Confessions of a Music User

It was a bitter cold day on the cusp of finals when I put Bon Iver’s self-titled album on the record player in my dorm room and lay back to look at the ceiling. Justin Vernon’s gritty falsetto lofted, “I was unafraid, I was a boy, I was a tender age.”

A few years earlier, I popped Coldplay’s Ghost Stories into the player in my Ford Ranger. It was my first CD. The chilly, synthetic opening track gave me that inconsolable longing C. S. Lewis aptly termed “northernness” in his book Surprised by Joy. I was floating in a frigid, starry region where something (or someone) beyond words seemed to meet me.

Then there was the soft, acoustic timbre of Quiet Is the New Loud by Norwegian duo Kings of Convenience. “Parallel lines,” they trill in harmony in the closing track, “move so fast toward the same point. / Infinity is as near as it is far.”

There’s also the heroic rendition of “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus” performed by the Wheaton College choirs and orchestra at Christmas in 2019. And the clunky song “Phone Call” from the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind evoked that same pang of transcendence the first time I heard it.

These were all specific times when music “did something” deep and profound for me. In the case of Bon Iver, it soothed heartache. Coldplay’s Ghost Stories tendered a longing for a beauty I couldn’t quite articulate. “Phone Call” made me want to fall in love again. And “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus” established an invisible kinship with every other soul in the auditorium. At the same time, these moments are unrepeatable. They can’t be forced, controlled, or predicted. The feelings that went along with each song cannot be manufactured at will. And strangely enough, what made each song unique was that it ended, placing me in a kind of silence that put all my trivial distractions and pursuits into stark perspective.

While I’ve had plenty of moments when music served as a genuine means of catharsis and connection, I’ve also listened to it to manipulate my emotions and stave off uncomfortable silence. Years ago, my family was on a road trip out west. I had my headphones on in the backseat, as usual. Eventually, my brother Josiah, wanting me to be more present with the family, encouraged me to take a break. “If you listen to music all the time,” he said, “your emotions will be in a constant flux.”

I didn’t know what to think of the comment then, but he was right. My emotions were in flux. I was going to music like a person goes to a restaurant. What will it be today? Excitement or gloom? Celebration or sadness? What would you like to feel for dinner tonight, sir? Josiah later asked me when I felt most like myself and at peace. I told him it was when I had my headphones on, listening to music “in my own little world.” As Jars of Clay write in their song “Headphones,” there is a temptation to retreat from real emotions through sound: “We go our separate ways … with our headphones on.”

I seemed to always need background music, something to offset discomfort, or to provide a rush of adrenaline. Some songs I listened to provided that ember of transcendence, yet they lost their flare when I put them on repeat, trying to squeeze the dopamine out of them. More recently, I’ve turned to certain styles, like the electronic-dance song “Miss You” by Oliver Tree, to buttress up a sense of frustration and anger. I’ve likewise visited melancholy tunes like Tom Odell’s “Best Day of My Life” to nurse self-pity, even despair. Music yielded instances of healing, grace, and beauty, but I also used it to manufacture emotions and escape the burden of silence. And I used it a lot.

According to new statistics, the average American spends seventy-five minutes a day listening to music, which amounts to almost 30,000 minutes each year. Subscriptions to platforms like Spotify and Apple Music surged during the pandemic. Today, over eighty million Americans pay for subscriptions to music-streaming services.

Aaron Jasinsky, call of the space siren. Used by permission.

A 2017 report naturally credits digital technology for the exploding listening rates. “New technology and the latest gadgets allow listeners to seamlessly engage with music anywhere, anytime,” it reads. “Smartphones, laptops, and tablets are among top devices for music engagement at home, and radio still dominates in-car listening, but new technology is becoming more and more relevant.”

Newer devices have only added to the meteoric rise in music streaming. Apple released AirPods in September 2016 along with the iPhone 7. These Bluetooth earphones are perfect to wear while working out, studying, or walking. Plus, they are easy to hide. I don’t think I can count the times I’ve spoken with people only to realize a few moments into the conversation that they have an AirPod in one ear. Wireless earbuds have deeply shaped how we listen to music, which is evident simply by observation. Whether it be the gym, library, or living room, these nifty (and easy-to-lose) earphones are ubiquitous.

While the invention might be recent, one science fiction writer foresaw the rise of earbuds decades ago. In the early 1950s, when Ray Bradbury wrote his dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451, radio and television enjoyed widespread use, but there was no way to listen to music or news in such a private fashion. Yet Bradbury knew where we were headed: ever more into “our own little worlds.”

