Music Industry Machinations

I had a random thought the other day flipping through prior top 40 singles.

It’s almost like there are two gears locked together in the topic obvious corpus — and we can ignore the more niche pockets but they could, most often than not, be derivatives.

The first gear is a celebration of living-to-the-fullest. Which is obvious, yeah, whatever, gratify yourself, only live once — anyway, bear with me.

The second gear is an implicit rumination on the consequences of living to the fullest. In more concrete terms, a lot of music — besides appealing to common denominators, one could find other melancholic topics — a lot of music is about failures, nostalgia, missing things. All for nothing.

Both gears are obvious on their own if you were seriously asked to fan through lyrics and wonder about it, certainly. What’s interesting though is that they’re interlinked.

People ride the first gear, going to raves and undergrounds, city clubs — even something as benign and seemingly innocuous as a first relationship. These are celebrated, the same as most youth can be — celebrated.

And then inevitably the gear turns, the clock moves, and now you’re in the ten years later. Everything is long missing. Because while riding the first gear no one asks themselves how to live in a way that doesn’t cause excessive suffering — and some would rebuke and say such suffering isn’t avoidable. Some would up the ante and suggest that whether you do or do not do these things, you’ll suffer all the same. Maybe so!

But I would suggest a class of actions which leans, hopefully, toward the least-path of suffering: the class of immortality. Living everyday as though immortal.

I don’t want to go to clubs the same way I don’t want to live in airports. After living a thousand years, I don’t think there’d be anything left. It wouldn’t build up to anything. The swivel door turns and you’re same.

Maybe in the ruins of civilization a thousand years out it’d feel strange to be anything at all. But if you learn to enjoy the simple day, then that’s a thousand years of smiling. And if you made a village, well, maybe it’d persist to this day.

You can grind yourself down chasing and being led to think these’ll secure you and your mentality. These things which spans only two years at best. But you’ll be grinded and still empty-handed.

And some could pity you, living so austerely — how dare you! And maybe the melancholy of never being anything could sneak up on you on occasion. But if being anything comes with the same pains, except more severe, then I think there’s something satisfying about rotting on the corner road.

To have love and lost or never loved at all — why not neither? Find some eternal love out there if you’re romantic enough. You could.

While enjoying the porch view so I flip through these old singles already buried seven years since, out of public consciousness. And one can’t help but wonder where’s the third gear; maybe a fuse of the two.

Reach out with your mind’s eye. It lasts forever.