Contra Music
This week, I've applied my energy to being observant of states, mental and physical. Video and audio were canceled on my devices, so there was just Noble Silence. Time for practice, reading and doing chores. I was feeling under the weather and ended up taking a half day from work.
It's Friday night and I'm allowing myself to indulge in YouTube. Getting caught up on AI news, podcasts, etc. I can't say I missed it much. One of the uncomfortable conclusions from this week's exercise in Noble Silence is that music is evil.
I kid. It's more an obstacle, depending on what you want to do. No one ever says they hate music, prefer silence, even if they don't listen to it. It's not acceptable in society to say, "Music is bad for you."
I loved music and have my whole life, having developed a taste for styles and tastes, from classical and sacred choral to punk and alternative. Having built a sizable collection of CDs – and having converted and uploaded them into the cloud where they are always available to me via smart device — I realized this week that music has been a source of misery. It's also been a cause of joy, but one of the problems is that even the joyful turns to a kind of nuisance.
Music really has become for me an emblem of the path, of what spiritual warfare looks like. We cling to and crave it. When we get it, it leaves these cranial echoes can haunt us for years.
I'm one of those people who gets a guitar lick, a clever line, or a melody stuck in his head and it can stay there for hours, drowning out the inner Noble Silence. I didn't get anything like brief periods of interior silence until I started practice and after several months of daily sits and walks, I found myself with a quiet space during normal daily activities. Now, with a little bit of achievement under my belt, I can see external sights and sounds a little better, see how they flow from the outside, into the body via sensation and end up lodged in the consciousness. Written this way, that's what a lot of the practice is about, preparing to see phenomena as they come and go, but doing so through the medium of you as a kind of pool. To be precise, a bio-pool of blood, water, bone, tissue...
One particular affliction manifested during my first year or so of practice. I went through a period of three, four, maybe longer weeks of having this Fleetwood Mac guitar line in my head. This particular bout of ear worm was intense, as in, my brain/heart/mind was under constant assault by Lindsey Buckingham and his guitar. Now, I can't remember the tune or the line, but the intensity of this inner song made meditation difficult, it made conscious living more cumbersome. I would sit down on the couch with a nice cup of tea and lo, here'd come Lindsey and it felt like everything was drowned out. At times, I believed it could ascend to the level of auditory hallucination, but it never did.
I can think of nothing so energetic, so willful as this worm. Like all things, it passed. I remember monitoring its retreat from my life, like getting over a cold, where your sniffles give way and there are a few days of congestion breaking up, your body mostly restored. Things have an energy to them and they can seem so immediate and real, yet disappear just as quickly as they came. The Lindsey worm was like this; one day a sort-of mental health concern, the next, gone. I honestly cannot even remember the song, the album, or the melody/lick that set me off.
Still, Lindsey's ear worm didn't keep me from listening to music. I decided however to cut back to Sundays, when I would do my driving to pick up food and run errands. The problem was that the blaring music – only experienced an hour or two – would stick with me for the rest of the week.
Noble Silence this week has been watching various songs emerge, unbidden, from the depths of consciousness. Stupid songs, more stupid songs, and then some really stupid songs. Pop rock, folk songs, commercial jingles. I'm impressed with my own ability to remember commercial jingles for products from decades ago, when I was a kid. I still sing them aloud because nothing says "I love you, useless capitalist commercial jingle" like keeping it alive in your mind, giving voice to it.
Songs have a distinctive quality that endears some more than others to us. We hear one that just makes us go crazy, causing us to play it over and over again. Some might say, obsessively. Not a few songs, however are (well, were) so ubiquitous between the 60s and Aughts that you were guaranteed to hear them a million times before your death. Larger stores are sure to have music playing, a kind of white noise that you can sing along to as you shop. My grocery store does this, playing classic rock songs. I fucking hate classic rock, but I will, like a trained seal, find myself humming or singing along to whatever is playing. I don't think I ever bought an Eagles album or cared that much for their music, but their tunes pop up in my head.
The breakdown of a more integral American society into vibrancy, diversity and smart devices means there is no common body of shared music. There is hyper-fragmentation caused by technology: technology brings people from one part of the globe to another, wipes out the local flora and fauna, and the survivors of both source and target are reduced to personalized virtual prisons. When a relative called me yesterday and mentioned the "liberation of the Iranian people," it was evident we were living in two very different news rooms. Custom tailored realities, that.
Back in the old days, rockers still knew and appreciated at least a few country artists and their works. They could sing along with them even if it wasn't their first choice for music. Today, there isn't really any artist who has broad appeal. Taylor Swift gets kind of close. The rise of AI however means music will become, well, enshittified. In a multi-cultural society, you lose a prevailing culture and end up with an enshittified stream of cultural detritus.
