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The Underground
Postiwyd gan dirty o Caerdydd - Cyhoeddwyd ar 22/01/2009 am 12:21
WORDS: Yasmin Begum / PICS: Ed Townend ((Both) Editorial Group)
In the cold light of morning, while everyone's yawning in backdrop to the nine to five drive or, if you're a student like I am, the half past eight to three o'clock drive, it's easy to dismiss music.
You can say, "Oh well, you know, it's just music, that's all it is. . ."
Yet, despite the fact we brush off our memories of the illuminating sensations of the night beforehand for an unknown reason, it's hard to ignore music's presence in our everyday life. It's at weddings, it's at funerals (sometimes) and?it's at friends' houses.
Its appearance in our lives is a hard thing to ignore.
Sometimes, when someone has a good time at a gig or a music festival, they will weave tales of such imagination that you feel as if you've been there. It's as if you've seen the band, you saw the sweat, you bumped into the man with the big glass of lager and got covered in the substance, and why?
In Punjabi culture some people will say that Jinn (a spirit) visited, though others will say that the Devil or God itself?was in?the room! Whichever way you're going to look at it, from whatever situation, people are going to relate it to the supernatural.
For example, there's a sect of Islamic mysiticism called Sufism where they play instruments, dance and sing to the point of being in a trance-like state, and this is when they claim that it's they became closer to God because of it.
Music and?the various things that go with it when you're out is a dangerous but daring concotion. Music and booze. Or if you're straight edge, music and Coca Cola. Music and stimulants.
It's the way foward, most definitely, a remedy for anything. Who, when they feel ill, turns up their favourite CD and dances around?
At what point do you truly live, as oppposed to exist? I was talking with a friend the other day, and he claimed that there's a clear line.
"To exist," he told me, "is to just get through life with the bare necessities needed, whereas to live is to embrace everything around you. The winter before this I barely scraped an existence, whereas when I'm around other things, other people, new solutions of things I thought were long gone... that's when I feel I truly become alive."
Music's a commodity now, look at channels like Kerrang! and its sister, MTV. Some oppose MTV for its pop-centred view on things (man, at one point they refused to play videos by black artists!) but how is alternative popular culture any better?
Being a musician has become synonamous with drugs, insanity,?VIP passes and most worryingly, The X Factor. Things are peddled toward us as?young people, a way to look and a way to be is pressured on us.
People talk about the alternative culture as a viable and promising alternative, but how many celebrites have used the machinery of the media (if unknowingly) to hype up their music press? Let's take the prince of indie music, Pete Doherty, and compare him with his pop cousin Britney Spears.
Our elders dismiss us, they say that we're young and naive, that we're not going anywhere or doing anything. They tell us to reject the norms pressed on us when it comes to things such as body image and say we're free to do our own things.
Why aren't we using this for everyday life? Let me not get idosyncractic on your ass, but how many of us have been at a gig and truly felt moved? Where the boundaries of race, colour and creed doesn't matter anymore, to a point where the whole crowd has moved?
The brilliance of the music has hit you, and you feel that everything has changed but stayed the same, an epiphany, so to speak? To join hands and sing along to the band with an unknown stranger next to you? How many of us have met members of the opposite sex and overcome our shyness to ask for their number??
Mix tapes, downloading, being introduced to a band, it's all happened to us. We embody that which is around us into things, songs that remind us of people, chords that have changed the way we think, songs that were written for us.
The revelation of the first time we experience music that we truly love - all those conflicting emotions! Music that goes on mix CDs, lyrics that are etched into your head, written onto doors at TJ's with Sharpie markers.
Economics has led to music being mass listened to, all English based, but music is one of those things that transcends boundries. You can sense the feeling from the way the singer sings, the minors and majors of the chords, the keys, it's all highly subjective but not at once.
Millions of people - especially teenagers - grew up on rock and roll and they didn't speak English; that didn't stop them. Language barriers don't exist here, no barriers or borders exist here.
I feel passionate about music, the way it speaks to me, the way it speaks to not only my friends but everybody I come into contact with. The transitions are numberless.
It's something that makes life truly worth living, it's explosive whether it's on?CD or in front of you, commanding your presence, encouraging you to not only break out of the chains you're put into by existence, but encouraging us.
It's saying, "Come with us", it's speaking and inviting us to join in coloruful chaos. Our exciting joy reveals itself, it's incoporating poetry, philosophies, keys, ideas. With music we soul-search, we lament, we cry and we dance, sometimes even at the same time (depending on how much you've drunk!).
The music I listen to has meant more to me than any piece of coursework I've written, any assessment I've been made to take and any project I've been forced to follow through with. It speaks to me louder than bombs if we're singing along and we know that we really believe.
It provides hope deeper than the false illusions of grandeur promised to me if I show up for?X amount of hours, do?X amount of subjects and get?X amount of grades that are pressured on not only I, but all of us, so we can grow up, become our parents and earn a living.
It's here, it's right here, it's moving fast and it's attention demanding. It's rising like steam from a crack in the pavement, like a stray book in a library that catches our attention, like a crack of sunlight appearing from a grey sky of rain.
Our fortunes were sewn on a string, and as we grow older our futures are looking more like coal than gold. The children of the 90s and the 00s, we're the only generation to have a worse standard of living than our parents.
We face a future of uncertain employment and certain war. Holy flowers and frequencies travel throughout the atmosphere, hazy, thick with perspiration and hot air, are these faces the new generation of Britain?
I saw a postcard once in my Welsh teacher's room saying, "To be born Welsh is to be born priveleged, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but with music in your blood and poetry in your soul."
Forget patriotism, that's not to be born Welsh; that's to be born HUMAN!
