Shaking My Sad Music Addiction
One day at a time, one song at a time…
Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash
January 14 2020
Hi everyone: my name is Isaac, and I’m an sad-music-aholic (I was looking for a more poetic way to say that, but couldn’t find it).
A few years ago, if I was meeting a group of strangers at night in a community hall filled with cheap chairs and trestle tables, this would have been the most appropriate way to introduce myself. I was over drugs and alcohol; had never had enough money to be exposed to that particular vice. But sad music? Oh boy. Hook it straight up to my veins.
You might think it is a bit glib to compare this to an addiction. You may be right. But let me try and explain myself.
Now I’m all for sadness as a pure form of artistic expression, as I wrote about previously.
I really liked being sad. I still kinda do. Sadness, for those who believe in a positive future but are nonetheless firmly grounded in the present, is unavoidable:
Belief requires an inherent sadness.
To accept separation and distance for a finite period.
Having faith in this finiteness.
Capturing and expressing this sadness is necessary, beautiful.
Linger and revel in it.
Let it wash over you, envelope and engulf you.
Then wake up and start again.
But as much as we might defend sadness, few of us would go so far as to argue it as being a virtue. Yet in many aspects of society, that is how it has come to be framed.
For example: one thing I have been doing a lot of recently is looking deeper into the themes that run underneath current popular music. If you dig a bit too deep, you find some weird stuff pop up over and over: symbology like the all-seeing eye and triangle, to slightly more weird pagan/satanic rituals, and even sexy time with aliens.
Then there are the more obviously problematic examples of negative behaviours being glorified: sexualisation of artists with mainly young fans; or narcissism; or materialism; or substance abuse. Perhaps in a more complex way, but sadness is also one of them. It seems almost undeniable that a large component of popular music is derived from a feeling of melancholy, which also manifests in related extremes such as recklessness, nihilism and outright wishing for death (apparently, fans/stans wishing for their favourite artists to kill them is now a thing).
While there are some songs and artists that are just flat out sad, often it is more subtle. Sometimes, the underlying lyrical message of melancholy is packaged in a more shiny and hooky melody, presumably to make it more enticing to those not yet so sadness inclined (not that this can’t be used for good: hello Pumped Up Kicks). In other times, the melancholy is not overt and central to the lyrics or music, but is hidden — subtly and sneakily secreted into the fabric of a song through its production. You might even say there is a conspiracy of sadness in modern popular music.
On one hand, you can convincingly argue that describing or manifesting sadness is a legitimate form of artistic expression. I’ve got no idea to what extent the sad-channeling of artists like Drake, or The Weeknd, or Lana Del Ray, or more recently Billie Eilish (or, in Billie Eilish’s case, sadness with a dash of devil worship) is natural or manufactured. They certainly wouldn’t be as popular as they are if they weren’t channeling genuine human emotions.
But on the other hand, any human condition can be manipulated if that condition isn’t fully understood and controlled, and this seems to be what is happening with sadness. If manipulated properly, sadness can be a powerful propaganda tool by people in power, because a sad population is a largely passive, apathetic and docile population.
Sad music is obviously not new. Indeed, I was first introduced to it by the Beatles; You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away was my gateway drug.
I dabbled first with Australian rock bands like Silverchair, went deeper with the big names like Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins and Linkin Park, and became finally hooked through Radiohead and OK Computer: a dragon chased by many a seeker of sadness that is unlikely to ever be caught.
But I was never truly a rock kid. My worries weren’t, at that stage, particularly anti-authoritarian or existential. They were mainly to do with girls. And then I stumbled on to a new type of sad music, one that played right to this vice. In fact, I would even argue that, while The Sadness Conspiracy may be most visible in mainstream genres, it began in earnest within this field of music. One derided by many but loved devotedly by a few, including myself and my school friends, called Emo.
