Music and Time

I listen to a lot of music. Well, maybe I should say I listen to music a lot. It’s usually the same songs over and over. I’m fond of familiarity. Whenever I drive, fold laundry, or tackle the mess in the kitchen before cooking dinner, I put on my headphones and play a few songs. My kids have picked up this habit as well, especially my daughter. It’s interesting to experience music alongside your kids. I love listening to the songs she’s into. The style is often unexpected. Lately, her music of choice sounds like it’s from the 30s, slow, smooth jazz, far from the hyperactive pop I was listening to at fourteen.  It’s not just my daughter; her friends gasp in delight at the same songs when they play thru the car speakers via the Bluetooth connection. As I listen to them croon the lyrics together, I think how bizarre time can be for us humans.

In my mind, music is marked by when it was first gifted to us. When I was a very young child, I would sit beside the FM radio on my nightstand for hours listening to “Oldies.” It wasn’t until I was much older and realized there was more than one radio station, that I started listening to “Hits from today.” CDs allowed for compilations like “Now, that’s what I call music” that encapsulated just a few months of time via the most popular songs. You can play the CD and instantly be transported to April of 2002. But that’s not how my daughter experiences music at all. To her it is all presented on the same plane of time. Right now. I’m not sure what that changes for her, but it has to change something, right?

My daughter knows a lot of songs. She’ll hum along to tunes that were released when I was a kid, or sing a lyric or two from a song that came out decades before she was born. When I ask her where she heard that one, she shrugs her shoulders—I don’t know. She has no sense of the time that, for me, is so firmly intertwined with music. Recently, we watched Forrest Gump as a family. If you’re not familiar, it’s a great movie with an even better soundtrack. Many of the songs I know to be protest songs and while my daughter knew them, she was oblivious to their historical significance. Is that important? Certainly, not at fourteen, but what about over the long term? If her entire generation is unaware of the ways the country dissented, will they know what’s available to them?

We consume music differently than we used to. You can instantly call up any song from any time and hit play. Music isn’t even organized by time period on my streaming apps. It’s organized by things like mood, location, or popularity. I had to do some digging to find playlists organized by decade. The first radio transmission of music was in 1904. So, in a little over a century, humans went from needing to be in the room with the musician to hear music, to being able to hear any song, from anytime, from anywhere in the world, whenever they want. What is that doing to us? If music from a previous generation is adopted by the current one, who will that music define in the future? Maybe we won’t define our generations by their art any longer. Maybe all art will become timeless the way music has.

Songs have always been a moment in sound—a complicated blip of wave pattern riding along the larger frequency. All art is like this if you think about it, although the wave pattern isn’t always sound, sometimes they are complicated blips of light, or vibration. Art is a moment captured or altered along the lifespan of the universe that you either connect with, or you don’t. Because music is so singularly sensational, maybe it takes different routes through our minds and that’s why my daughter can listen to a song that’s been around for forty years longer than she has and feel like it was made for her (she loves it right away), and I always want to know who’s singing and why. I don’t feel comfortable unless I can pin down the song to something else. Once I understand the context, then I feel free to enjoy it. I probably need to lighten up a little. Maybe I’m thinking about music the wrong way. I could be doing the artists a disservice by focusing on them and the social context of their time, letting all that information bounce around in my brain among the notes. Maybe it would be better for me to listen to music the way my daughter does and just enjoy the melodies.