Reflecting on Music

by Astrid Grigsby-Schulte

It’s a Wednesday night at Emory; I’m sitting on my school-issued bedside table beside my open dorm room window, which I’ve adorned with a supremely bohemian paisley scarf. Outside, monsoon-like rains beat against the side of my building, adding texture to the soundtrack of my procrastination on schoolwork. One of my hands is wrapped around a mug of tea and the other is supporting a Vonnegut book, but my mind drifts elsewhere. I’ve put my music library on shuffle and a mixture of certain works by The Beatles, Radiohead, Beach House, Elliott Smith, and similarly ethereal-sounding artists takes me over. They are paradoxically yet effortlessly a combination of hypnagogic and stimulating – they are trance-inducing and yet they spark a unique, pensive brand of internal reflection. In this moment I start to think about what exactly it is that music does for me. I am thrust into contemplation of how music encompasses my identity, my soul, and ties me to the very essence of what it means to be human.

The bands I claim as my favorites have become part of the image I present to the world; they have connected me with others in an inexplicably profound way. “Good” taste in music has surpassed many other criteria when it comes to distinguishing like-minded people. Like the paisley scarf I’ve used to cover the conventional furniture in my room, my taste in music assures me that I am an individual; that I am somehow outside of the norm. It is a source of pride and it is emblematic of my cultural relevance. There’s no excitement like the one felt when ranking the STRFKR albums from best to worst with another fan, or while referencing that specific guitar lick in “Whole Lotta Love” and having someone totally get it. While I know how wholly self-righteous this way of thought is, I’m also so faithfully married to it that I overlook my own pretentiousness. So it goes.

But beyond this enigmatic tie to my identity, music arouses something within me, some emotion that evades description but that any music-lover can understand. There is a warmth; a tingle; a tightening of the throat; a “God damn” or a “Jesus Christ”. There is that something that makes an Atheist like myself feel the need to use religious exclamations because nothing else can capture the spiritual awe and reverence evoked by that perfect collision of sounds. For a moment I feel connected to every other human being who has listened to and loved any piece of music.Therein is a historical bond, a bizarre instinct of our species that shapes individuals and communities alike. From the flute songs of prehistoric peoples to the strange, magnetic power of Electric Dance Music (EDM) today, our race has always gathered around melody and rhythm as means of communication, expression, and entertainment. Music gives us feelings we can’t articulate; it strokes the heart and the soul with every expert composition. It is the magical, the unknowable. It is the best and worst of humanity and its very definition. Music has captivated me alongside the rest of humankind, and I embrace my fate as a slave to my instinctual appreciation.Snapping out of my art-induced trance, I refocus my eyes on my book and let the stereo tunes fade into the background. I forget my odd and obsessive line of thought in which I had gotten lost, and try to focus in on something else. I clasp my tea and escape all thoughts of music, listening instead to gusts of wind as they pound the rain rhythmically against the roof.