Music Is My Savior, Which Has a Great Influence on My Life
Music is the art of arranging sounds in time to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre (wikipedia.com) It has many genres made for different types of people, and can be made with anything: hands feet, drumsticks, cups, and many others. There is a song for every emotion a person can feel. Although I have many influential people in my life, the discovery of music has had the biggest impact on my life thus far.
The song “Human” by Christina Perri, is about how she can be anything anyone wants her to be, however she can only do so much because she is only human. She sings: “I can fake a smile, I can force laugh, I can dance and play the part, if that’s what you ask, Give you all I am, … But I’m only human, and I bleed when I fall down, and I crash and I breakdown.” Not only do the lyrics speak to me, but the music goes along with the lyrics perfectly, because it goes from soft to extremely and passionately loud. That appealed to me because it reminds me of my bipolar tendencies, because people who are bipolar switch emotions very quickly. This song relates to me because, in my school and community, I feel as though there are some people that put me on a high pedestal, because I come from a revered family.
Even though I admire the adulation, I feel like I cannot fail, or those very people will think of me differently. I want to be everything they want me to be, but then I listen to “Human” and I remember that I am only human and if I make mistakes I just must learn from it and keep on living life. Zora Neale Hurston talks about this in her speech, How It Feels to be Colored Me. She tells her readers that she does not care about what people think of her and she is just going to live life as Zora and that will never change. Anger can get the best of me at times. There have been many situations where I just wanted to scream like a hungry lion, and forget about going to school, my responsibilities and my future, being a young woman with so many future opportunities and talents, figuring out what I want to do with my life is that hardest thing.
Next year I will be a senior in high school, and even when I was in fourth grade, my parents have hounded me about where I wanted to go to college, what I wanted to study, and if those choices would help get me a good job in the future. I still do not have any answers to their questions. I feel as though the only person that can get me through these times is Jhene Aiko, a rhythm and blues singer. It is not the lyrics in her music, but her voice is what calms me down. Her voice is so smooth and flowy and just one song can help me forget about what I was stressing about or upset about in the first place.
As a teenager, I go through different emotional and mental stages, which is all a part of growing up, and figuring out who I want to become. As teenagers, our first loves can be the most wonderful and devastating times of our young lives. There are over one hundred songs about the whole first love experience: the first encounter, the love, the heartbreak and betrayal, and last of all the revenge. In these predicaments, I always refer to the songs “Bust Your Windows” by Jazmine Sullivan and “For the First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack. Sullivan’s song is about how she got revenge on her cheating boyfriend by busting the windows to his favorite car. Obviously, this is the song I listen to when I am anger and seeking revenge.
Even though I do not think I would ever have the audacity to do this, listening to it makes me feel powerful and in control. Flack’s song is about the first time she saw the love of her life and how she thought that all the good in the world started with him. I have felt like I was in love before, however those feeling became mediocre when I listen to her song because she had so much love and affection for her man and it made my heart melt. It makes me only hope that I will get the chance to feel that kind of love for someone one day.
In life, there are bad times and good times. Life is going to happen with or without our acquiescence. However, when life is a little too much, or when you do not know exactly how you feel, or you just want to escape all the stress, music can be the closest thing to salvation. Music will always be a reminder that as life keeps going, you should follow suit. For people like me, music gives hope that whatever is going on, it can only get better, and if it does not, there is a song for it because music is made by people for people.
