Life moves really fast. S4E09 — Thanksgiving IV
And if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you just might miss it.
Deep dives
Have you ever wondered if we will ever run out of new music? Please bear with me and give me the chance to explain myself. This is not going to be a cynic reckoning with the music industry; or simply me expressing a high level of dissatisfaction with my favourite band’s or radio station’s recent deliberate (non-)change in terms of their musical style.
There was a time as a kid when I was puzzled because of this question. If there was a finite amount of musical notes that I am physically able to hear, this would mean that there is a finite amount of combinations to create new music, right?
I don’t recall how old I was, but I see myself having this revelation back in the kitchen of my parents’ home, in the summer, listening to the radio. I was quite shocked when this thought came up and I couldn’t really handle the pressing question: What happens then? Imagining the absence of new musical arrangements that the world has never heard before made me sad.
What would come next? Would we simply arrange ourselves with the music we’ve created up to this point and simply choose to discover and rediscover other music? Would it even bother us?
Surfacing in (seemingly) shallow waters
Please don’t let me down.
That’s the only line of lyrics a band once played in front of an audience that included my colleague from work.
Please don’t let me down.
So there was this guy playing an easy and catchy chord pattern on his guitar, while the second guy performed his heart out to deliver this very sentence.
Please don’t let me down.
I’ve had a lot of fun talking about this with my work colleague when we recently travelled back from a business trip by car. What an performance, I said, and thought about all these weird but meaningful rhetoric exercises a lot of speakers have to go through to deliver clear and concise speech. What was the chance they were simply doing their homework back then? Did it matter that their song was one-dimensional?
Well, I guess there is a mathematical approach to answer the initial question from above. A lot of songs use very similar melodies, and obviously we really do appreciate this familiarity. Even if we will ever run out of music, will this even bother us, or will we hear about it in the news? I don’t know; and I don’t care.
What I do know for sure is that all these thoughts have taught me to enjoy and appreciate the music that is out there. Even if it may be a very simple one-liner that is simply the sweetest “please bear with us” any band ever performed.