People complain about the end of human creative endeavor as AI takes over film, music, writing, and basically anything else once done by talented individuals. But let's stop and recall that in the last 20 years, films have become tiresome, rock died and all that is left are pop music and hip hop. Marvel movies were being largely generated from special effects devised and rendered on expensive computer software by a human. Yet, every comic-book based movie just felt like something we'd already seen a million times (Nolan's Batman series excluded). Everything was already feeling pre-fabricated, artificial and inhuman before ChatGPT rolled out because of the prevalence of technology and the multi-cultural decline, typical of late period empires who are spent in every sense of the word.
Is AI just finishing a process that was started years ago? I say, "Yes." In 2055, we will still be watching comic book movies and the graphics won't be that much improved.
I've written before about the obsolescence of humans. The gradual transfer of artistic creation to AI, in order to further strengthen our oligarchs, means another avenue of escape has been cut off. No community, no family, no homes, no jobs, no creative outlets and endeavors... The concern now is whether there will be any incentive at all to noodle on a piano or guitar since it's easier to just ask AI to make something on the spot. The new future of film is humans using AI to "create" – request – a film with this actor, this plot and this type of dialogue and setting. They will watch this by themselves or upload it to the entire world.
I discovered Cocteau Twins in the last six months or so. How I made it this long without ever giving them a close listen escapes me.
Oh, did I go crazy with those tunes, playing them incessantly while at work! "Heaven or Las Vegas" is easily one of the greatest spiritual assaults I've ever undergone, but lower than Lindsey Buckingham's spiritual wracking with that meddlesome guitar lick. Elizabeth Fraser's voice and, at least in her early career, her creation of lyrics from non-words she invented on the basis of sound (not meaning) – glossolalia – creates a harder nut to crack for someone like me, who enjoys internalizing songs so that they live with him forever and ever, disturbing his inner tranquility to no end. Cocteau songs are harder to remember because the mental entries are harder to grasp, so it takes several listens. Internalizing a Cocteau Twins' song is like trying to ride a bike with handles drenched in dish soap: hard to steer, to control, but the ride is fun. Then one day, you're there! Haunted by yet another set of sounds. You may recall them at will or they may just appear, unbidden in your mind. Eventually, you will hear them played softly on the speakers at your dentist's office.
With demonic possession, there is some part of the victim who has to accede before the demon can enter and take control. Or maybe I'm mixing this up with vampires, who can't enter a home without an invitation. Anyway, audiophiles are people who enjoy sampling various types of music, looking for some new sound or lyric that will induce a new feeling and mental tone. They invite music into themselves, where it can live rent free indefinitely.
When the listeners change (they will), the songs they loved will become alien, but still lodged there in the consciousness as another fabrication.
This is what drives people like me with music exploration, the hunt for that feeling tone that doesn't fit anywhere on the spectrum of happy/sad/bored/etc. This is something so inexpressible when heard that you cannot relate it to others because there are no words. Still, music reviewers back in the day would write columns in which they tried to capture some of it, to help other listeners sus out whether this new voice, this new music arrangement, would provide them with that special sensation, the felicitous union of the outer and the inner into a heart sensation that was beyond ordinary experience. If you meet a fan of the same song or artist, you can knowingly look at each other and say, "Yes, yes you get it. Yes, yes, yes..." This seldom happens. Maybe at a concert or something, but then it's just a bunch of strangers.
When we find these special songs, they eventually end up on the overhead music speakers at the grocery store, loud enough to be heard distinctly as "oh, this song X...".
The great songs that got you excited, or left you feeling wistful, pensive or cautiously hopeful about that cute girl in band? Yeah, its energy will wear out, its ghost haunt you to your death. When you are mowing the lawn, or washing dishes, it will creep up on you. It'll just be an echo, a distracting nuisance, a mental fragment that left an impression. Capitalists have scientifically studied the right volume to play their in-store music, to insure that it can be understood lyrically by the ear, but low enough that the song is drained of its vitality. The point of capitalism is to keep you distracted, mindless, in a herd state.
One accumulates a large collection of songs if they love music. They can easily fill up your awareness, this replaying of old music inside your mind. Where do these songs come from? Who is picking the tunes?
These types of questions came to me throughout the week, if they popped up. And they do pop up, but part of Noble Silence is reading and writing in addition to sitting. Music doesn't stand a chance against me in 2026. Ha! Still, the arising and passing away of internal music has been a helpful point for practice. The DJ is me obviously and the songs are all ones that are stuck in my sense organs, in my consciousness. I don't care about their meaning, why any one particular song shows up, because it's all noise. As I wrote about in my recent blog on dreams, they are almost always the chatter of the monkey mind, having no value whatsoever. The same goes with many of our waking thoughts. Why did this show up, not that? Who cares? Watch it arise and then cease. Don't grasp it, don't hang onto it.
One of the tricks of music is that we can get so lost in a particular song that we don't realize we are being made. Our mind so delights in what ear consciousness is transmitting that the heart – because of these poignant feeling tones – comes to experience itself as a reality. Music can make reality feel, uh, real, particularly in the context of a grand symphony hall or great cathedral. That's one of, if not its greatest, danger. Eating is for other people the sense experience that makes one feel whole, complete, a reality unto itself. But music is in the West given far greater honor as a spiritual practice. Eating isn't even though Western bodies would suggest otherwise.
