As I sit here in my basement with the power out jamming to a playlist of everything from Cat Stevens to MGMT to Sex Pistols lamenting over the lack of phone service and the fact that at any time a tornado could rip through my home and, living on a mountain, ravage my basement that has a total of eight full sized windows looking out onto my wooded back yard with about fifty trees ready to fall on our roof at any time crushing the first home my family has ever purchased and destroying all of our cool furnishings acquired in other countries and probably causing the loss of my favorite item, a stuffed animal, Lisa, a calico beanie baby that I’ve had since I was four that has been puked on about ten times and had the whiskers fiskered off of it, I think about the importance of music. I figure there’s just something about a natural disaster that will never happen that makes you think about things you’d never think to think of. Probably the most obvious answer would be to say that music rules my life because, let’s be real, any time I’m not listening to it, “The Man” is probably somehow behind it trying to tear apart my super rad and incredibly punk rock scene that it’ll never understand because all “The Man” cares about is the oppression of youth. I don’t even know who “The Man” is, but he seems like a good person to blame my music free moments on, however, I digress. The Strokes, Cat Stevens, The Moldy Peaches, Boston, Def Leppard, The Ramones, The Wombats, The Goo Goo Dolls, Everything But The Girl – all of these artists inspire me and help me conceive a perfect world, but while all these artists and many many more are a very important aspect of my life, they aren’t responsible for anything tangible that I’ll ever have. So if such a, probably unnecessarily, big part of my life isn’t responsible for really anything directly useful, how is it important to me? Let me break it down for you in my, I’m guessing you assume, uncomplicated angsty teenage way.

I am an admittedly emotionally shallow person. I’m not saying that I’m shallow in the way that most people think of shallow, I’m just saying that the only emotions I really demonstrate pretty mildly are happiness, sadness, and stress, which really isn’t an emotion. I actually have difficulty responding to a lot of things and tend to take a very rational and unemotional approach to analyzing situations. This is where I think music comes in. The only creative thing I ever do in my life, which I do very consistently, is link songs to certain situations, or I use them to define how I feel about certain things. For example, I tend to equate feelings for Eric (name changed because he doesn’t know he loves me yet) to the lyrics, “You were on my mind at least nine tenths of yesterday/seemed as if perhaps I’d gone insane/what is it about you that has commandeered my brain,” from Kimya Dawson’s song “My Rollercoaster”, but other times to contrasting lyrics such as, “We feel nothing so jump into the fog, I just hope it’s your bones that shatter not mine,” from “Jump Into The Fog” by The Wombats. Clearly I have very conflicting feelings on the matter of Eric, which I wouldn’t so easily understand without using lyrics to define how I feel. The most important use of music for me is that it is a tool for my emotionally inept mind to fathom all the things I feel and help to put a name on it.
Music has a lot more uses that are less important to me but also fairly big. Though I play the cello on quite a sub par level and dabble in some heart and soul on the piano, music helps me express things. Not my own music of course because unfortunately I quit piano after the third grade and my horrendous orchestra teacher pulverized my love of the cello after having not playing for a couple years because of extenuating family circumstances, i.e. moving to the middle east with an orchestra-less school, but the music of anyone else that creates it. I feel that once I realize how a song can show how I feel about something that I should broadcast that to the world. One particularly obnoxious instance of this was when I actually played attention to the lyrics of Tame Impala’s “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” and realized that some of the lyrics were, “And I realize I’m just holding onto the hope that maybe your feelings don’t show,” I posted about five things each on three different social networks about how remarkably apropos those lyrics were to me (and about 3.6 billion other people which I didn’t think of in my moment of excitement). The self expression through music, most successfully demonstrated in Say Anything (aka the best movie ever) when John Cusack blasts Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” (one of my dad’s favorite songs and one we jam to often) out of a boom box while that pale chick was pretending to be asleep but actually being super turned on by his romantic gesture, is and has always been an important method of mostly romantic expression, hence mix tapes. But other than expression, it can also be a motivator (“Separate Ways” by Journey is my speed walking song), a confidence booster (in Kimya Dawson’s “Loose Lips” she reminds listeners multiple times that she loves them), or just grounds for acting like and idiot (we’ve all seen the episode of Scrubs where everyone jams to “A Little Respect” by Erasure because it’s stuck in everyone’s head and I can guarantee that many a two-o-clock in the mornings have been spent flailing wildly around my room to it).

You see, music is what you need it to be. I don’t think music saves lives like a lot of angsty people say, but my life doesn’t need saving so music can’t do that for me but perhaps it can for those who do need saving. The lyrics, the beats, the ups, the downs, the moves, the moods, the feelings, everything about it, is what makes it so important. Perhaps analyzing music’s importance was a waste, but I think everyone should remember that music can help you with what you need and what you want, even if all you need to do is scream that awful yet amazing song “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers to the world.