Everything Louder Than Everything Else.

Music. Such a huge part of all our lives and so ridiculously diverse. The subjectivity of music can be very annoying at times and joyous at others. When that friend we all have who knows every song ever introduces us to what will become our new favourite band it's such a brilliant thing, but then there's the bemusement of why your best friend actually thinks Fireflies by Owl City is actually a good song. Maybe it is (no, it's not, really); the thing about "good" music is that it doesn't really exist. If there was such a thing as objectively good music, we'd all agree all the time and there'd be no new music either. Which would be really boring.

But even in the knowledge that musical taste is subjective, it's sometimes hard to fathom the tastes of other people. Listening to Radio 1 is a particularly confusing experience for me. All the while I'm thinking "Really? Enough people out there like this enough to get it on the radio?" The other side of that is of course that I must be the cause of much consternation in other people, my tastes are so outmoded, outlandish and eclectic, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. The only thing that I don't understand in the world of music is those people who say they have no interest in it. For me and many people I know, that's akin to saying you have no interest in living. I don't mean that in a melodramatic way but, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis' quote on friendship, I think of music as something which "is unnecessary, like philosophy, like Art ... it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival"

Now we can harp on for ever about who are the best musicians and the whys and wherefores of our tastes in terms of genre and style, but in the end the songs we really remember are the ones that seem to represent us the best. We pick up on things we see as reflecting ourselves. Of course, there's no song which can absolutely match my current state and tell me exactly what I'm thinking and feeling. A lot of that connection we feel to certain lyrics comes from our wanting to have a connection, or perhaps from a frustrated want to be able to express ourselves in a musical way.

The expression, the communication between singer and listener, is a huge part of the songs we hold dearest. Certainly a piece of music can have its own merits but I've found that for me a song lives and dies by its lyrics and the meanings that they convey and how readily I can relate to said meaning. Of course, the meanings we receive may not be the intended meanings but the subjective nature of our experience of music means that what we take from our music is probably more important than what was put in there at the other end of the process.