Great artists and composers want to infect you with their ear worms, to inseminate you with something they whipped out on the keyboard or guitar one night after getting stoned. They may feel that there is a god or goddess – a muse – who drives them to produce sensual works which elevate the soul, or provide a healing balm, or let it share in anger and rage...
Or in the case of J.S. Bach, who was probably very moderate in his drinking: he may have written a lot of beautiful music because he felt inspired, felt that there was a calling to produce beautiful sounds to lift the hearts of people.
"The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul. Where this is not observed, there will be no real music but only a devilish hubbub."
We've lots of devilish hubbub today.
Music can be a powerful booster of mental states. We all know how it is used in commercials, movies, gatherings religious and secular, to essentially manipulate us. We go along with it because we feel there is something that lifts and shifts us from the ordinary. When this music becomes too familiar, we may go in search of something new. The nature of dukkha includes getting what we want and then finding out that it becomes threadbare. This includes music and all artistic efforts. They become dull, humdrum, without much charm. They hold us, entrance us perhaps if they are of good quality, but eventually, they fade and are forgotten.
What does not fade? What does not lose its luster? What is calm, peaceful, unified, at rest, unperturbed, neither lacking nor overabundant? Very few of us ever get to that question. It never comes up.
Ear consciousness transmits music to the consciousness proper and no matter the music, it can become a pest. Silence is golden, both out there and in here. The world becomes calmer when we remove distractions like music, barking dogs and honking horns. And let's be candid here: Music is very much a distraction, something we put on in the background while we do chores or while out driving. It's something we are forced to listen to in public because of sound systems, or because someone is blaring it out of their car with the windows down on a warm summer day.
We go to a festive outdoor gathering, we hear music. Most of us will tolerate the tinny sound of music piped through a PA into the open air at a street fair or carnival. We won't like the music if we're older because, maybe it's aimed at kids. We may walk away with no memory of what was played, or maybe with an ear worm from hell nestled at the core of our brains.
Very seldom do we listen attentively to music for its own sake, as a kind of mindfulness exercise. The danger is that while one can, from a place of awareness, watch the life of the song and its notes and just observe, not ponder, the effects as they strike our ear, enter our central nervous system and give rise to thoughts and feelings, like, "this is pleasant, but this more still," we come away from the experience with a sensory experience that will come back to us later, uninvited. When the mind has a spare moment in which there is a nice big pause, it will go back to the closet and fish the record out, put it on the turntable.
It seems this whole process of experiencing music, seeing it as a desired thing that changes into a nuisance, has the promise of making it less enchanting. Finding the unsatisfactoriness in all things sounds like a fault finding mission, a way of complaining incessantly about life. Complaining however isn't what we do if we are wise. We see the costs paid for indulging in sensual living.
We've all heard someone say, "Oh, man I spend hours listening to music... it's the only thing that keeps me sane... life would be meaningless without music..."
Music is life for some people. It can give focus and expression to the inexpressible. The way it pleases the ear and the feeling tones it generates provide a sense of permanence and truth in a way that other sense organs do not. We may delude ourselves into believing that there is truth in this song, piece, ballad. A song can have effects that last for many years, remaining buried in our consciousness, bubbling up from time to time for reasons we may not know. Emotional triggers can resurface a long hidden tune.
One thing about a really enjoyable song, like a rock song with good lyrics, intensity and drive, is that it can take over everything in the moment. You can get wrapped up in it, lose yourself, forget about all your cares, etc. Some people, to better effect this mental state, will play it loud. Many artists will make faces, contort their bodies, shut their eyes, seemingly lost to another dimension during a performance.
Music is best when it causes us to forget ourselves and our problems – our kilesas – for a moment. This is the intended purpose of religious ritual, as a way of shutting down the normal frenetic mental activity, granting a reprieve from the screeching and howling of our inner primate.
On the other hand, we hate when someone starts playing music that every sane man knows is pure crap.
"Turn that shit off!"
Even music we normally like can become an irritant when we are not in the mood for it, or when it reminds us of a recent failed relationship. On one level, music is just sound waves, but because we are complex animals, it can strike us one day as perfect, a week later, as bleh, based on complicated factors we may not be aware of. Even later, we may come to detest the song while of course praising music generally, its beauty, its essentiality. If life is to have any meaning at all, we must have music and art and wine... but not this music, not this painting and not that wine!
In reflecting back on a life of listening to music, it's been much less enchanting as of late. Listening to it means enduring its effects, of overlooking that many of the songs out there are deficient in various ways. This means they can be pleasant now, irritating tomorrow. Someone right now is suffering from the song, "Wet Ass Pussy," that took the world by storm a few years ago.
Music can overbear the senses depending on context and usage, keeping the mind in a state of heedlessness. Music is by its nature aimed at eliciting an emotional response: it is emotional manipulation par excellence. Test your own experiences with how music is used on you in settings, from patriotic parades to Christmas Eve carols.
Then ask yourself, whether it is a true refuge, a place of quiet that is cool, calm and collected.
