© 2000 Derek James B.

Emotional Music

Warning: Strong opinions within. This is what I feel and believe on this subject, so if you don't like it, don't get outraged and send me flame messages, just send me an E-Mail telling me what you think. I'd actually like to have a discussion with someone who believed the exact opposite of me. I'm not saying any of this just so I can piss off anybody.

Music is incredible.

I have loved music since I was extremely little, and one of the biggest aspects of many pieces of music that I have come to love is emotion. I simply love emotional music, being able to feel what someone is saying. If there is a performer on stage, simply saying the words, it means nothing to me unless he or she really feels it. Through the music, I feel it, too.

I used to hate slow songs, as I always thought they were depressing. Now some of my favorite songs are slow. Most of them are emotional, and slow songs can really get a feeling across. I used to hate loud music, but now I love a lot of it. Screaming never got me, but screaming out of emotion, or with an actual purpose other than just to make noise for the song was something else entirely. A song where a guy starts off singing slow and soft, and ends up screaming the words out of emotion has an impact on me. I never really realized how much of an impact emotional songs could have on me until about 15 minutes ago.

I like the band Fuel, and recently they came out with the song Hemorrhage. I turned on the television halfway through the song, and was pulled in by the music video. Just him sitting there with his fists clenched and his eyes shut tight, screaming the chorus of: "In my hands, in my hands again . . .", it just had an impact on me. It was powerful to me. Here's this guy, watching a loved one's life slip away, right in front of him, with nothing he could do. I thought that was something.

Then, just today, I heard the song again. As soon as I got home, I downloaded it from Napster. I played the song, and was running through scenes from the music video in my head.

Then it hit the chorus.

I had tears running down my face. I was crying. I couldn't believe it. The music just got to me so much that I was mouthing along with the words, with tears leaking out of my closed eyes as I sat in a curled up ball in front of the computer. I had never been that affected by music before in my entire life.

Then I realized partially why. I couldn't remember the last time I'd cried, but every day, I had stress, and things worth crying about simply accumulating, constantly building up on me. It broke before I even realized it was there. The constant stress to keep up my grades at school, to live up to a reputation set by my sister, to stand out, to maintain a social mask, unwillingly falling in love with someone, not having a single person I could confide in. My friends are great friends and all, but no therapists. No one I could just sit down and sort my problems out with. I tried once to find someone who could and that ended in disaster. That doesn't mean I've stopped trying, but I've merely become despondent on the subject. I just feel hopeless.

The music was like an outlet, and I sat down in my room in the total darkness and cried my eyes out for about 5 minutes. Socially-programmed instinct kicked in several times, the desire to be strong and stop crying, but I fought it back down. A part of me loved this. It was an experience I barely ever felt, and it was exquisite to me. I let myself cry, to cast away frustrations that would simply return tomorrow. It was only a temporary reprieve, but the fact that I could do it all said something.

It meant something to me.