Far be it for me to fully and accurately explain Emo: there is an academic-journal-worthy Wikipedia page for that. I missed the start, the evolution from underground hardcore, punk and indie roots. But I was there in its heyday, wearing skinny jeans on legs not quite skinny enough to pull it off. Trying to grow a fringe with an already receding hairline. Desperate to learn guitar to the minimal extent needed to be in a band, and all the benefits associated with.
Emo is, as the name suggests, defined by the fundamental emotions that flow underneath, typically channeled into girl dramas. But to say that Emo is just sad boys singing about girls (and, on the very odd occasion, vice versa) is not quite accurate. Girls are often the catalyst for the emotions that emerge and are communicated (often incredibly effectively) in Emo music, but the emotions themselves reflect a more deep-seated negative worldview. Plenty of boys got brutally dumped, cheated on or publicly embarrassed by girls without resorting to self pity and learning how to scream into a mic. These are the guys with the level of emotion to make a living out of it, or at the least, with the balls to cash in on it.
Many Emo songs might seem, on face value, unfiltered outpourings from a soul in a particularly dark place. And if you go back to the ‘first-wave’ of emo, then this is largely the case. If it stayed like this, it would be fine, and there are many Emo bands that I still listen to whose use of emotion seems completely genuine.
However, a trademark of 2000s emo — what the experts call ‘second-wave’ emo — is an intoxicating combination of emotion, self-awareness and cynicism. Many of the most popular Emo bands (some you might have even heard of: Fall Out Boy and Panic at the Disco for example) take on a pseudo-meta quality of being both a part of and above their scene: in turns channeling their raw emotions whilst looking down and sneering at the pettiness and self-absorption of them. Even the most seemingly completely sincere song can be subtlety undermined by a winking, knowing song title. This is explained in this review of one of the defining albums of this period: Tell All Your Friends by Taking Back Sunday.
I still enjoy listening to many of these songs, and they resonate with a part of me in a way no other type of music does. But it also makes me somewhat uncomfortable. At some stage, it becomes impossible to tell how authentic these emotions really are, and where the conspiracy kicks in.
My experience was with Emo, but it stands in relation to much popular music today. I would argue that artists such as Taylor Swift, who a cynic might say has made a career out of manufacturing emotional relationships that can be manifested into commercially successful songs, owe their legacy to this brand of Emo. Songs like ‘Blank Space’ — whose cynicism would fit like a glove within second wave Emo — take the form of parody of an insufferable self-identity that lies undefined, somewhere between real and imagined.
While not always as wholly reliant on the emotion of sadness, these artists all have the same things in common. They have the looks and the swagger to perpetuate romantic situations without trying. They have the talent — the way with words and melodies — to translate these situations into popular music. They have the self-awareness to become acutely aware of how good they are at doing this. And above all, they have the shamelessness and cynicism to keep doing it at the submission to the music industry, because they know that there is a market waiting for it.
Sadness is a market, but it doesn’t have to be.
This is the essence of one of my favourite Emo songs, called The Black Market from a band called Rise Against. The ‘market’ they sing about trades on “a currency of heartache and sorrow”, and they readily admit that this is a market that they have trafficked in, profited from and are now deeply imbedded within. The song is a call to escape the trappings of this life, to find a way to escape and live in “a world above the ground”. It is also a comment on the paradox of sadness: despite its validity, its necessity, its creative potential, at some stage escaping from sadness does become a choice.
It was crucial in making me realise that, maybe, I was addicted to the pull of sadness, of Emo. That maybe, at some point I had to consciously stop listening to this type of music, even though I still enjoy listening to it. Because that enjoyment doesn’t mean it is good for me; crack would give you a similar feeling.
That pull, at least in the near future, will always be strong — I’m not the only one who still gets drawn back in. I am now increasingly aware of the difference between manufactured and authentic emotion, and increasingly seek out artists that demonstrate the latter (new suggestions are always welcome!). Hopefully this awareness will be enough to finally shake my sad music addiction, one song at a time.