I have spent a lot of time trying to rationalize and justify why music is important. I have listened to hundreds of albums, many of them dozens of times. All I can think to say is it gives me a “feeling” which doesn’t go away. When you listen to Rite Of Spring by Stravinsky dozens of times, the feeling of that piece becomes a part of you. What I can’t refute with any sort of logic, however, is the way that music seems purely to be a hedonistic endeavor. I cannot say whether it “improves” me, in any way. In relation to what does one improve? I can’t prove that it’s made me smarter, stronger, more capable of success. If anything I can say that it’s a purely emotionally gratifying experience, nothing more.

Exploring the unique ways which music evokes emotion is one of the most fulfilling experiences I have ever endeavored. That is why I have spend thousands of hours, after school, almost every day when I have nothing else to do, devoted to finding new music to hear. It is always amazing when you hear a song that evokes a feeling that you never knew you could ever feel. Always looking for art that expresses something better than you could have expressed it yourself, it seems to expand vastly the capacity for feeling. It is evocative to the extreme.

Yet, what does one who listens to music share with the ignorant masses who blithely exclaim that “music is my life?” Perhaps it’s like people who don’t study philosophy who say that if you can think you are doing philosophy. Many people simply do not listen to music music outside of the pop sensible stuff which circulates the mainstream; music which has suited the public sensibility well enough to be palatable to a wide audience. Those who do this, who do not expand their taste past what is widely acceptable are not challenging themselves. They are philistines. Music appreciation takes countless hours of exposing oneself to experience that one would not have otherwise, going outside of ones comfort zone.

Yet so many people feel that music listening is not an objective experience which can be quantified in ones ability to experience and appreciate. Could there be an argument to counter them, considering the popular sentiment is that music is subjective? Perhaps not, perhaps music listening is simply a hedonistic self serving act which acts as nothing more than mental masturbation. What isn’t self serving, after all? Getting a job is self serving, being president of the United States is self serving, going to war is self serving; but at least one can hide behind the plausibility of being “selfless” in these pursuits. One may feel that a life devoted to others is the life most worth living.

Us music listeners are incredibly self serving, it is only the musicians who give us self serving hedonistic pleasure seekers our pleasure who are the truly “selfless” ones. What is a musician though? An enabler of this hedonistic pleasure seeking. The same as the president of the United States. This self serving pleasure seeking which gratifies the president to enable people who self-servingly seek to “live”. Living is extremely self serving as well. What is the point of living, if not to gratify oneself? Life itself is merely a hedonistic endeavor, an absolute masturbation fest of self serving louses who try to give themselves some sort of justification for self-servingly doing things, when they could very well just acknowledge that their consciousness is a biological anomaly and not act like self important wankers.

The question of whether or not music “important” seems irrelevant, considering that nothing is important. However, who is to say that the music that you listen to doesn’t profoundly affect your behavior? I’ll try to defend music a little bit, although all that I can give music is my own uninformed conjecture. It is, after all, a matter of trying to explain the effects of what happens in my brain, which I can’t see. I can’t see the circuitry, the way that music actually affects my cognitive function. That is what is important after all; I am not one of those people who believes in some sort of metaphysical dualism between mind and body. I do believe that the brain is the center of who we are as human beings.

Perhaps every song that you listen to resides inside your brain, it shapes the neural pathways in your brain. When you listen to Chick Corea, you have pieces of Chick Corea inside your brain, little fragments. It is like a piece of reality is dropped in your head, and it shatters and the little pieces become an inextricable part of you, to borrow from the phrasing used by Rilke in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs. Perhaps the direction that your emotions push you is the only thing that matters, considering that logic is only a tool, and the emotions that drive logic are the hands that grasp that tool. It doesn’t matter if you’re a genius in some craft, because genius is only a tool which one uses to craft some end, which could be equally malicious or benevolent.

Even then, no one is to say that the music you listen to could be driving you to some "good" end, because no one is really to say what is objectively good. Many have tried to say what is good, and all have failed. It is only a subjective matter, because emotional preference is subjective, and objective logic (if there is such a thing), cannot be part of emotion or right and wrong for that matter. Since music is ostensibly part of emotion, and neither emotion nor logic can determine what end is "good", music fails to hold any significance beyond it's self serving nature. It is self serving, worthless hedonism, and the musicians who herald it merely arm flailing preachers, pretentiously trying to "be something". It is pure pretension, pure masturbation. Music is hedonism, no more or less than all human behavior though.

At the time, didn't recognize myself til I was petrified
But half the time I'm not myself
So most of the time I don't question why
We did testify, but best I can do is buy some time
Spend my time folding time
Even met myself one time

Us music listeners

rise up