Melody and Melancholy

Music can soothe the savage soul when the listener trusts the music. It can also twist your soul like a coat-hanger - make you anxious or depressed. Whether we realize it or not, music can change our moods.

People have known this for quite some time. In the days of Thomas Jefferson, black slaves sang skat songs to soothe themselves while they picked Southern cotton.

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen. Nobody knows my sorrow.

The Blues is an art form that was derived from a successful technique to lift the spirits. If I felt like turning my blues around, I'll fight fire with fire. I'll listen to Blues greats like Taj Mahal and B.B. King. Sometimes I'll play the harmonica in synch, just pour my heart out.

If you love music, you must know what I mean. How a song can alter our perception, like yellow sunglasses do, or orange, or blue.

Of the most popular music, and the most powerful, in my opinion, is a band from the U.K. called Radiohead. Now Radiohead is one of my favourite bands but I'll say their misery spreads like contagion.

These are lyrics to a Radiohead song that reached Billboard's Top 20, called No Surprises:

i'll take a quiet life. a handshake some carbon monoxide. no alarms and no surprises. no alarms and no surprises. no alarms and no surprises, please...

When I feel glum, it's one of the first things I'll turn to because I can relate to it. It has the power to drive me into a kind of melancholic bliss. It's so low that it feels high. Sometimes it can reverse my mood, like spinning the odometer back to zero in one direction or another.

These lyrics, coupled with a preschool jingle in the background, move me into a dream like state. I dissociate my mind from my surroundings. Radiohead and bands like them offer an honest, distilled, piteous misery. I treasure the song, for what it means to me now and what it meant to me then.

But what does the song mean?

The song means a different thing to everyone. It's reminiscent of the poetry that sad schoolboys, of six or seven years old, write at their desks when they're daydreaming. It is beautiful in its innocence. It is intended to evoke an emotion in us.

Sometimes the emotion is so strong that it can stagnate within us. Radiohead promotes that stagnation by romanticising or glorifying sadness, in a way. Makes the afflicted feel like tragic

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