Music can be used to elicit a number of emotions. From love to hate and everything in between, music has been used to describe, express, and embody these complex layers of chemicals that we call emotions.
Music is one of the things that I love the most in this world (definitely top three) and it’s all because of the aforementioned sentence. It can be a vehicle for some of the most complex, conveluding and downright irrational feelings and actions that we, as human beings, have. So, if I may take a brief moment of your time, I would like to walk you through the relationship that my emotions have with certain songs and other elements of music.
Let’s start off with the quick and easy, Love. Since music has existed, it has been used to express the most basic of all human emotions, that being love. Starting with the grand orchestral symphonies that told tales of love in three movements, the love song was born. Love songs eventually found their way into jazz. So far in fact that they helped create the sub set and eventual genre of blues music. Some of the greatest rock and roll songs are about love. The pop ballads and anthems of the 80s, love. The world of late 90s and early 00s R&B is built off of love. Even today, some of the greatest hip hop tracks ever recorded were about love.
The love song is very near and dear to my heart. If you know anything about me you know “La La Land” is my favorite movie. This obsession over this film is what birthed my love for love songs. From there it only grew. Through careful needle drops in other rom-coms, my repertoire of love songs has built up and now expanded to a point where I can pull out the perfect love song for even the driest, least romantic moments.
You of course have the song that started it all, “Mia & Sebastian’s Theme” from La La Land is the quintessential love song. No lyrics, just 98 seconds of emotion from a single piano. This is the definitive love song to me, it cannot be topped (also doesn’t help that this was playing in the background of my first kiss).
Going off of “La La Land’s” themes, you have the deep emotional ballads. Nothing defines this group of songs quite like The Weeknd’s “Die For You.” The gut-wrenching lyrics are one thing but the delivery and sheer emotion that is pumped inside this track is unbelievable. When you hear Able belt out the lyrics, “The distance and the time between us, It’ll never change my mind ‘cause baby I would die for you” you can’t help but to think of who you would die for.
Take the emotion of “Die For You” and add in a bit of reckless-abandonment and you get a newer favorite of mine, “Constellations” by Jade LeMac. Again, the same power and emotion in this performance force you to think of the rawest and most pure emotions that you can possibly experience. The only difference between this track and the former is that while Able laid it all out on the track, there’s an aura of mystery surrounding this track that leaves you craving for more.
Moving further into the recklessness of a love song, you get, in my opinion, two of the most pure love songs that transient their language of origin. “Ma Meilleure Ennemie” by Stromae and Pomme and “Enséñame a Bailar” by Bad Bunny are two absolutely gorgeous tracks that, while being in different languages, are two sides of the same coin. Translated, these tracks are “My Best Enemy” and “Teach Me To Dance.” In the former, the song is a beautiful ballad of two people coming together despite their differences they keep coming back together. The song originates from the series, “Arcane” and plays during a dance scene that visualizes the song completely. The latter is a track about two people dancing together, one teaching the other learning. Eventually the two dance until the sun rises and it’s just “Tú y yo solito’, y el sol” or “Me and You Alone and the Sun.”
Love songs take those completely unfiltered emotions and conceptualize them in a rational way. Love songs make the irrational, rational. They take these powerful emotions and turn them into something magnificent. On the other hand, if you took those unbelievably powerful emotions and decided to throw them away, you would get what I call, musical rage.
Of course there are the classic break-up songs. Taylor Swift’s, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and others like it take a surface level of rage and release it all on an entertaining but otherwise shallow track. When I say musical rage I mean “The Emptiness Machine” by Linkin Park. The raw emotion and unabashedly harsh nature of the track.
You can now go two ways from this point. You either lean into the rage aspect or the emotional aspect. If you go down the rage route, you will find yourself the song, “a bulleT w/ my namE On” by Bring Me The Horizon. A track of nothing but pure distaste and loathing not to just the person the track is directed towards but the singer themselves. It is a grimey, loud, and aggressive track that destroys any fragile emotion from the inside out.
