I've been thinking a lot lately about song lyrics. I'm writing this paper for one of my classes. Don't ask. I don't even know what it's really about yet. For this paper, though, I've been rolling around in my head all these thoughts about music and song lyrics and the way that technology allows us to be constantly enveloped in this particular literature.
I realized pretty early on that my fascination with this topic has a lot more to do with the words involved than it does with the music in which the words are couched. It should be fairly obvious why I'm more concerned with words than music. So here I am with all these thoughts bumping around up there in my brain, and something suddenly occurred to me: words affect me profoundly.
There was a moment the other day when I was walking home from school, feeling down in the dumps, fearful as I often am that I was teetering on the brink of failure. Then, suddenly, the lyrics of a favorite song popped into my head. I can't remember now which song or which lyrics, but the moment those words appeared in my mind, I began to carefully apply them like a verbal salve on my wounded self. Within a matter of moments, these words had helped me reconstruct myself as a person who could succeed, who could get done what she needed to do. I realized almost immediately what I had done, and that was the instant in which I realized this truth about myself: words affect me profoundly.
It began to dawn on me how much of what I perceived to be myself was built out of certain words, certain phrases. These were things I had read, things I had been told by others, things I had told myself or had written. This is amazing to me. Am I really so literarily inclined that I am truly a self constructed of words? Or do lots of people feel this way, people who don't have the same investment in language that I do?
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2 comments:
That's really interesting. I find that is often true of poetry and music that the lyrics (and for my the music that it's crouched in) effects the ways I think about myself and the world. I think we all are influenced by language- but I also think that you have a special gift and appreciation of words.
That doesn't surprise me about you. You're a writer, words are your livelihood!
Oftentimes I wonder if other people are affected as profoundly by things as artists, writers, musicians, etc. are. It seems that most of our breed are deeply impacted by various art forms, expressions, ideas, or sentiments that others pass by haphazardly without taking time to notice. At best, from what I can tell, they take a whiff of its aroma and then continue on with the "pressing" issues of life.
I appreciate words, but I find images to be much more deeply impacting for myself (for obvious reasons). The words that have deeply moved me have painted vivid pictures in my mind.
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