Earth, Wind and Fire Makes Me Happy

I was browsing through my collection of MP3s, playing songs purely based on whether I felt like listening to them or not. Bob Dylan? Don't feel "Bob-ish" right now. Marshall Tucker Band? Oh yeah, "Fire On the Mountain." Lighthouse. Reminds me of my first date (she stood me up). Earth, Wind and Fire. Sweet. "Got To Get You Into My Life" and "Getaway." I then concluded that Earth, Wind and Fire makes me happy.

Earth, Wind and Fire's "happiness" got me thinking about other songs. Some don't make me happy at all, like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" or "The House of the Rising Sun," or anything by Leonard Cohen. Paul McCartney makes me happy, so does Corb Lund. Sometimes I'm in the mood for "non-happy" songs and will gleefully wallow in musical misery. Sometimes I feel like loud, fast music, sometimes I feel like honky tonk. Sometimes I want the transcendence that is Beethoven's late string quartets.

For the most part, we all have our favourite music, music we like, music we dislike, and music we are ambivalent toward. Some people do not listen to music and proudly wear their musical void like a badge of honour. Some treat listening to music like a vice or an addiction they overcame. "I used to listen to music," they say, "now I have other things to do." Other more important things like watching Dancing With the Stars. I digress.

Trying to pin down what it is that makes a song popular or a "favourite" is akin to nailing Jello to the wall. Studies have been undertaken, theories have been posited, even software has been written that attempts to determine the "hit-ness" of a particular song, but still, the mechanics around musical taste are, for the most part, unknown. Musical taste, like other aesthetic choices, is ephemeral at best.

Listening to music reaps huge rewards. In addition to "happiness," music transports us to far off places, recalls memories long buried, and can help alleviate stress among other things. I feel for those people that do not listen to music and wonder if they are even a tiny bit cognizant of what they are missing. My guess is that they are not. Pity.