The songs that saved your life

Whenever three things come together in anything like the same orbit I smell a blog post. This essay by Mark Edmundson ("Can Music Save Your Life?") strikes me as being totally wrong. The other two things are my daughter's starting to get into music (albeit a song that seems calculated to appeal to girls with low self-esteem: "You don't know you're beautiful--that's what makes you beautiful") and my listening to the part of the album that actually downloaded when I bought the new Saint Etienne album on iTunes. The Saint Etienne album is a celebration of music (which sounds horrendous, I know) and begins with a song featuring a lot of spoken word (also highly dubious in prospect) about getting into music as a teenager and this going along with parties, boys, and first kisses. But the point isn't about the kisses, it's about the music: reading the music press, memorizing the charts, getting excited about going to see bands. It is connected somehow with the other stuff though. (I think this is why I am moved by my daughter's liking a song so much that she plays it all the time. Although it's also the only song she's got on her phone.) It makes sense for singer Sarah Cracknell to ask: “when I was married, and when I had kids, would Marc Bolan still be so important?" The answer, surely, is No. Not because music was ever a substitute for having a family, but because other things, such as families, become more important as you grow  up. And so, hopefully, you need music less. 


This seems to be a pretty well recognized phenomenon. Jim Morrison memorably claimed that "music is your only friend," and The Smiths compared music to a life-preserver:

The passing of time
Leaves empty lives
Waiting to be filled
I'm here with the cause
I'm holding the torch
In the corner of your room
Can you hear me?
And when you're dancing and laughing
And finally living
Hear my voice in your head
And think of me kindly

But isn't the idea of music as something that stops you from drowning, that saves your life, an exaggeration? Isn't Edmundson right? Well, yes, if you take the claim (which is not only made by Morrissey) literally. But no one means it literally, except in the sense that music can help get you through a difficult time. In some cases that might mean preventing suicide--there are plenty of songs urging you not to kill yourself--but more often the idea is of music as therapy, not emergency surgery.

Edmundson asks:

Who hasn't at least once had the feeling of being remade through music? Who is there who doesn't date a new phase in life to hearing this or that symphony or song? I heard it—we say—and everything changed.

The answer to his first two questions is: Me (and you too, I would bet). "I heard it--we say--and everything changed." No, we don't.

He also says this:

Music makes life melodious—assuming that the music has a melody. But life is often jarring. Pop music suggests, by its easy, pleasurable repetitions, that life makes sense. We can pretend, for the duration of a song, that there is harmony in our lives.

Instead of pop music he recommends Beethoven and Coltrane. I don't know jazz, but I have no objection to Beethoven. Still, there is something shocking about this idea of pop music. You would have to define pop music very narrowly (no blues, no punk, no heavy metal, nothing alternative, no rap, etc.) to get it to consist of easy, pleasurable repetitions suggesting that life makes sense. Even The Beatles would be out, at least in their later years. So this is really a caricature of pop music.

He goes on:

The philosopher Allan Bloom didn't much care for the effect that music had on his students. He believed that they used music to counterfeit experience, in particular to fabricate joy. He said that music—rock music especially—reproduced in listeners the feelings of triumph that come from completing a great work of art or doing a heroic deed or making a conceptual breakthrough in science or philosophy—or even finding the true love of one's life. Students, Bloom said, found in rock music a way to fabricate those emotions, and then they often took the logical next step and asked themselves, implicitly, Why bother going further? Why should one actually do the deed and put in all the work leading up to it, when one can have the reward simply by putting on some music or showing up at a concert?  

He cites no evidence, and it seems to me highly implausible that anyone has ever foregone a genuine achievement because music acted as a kind of experience machine that made the effort not appear worthwhile. Would anyone claim that the vicarious experiences offered by literature have this effect? Music is rarely triumphant, and when it is it tends to be motivational rather than demotivational (although I have no evidence to offer either). "We are the Champions" might be a good song to play in a gym. I doubt everyone would stop working out and just listen before going home.

Of his students he asks: "Does music save their lives? No, it preserves them, much as it did mine." But a life-saver and a life-preserver are much the same, aren't they? And music does not only help stop you from getting too bored, as Edmundson recognizes some of the time. 


Perhaps his essay is not worth responding to, and I won't go on much longer, but there's also this:

The Music Geek listens only to the best music. He does it all day long, sitting in his Herman Miller Aeron chair, with his Bose headphones on; he wears pads on his eyes; his face is drawn in sublime concentration.

This person does not exist. Edmundson also says that we should create music, if only for ourselves, not just consume it. But he's writing like someone being paid by the word or fulfilling some contractual obligation, not like someone who has something to say, so I can't be bothered to formulate a response.

I don't agree with Alva Noë either when he says that the best musical artists play with identities but don't inhabit them. Authenticity is not bullshit, as Noë almost says. Here's one thing he actually does say:

The greatest rock artists play with identities, they don't inhabit them. Think of the way the Rolling Stones moved from blues to country and western, from funk and disco to psychedelia. We find equally soft boundaries and playful identities in the Beatles, Bob Dylan, David Bowie and Bob Marley.

Bob Marley playing with identities? I missed that. And what about the fact that the Rolling Stones moved from really, really good to notoriously bad? Bruce Springsteen's identity might be bogus (I've read that it is a brand), but not all identity is like that. The songs that let you know, not that life makes sense, but that someone else feels the same way you do are hard to fake. And they can become an important part of your identity, not something to play with, and not something to sneer at when you're older and Marc Bolan is no longer so important.