how to change the people

Maybe music is magical. History has shown it to be the one thing that you can change about people — the one thing people change about themselves, truly. You can’t do that ideologically. You can’t do that morally. And if you can either or, then you can’t do them truthfully.

Truly, when musical tastes change, people feel something differently. They think differently. They see differently. They act differently. They love differently. And in course, their ideology changes. Their morals change. They change — for the better, or for the worse. But the thing to take away is that music can be used, like a tool, to connect to people implicitly.

Examples of this can be taken throughout history. We don’t have to look at the Romantic era to see how it drove artistic fascination and moral convictions (could this be why the 19th century was an era of moral revolution? The abolition of slavery? The rise of socialism?). We can turn to how the Beatles changed popular perception about peace and drove opposition to the Vietnam War. We can look at artists like Britney Spears — pop icons — for ushering in an era of docility and apathy.

And music is largely independent of economics — it drives culture like no other art form can. It is something people feel, not hear. It impacts people beyond what a speech can do — beyond what a painting can do. Its beauty is two-fold, and it is unyielding on impact. It cannot be stopped. It affects everyone, like a great idea can. And because it changes how we feel, we remember the change. It impacts us everyday.

The music we feel and listen to changes when we fall in love. It’s evident that this changes us — or rather, the people we fall in love with and the music they listen to alternatively change us because music, of course, defines who we are. And I mean the music we listen to, not the music we make (the distinction is important).

One can relate to each human on Earth through music; it’s that powerful, that ubiquitous. It may not match the ideology of its creator — just look at Wagner and Nietzsche. But you can change how people think by framing your music in the way you want people to think.

What does the last paragraph mean? The best way to explain is to give an example. Consider dubstep: It was different. It was cacophonous. It was rebellious. It was radical. It hid anguish in its novelty. And it was interesting to people. It was one of those things that no one had an ambivalent opinion about; you either loved it or hated it. In those who loved it, it made them feel free — or at least for me. It opened the doors to electronic music in particular. And it made people accept the vulnerable — geeks, nerds, emos — as, well, cool. The figurehead of the movement was, of course, Skrillex — the lead singer of an emo band who looked like he was beat up as a kid and cries at night. He expressed these sentiments — of being different, being an outsider — through his music. And people actually liked it. They’d had enough. They wanted something different. They got more than they bargained for: Electronic music found an avenue to enter the mainstream.

And with the introduction of electronic music came the appreciation of the nerds. All of a sudden, dressing like a nerd was cool. Being ahead of the game musically was chic. Living in downtrodden areas — Brooklyn, Uptown — became cool. But that’s not all: Geeks became cool. Programming, hacking, learning, school — all this shit became useful. Maybe not everything was a direct influence, but it did have some influence: It turned hardos into EDM bros. Everyone’s getting along. For now.

So the lesson to be learned from dubstep is that, when used cunningly, music can be the change in people that nothing else can be. Speeches about education or anti-bullying or why Facebook and programming is cool would not have had the same effect that electronic music has had on what it means to be “cool.”

The deepest rifts in our ideologies can be bridged through music. You just need to figure out what people wanna hear, and most importantly, when they want to hear it.

written c. 2014