The novel follows Guy Montag, a firefighter whose job is to burn down any house holding books. While Fahrenheit 451 is a tale about censorship (the title refers to the temperature at which paper burns), it is just as much about distraction. While on his way home one day, Montag meets a curious girl on the street named Clarisse. She’s young, attentive, and actually observes the world around her with interest. She looks and listens. After a brief conversation, she asks him, “Are you happy?” Montag contemplates the question as he enters his bedroom later and realizes that, no, he’s the farthest thing from happy. There in the darkness he faces his wife, Mildred, on the bed before him:

His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of a tomb, her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum in that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.

I can imagine Montag standing at the foot of his bed realizing not only that he is unhappy but also that he will never really know his wife. She already has a family, and it talks to her through radio and TV waves 24/7.

Perhaps it isn’t incidental that Montag’s world can’t tolerate books. Reading requires attention and resists manipulation. It requires silence and surrender, quiet listening. But Bradbury’s dystopian world is a palace of noise. Even the music has devolved into noise, designed to titillate, distract, and numb people into emotional oblivion.

Roger Scruton, the late British philosopher, believed much of modern music had devolved into a vacuum of senseless chatter: “For the most part, the prevailing music is of an astounding banality. It is there in order to not be really there. It is a background to the business of consuming things.” This kind of music lacks a basic ingredient: real musicians. Songs are generated largely by computers instead of humans playing instruments, and “electrical pulses” stand in for rhythm. As a result, the musical landscape of the modern world is becoming “less and less human.” AI has exacerbated this problem by divorcing music production from human expertise. “Music is no longer something you must make for yourself, nor is it something you sit down to listen to,” Scruton continues. “It follows you wherever you go, and you switch it on as a background. It is not so much listened to as overheard.”

Mildred’s problem in Fahrenheit 451, and the problem Scruton further articulates, is not listening to too much music but failing to really listen to it. We consume an electronically curated background, a steady IV drip of dopamine, intended to distract us from our real emotions, our thoughts, and the world around us.

Silence is hard to come by. In January, I walked down the driveway in the dark fog to check the mail. The quiet and cold felt alien as I came back up empty-handed. I stopped for a moment to look at the gray rim of the lake and listen to the water dripping off the branches, but I didn’t stay long before hiking back to warmth and distraction as if something (or someone) was following me. A deeper part of me, though, wished I had stayed out there for a long time, alone.

The Catholic thinker Josef Pieper thought that modern people had lost the ability to see because “there is too much to see.” We are overwhelmed with a daily deluge of images and flashing texts. Maybe it can also be said that we’ve lost our ability to hear because there is too much to hear. From this perspective, the opposite of music is not silence but chatter – noise for noise’s sake.

And yet, despite all this, I remain grateful for my pair of headphones. Driving wouldn’t be the same without music. Bustling coffee shops can evoke some life with overhead speakers playing Modest Mouse and Death Cab for Cutie. Workout groups often stay motivated by listening to “hype” music. And a recent study correlates listening to music with cognitive benefits like neuroplasticity in children and even the alleviation of dementia symptoms. Another benefit of music is the enduring bonds people form through it. In places like Oklahoma and Texas, country music is a major part of the culture, as punk rock is in southern California, or bluegrass in Appalachia. Music has always been a way people connect, celebrate, lament, heal, and worship. It can be the prime engine of hope during periods of blatant injustice, and catalyze the collective passion needed for widespread social change.

The benefits of the “democratization” that modern technology has brought to music are ample. I wouldn’t have experienced many of my own musical delights without it. And yet, letting music wash over every moment of life without cultivating places for quiet is like reading the classics and never pausing to reflect on their meaning. We become chronic skimmers, afloat in the ocean of noise with our eyes sleeplessly staring into space.

Beautiful music has tended to hit me at unexpected times. As I said earlier, those times can’t be controlled or manufactured. I’ve never been able to wrangle a transcendent experience like a cowboy ropes an elusive bull. Every time I’ve tried, I’ve ended up restless and in an emotional flux – focused on myself instead of on the divine. One thing any of us can do, perhaps, is to choose to listen not only to music but to the silence. And we can listen to music in ways that brings us closer together rather than silos us.

A certain senior demon once extolled the reign of noise in his rant to his nephew in The Screwtape Letters, writing furiously,

Music and silence – how I detest them both! [Ever] since Our Father [Satan] entered Hell – [no] moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise – Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile – Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.

It is a clamorous world indeed. Noise often defines our fast-paced, digital milieu. But Screwtape was wrong. The whole universe will sing in the end, not chatter and grind. Everywhere around us there remains a symphony already playing for those who have ears to hear. It is music we can train ourselves to abide in. Even when the whole world feels like one big noise, we can choose to listen for the deeper, eternal rhythms of God’s kingdom, where joy and sadness are mingled and where, George MacDonald suggests, “there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence.”