It’s first worth defining “one’s people” before selecting the song, though it seems almost a chicken-and-egg problem, don’t you think? Music is one of the most powerful binding mechanisms culture has to offer: even if conversations around it can turn banal when it’s a namedrop exchange – or it can turn into a trying haze as one fumbles to put into words some originally wordless experiences.
Amusingly enough – surely you’d confirm – music is a universal experience despite its ability to carve out “those who get it” and “those who don’t” but maybe you’d hope to get an open enough mind to switch sides whenever. Its ability to carve persists as long as we want to draw distinctions; a highly favourited pastime, or even necessary for some. So, despite the universality, one may have to wonder whether to don the outsider’s apparel or affirm you’ve the in-group’s codex.
Once you get your fit, you’ll then have to wrestle with how music is monopolized by big business. That’s the even funnier backdrop about it all: this duality between expressing the true while also getting a label deal. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s strange the same way it’s strange to consider oneself a part of the Prius family. It’s easy to forget how much corporations exert themselves unto “public” opinions – mastering the “authentic” campaign and letting word-of-mouth win out. Reading enough forum posts can be disarming, even if those forum posters are in fact employed by an ad agency.
Looking past the universality and the monopolies, how often do you look at the physical origins of the music you listen to? Music certainly may speak to you but do you speak it? Namely, the music of your own town, if it had a tune. In some ways this is the fundamental disconnect.
Rolling up some sleeves to shovel through history, maybe then we can find the departure. The departure of your town’s music. Maybe we could pin it on UMG’s inception with its now global market share of 31.8%.
However we want to make sense it, we’ll still find ourselves in tribes of corporations or foreign nations as long as we have any divisional inclinations. To this, maybe it’s a little mind-blowing that such distant entities – with an uncomfortable call-out about how we assume our experiences and world-processing are universal when everyone has such a starkly different inner world – it’s a little mind blowing that it speaks to you at all! Perhaps one may see it a tad beautiful; turning the fake into real, and the foreign into familiar. Or reassuring: even if you had completely different experiences and thought constructions, your soul returns to the same reverbs shared by others.
It may be perhaps a classic Wester disposition to dissolve all of these borders anyway, whether out of profits or of an uncomfortable familiar pattern of speaking, invading personal spaces. Though every so often one is reminded it doesn’t work that way.
Peering over theses nations from a periphery so one wonder if there’s even a people left. Which of course is melodramatic and absurd, certainly so – of course there is. It’s just hard to hear their tune. When you live long enough in silence it’s hard to realize you are a part of some music makers, however their song goes.
So, what is the song of one’s people? It was probably lost as soon as commercialization and communication advancements scrambled most of it. We can nod toward our singularity this way, supposedly.