Sometimes I wonder why music is so important to human beings.
Just about every culture has some form of music that is unique to themselves and helps us to understand them a little bit. But why is this so?
Victor Hugo once said "Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. " Is this true?
Does music create a culture or do culture create music? I would guess that the culture creates the music, but they are so closely born that it is almost impossible to distinguish.
For example, Flamenco music was born out of a small area in Spain that was occupied by the native people, Gypsies and Islamic folk. Yet it is distinctly not anyone of those individual elements. It embodies many of the traits we think of about those cultures - passion, drama, excitement and mystery. In fact, Flamenco originally described the lifestyle of these folk not their music. Eventually the lifestyle evolved and moved on but the music remained.
The same is true of hip hop. There was first a culture that existed and then a musical expression was born from it. You cannot seperate hip-hop the lifestyle from hip-hop the musical genre yet but you can see the evolution from the original party/boasting raps to conscious raps to gangsta rap and so on. At some point will hip-hop the lifestyle move on and leave behind just a musical legacy?
I guess in the end it doesn't matter because we will always find some form of expression for ourselves and thats all we care about, but I still trip on how it can be so powerful. You will never find a crowd of people moved to react like they do when a hit record is played in a club for any other medium. It's not like a picture of the Mona Lisa is going to make some hotties get wild and shake dem tings!
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