Idiosyncratic thoughts on music IV: the melancholy tinge and the transformation of emotion
One of my friends once commented that most of the songs I enjoyed had a melancholy tinge. That's almost true; I'd rather say that most of the songs I enjoy are melancholic with a hopeful (or at least transformative) ending. These are sad songs, but by the end of the song the sadness is changed into something else.
This tendency perhaps comes from the fact that music for me is almost always functional (with some notable exceptions, like Erik Satie's music), there to do things---mostly to transform emotions, to get into or out of certain moods. This has sometimes led to me worrying that I'm appreciating music wrong, that there must be something that I'm missing. But perhaps this worry is misguided: of course, such an attitude would be reprehensible in the case of my relationships with persons (no person can be reduced to a single emotion), but it's perfectly understandable in the case of listening to music.
So the music I enjoy most is music which transform anxiety and sadness into something different: wry acceptance, irony, joy, happiness, trying, effort, activity, stillness, an affirmation of life. Some examples:
flora cash, A Good Childhood: a childhood may not be great, but one can still look back on it without resentment. "I was always running from my own love . . . I really could've used your company."
Oasis, Stop Crying Your Heart Out: their most sublime song.
AJR: "I'm not dead yet, so I guess I'll be alright" (from Way Less Sad and OK Overture). Examples abound, really. One could include Adventure is Out There, Humpty Dumpty, and Bang.
half·alive: RUNAWAY, What's Wrong, Make of It. "My past is what I make of it . . . like these new shoes, I'll break them in. Old best friends, I'll pray for them; all my friends, I'll pray for them."
Wallows, Do Not Wait: the bleak assessment of life as "most times, humiliating" ultimately changes into a realisation that we don't know what's to come. "Something you'll want to forget" is changed into "something you'll always remember."
Kanzaki Iori, Hated by Life Itself: one simply keeps trying, even if one doesn't know why.
Yorushika, Say It: sadness over the past while realising how one can be positively affected by it.
Even when the sadness isn't changed into something else, I enjoy songs where the sadness is questioned---in other words, when it's just starting to be transformed.
There is an interesting similarity here between "lovely" by Eilish & Khalid and "I am a Rock" by Simon & Garfunkel. Both ostensibly champion the benefits of self-sufficiency ("Isn't it lovely being alone?" and "A rock feels no pain"). But both also ultimately undercut it: clearly, the songs suggest, it's not lovely being alone ("I hope someday I'll make it out of here") and being a rock is ultimately deadening.
There are exceptions, music I enjoy in which sadness is described and never transformed. I like "These Days" by Jackson Browne (my favourite version is by Nico), which ends with a realistically plaintive cry:
Please don't confront me with my failures; I have not forgotten them.
Music is joy; music is the transformation of emotions. Xunzi argues that the best music is that which leads to self-transformation, to becoming a better person. "Sounds and music enter into people deeply and transform people quickly." I certainly agree there. (One might go further and say, with Ji Kang: otherwise it's decadence. But I don't go that far.)
Even just being able to describe the emotion---just knowing someone else has felt it and sung about it and set it to music---can be a comfort. To adapt a remark from Proust: sadness, at the moment when it is changed into music, loses some part of its power to injure the heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy.
