Where words fail, music speaks

On the TV last night, they had a show of the Top 100 Albums ever. It got me to thinking (I swore I'd never use that phrase, it's just too Sex and the City!) about the impact of music on everyday life. It struck me just how big a part music plays in so many things that we don't notice. Take commercials for instance, if they use a popular enough song to advertise their product, every time you hear that song, you going to be reminded of that product. That's a fairly obvious point just there, but it does the job I think.

My housemate pointed out that music is one of the few art forms that can affect you so much, and you don't even really need to understand it. Like, for example, Opera. Not everyone's cup of tea, but you can listen to those songs, written and sung in a totally different language, yet still feel the emotion, and energy of it. You don't need to understand the lyrics of a song to be affected by it, is what I'm trying to say I guess. In other art forms, you need to have a vague understanding of what it is for it to have an effect on you. (Feel free to disagree with me, this is just my opinion.) In order to be moved by a film, let's say, you need to know the whole story, or at least part of it. Yeah, you have foreign language films, but they're more often than not, subtitled, so you CAN understand what's going on. The same goes for literature; if you pick up a book that you've never read before, and start reading it halfway through, it's not going to have the same effect on you, as if you'd read it from the start. But with music, you can be swept up in just one lyric, and it can provoke an enormous range of emotions. There's a quote in the movie Empire Records that says, "...Music is the glue of the world. It's what holds it all together. Without [it], life would be meaningless." I think that's so true, without music, my life would be so much emptier, and quieter!

I hope everybody has at least a little music in their life, even if it's singing to yourself in the shower!