Music brings a certain public respectability.
Somehow, music, as a form of art, ought to be nourishing. Instead, my music is like eating emotional junk food. It's not an elevating influence but a leveling one; it meets me right where I am and legitimizes my longings, but without encouraging anything more. It breeds...complacency.
What most people don't realize is that, sure, it's not trashy, explicit, sexist, or dehumanizing. But perhaps it's subtly worse: it's the kind of music with the kind of beat that goes directly to my chest because it inarticulately expresses my inarticulate desires. It lets me continue my slow descent somewhere concealed inside all the while pretending that this is okay. Worse, it sustains it.
It's a music that moves me powerfully and immediately, but instead of filling my soul, it hollows it. Its beats almost exclusively cater to the erotic, an adolescent sort of sexuality -- the first childish feelings of satisfaction and delight. The rhythm and melody are more important than words themselves because their message, well, the message is understood before anything is ever said. And because it appeals to adolescent desire, because music is art, suddenly my longings are legitimized.
On the invisible relationship between art and legitimacy