If you go down the other end of that road, you will find yourself back with The Weeknd with the song, “False Alarm.” While this track doesn’t fully embody the full range of rage and resentment, it combines the darker of those elements with longing and lust. The repeated, distorted chorus of “She’s a false alarm, false alarm (hey, hey, hey, hey)” brings the resentment to the forefront while still maintaining those purer feelings of love and longing.
On the furthest end of this spectrum of rage, you will get “Call Out My Name” by the Weeknd. Cut out the rage of the last track and replace it with double the resentment and you get this absolute beast of a record. The somberness of the first verse sets up what could be a beautiful love song. The chorus throws that all away. The lyrics “Girl, why can’t you wait ‘til I fall out of love?” are the perfect representation of love that you resent to the maximum degree. This track is truly a masterclass on raw, dark human emotion.
Now, love and rage are the two most extreme emotions a person can feel. And while not too dissimilar, they both have wide ranges of music that attempt to convey what each of those emotions feels like. Now let’s look at some tracks that convey complex emotions that are softer and less intense than the two previous ones.
Once again, transcending our English language is the track, “Je Te Laisserai Des Mots” by Patrick Watson. Longing, that is the only word that can be used to describe what this track embodies. Pure, unfiltered longing. If independence had an anthem, my pick would go to “Fair Trade (with Travis Scott)” by Drake. “Evil Friends (feat. Danny Brown)” by Portugal. The Man is a fantastic example of honesty. “I give it one hundred from the start to the end, Roll with my day ones and that’s how it is,” as it is repeated in the chorus, leaving absolutely no room for extra interpretation. It is clear what this song is about. “Open Arms (feat. Travis Scott)” by SZA is what I hear when someone says the word acceptance. Welcoming someone into your life with open arms despite all your differences.
From love to hate and everything in between, music is what unites our emotions. Whether it’s the extreme highs of love that cause you to rise above even cloud nine or, the extreme lows of rage that cause you to sink to a place you swore you would never go, it can all be expressed in music. Now clearly, there are hundreds of songs that cover the exact feelings and emotions I discussed. There are thousands of songs that cover the emotions and feelings I didn’t discuss. I picked these songs because I have listened to them at crucial moments in my life. Every single one of these songs was playing when I experienced the emotion described with it.
Everyone has their own songs. Everyone has their “Mia and Sebastain’s Theme.” Everyone has their own “False Alarm.” Everyone has their own song that is so specifically tailored to your life experience, you have to think the only rational explanation for this song existing is coincidence. That is why you must push past the rational. Love is not a rational thing, in fact it is the most irrational thing that could ever possibly be conceived. Same goes to rage and regret and longing and acceptance. These irrational concepts that we have dictated and catalogued as emotions are what rule our lives. Just the mere fact that someone can quantify them enough to put them into song is unbelievable.
From love to hate and everything in between, there is a song for it. One day you will find yourself in a deep, emotion-laden event. An event so major that it changes the trajectory of your life. After that happens and you start to think about it, you will come to a point where you cannot make rational sense of what just happened. It is at this time that music will be there for you. Whenever reason and ration fail, the beauty of irrationality will rescue you. Whether it is your first kiss, first goodbye, first heartbreak, or first second chance, music will be a constant in it. Whether you realize it in the moment or afterwards, there will always be a song that can conceptualize your individual experience to a higher degree and magnitude than you ever thought possible.
Music is the universal language. Not just in the cheesy way of it unites us all, to me, it goes further than that. Its connection to someone’s emotions can create a universal bridge of understanding. Once again, taking the most irrational things and making them rational. It takes anything as irrational as love and hate and translates those raw, pure, gorgeous and terrifying feelings into something that anybody can look at and say, “I understand.”
Music is everything, from love to hate and everything in between.
Featured Image: Above is a collection of some of the songs mentioned in the essay. Each have heavy themes of either love or hate.
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