So this is my entry to a prompt "Write about an album that got you through a hard time".
Without thinking much, my mind instantly thought about my unusual relationship with the music I've been listening to lately. I firmly believe that our choice in music reveals multiple layers about our experiences.
Our choice of music is never objective, there are no objectively perfect lyrics, objectively melodious melodies, objectively perfect cacophony of vibrations and precurssions that can soothe every human mind, at all times. In fact, you'd find people change their taste over the years in unrecognisable ways. For no development of taste in music is also objectively predetermined. Not all roads lead to Jazz.
With this perspective, the question arises why then one chooses to prefer certain music, and why do they prefer to change that taste over life experiences? This blog is my answer to these questions.
I've been raised in a rather orthodox atmosphere of obedience, subservience, unquestionable loyalty, and an unpayable debt towards your parents. The kind of climate where things were either Godly good or Evilly bad, and doing bad things meant you, a child, figuring out this complex world, are bad, disgrace and worthy of abuse.
What does a fairly straightforward upbringing like this, though highly lucrative in psychotherapy spheres, does to the taste of music of a growing human mind?
Naturally, in this very monochromatic world, the cosmic dance of vibrations and the fractal strings of alphabets, becomes objective.
Not only the child develops an acceptable taste in music, and seeks out music that earns validation in the eyes of their caretakers, peers, and every single person they want to impress, silently, a very loud playlist gets developed that the child subjectively enjoys but tries very hard to hide by objectively looking down at people who like such music.
With this background, as I was recovering from what seemed to be fever after a fall from bike on slippery curvy hilly roads of sleeper town of Munduk in Bali, a day before Nyepi, the auspicious Hindu festival of silence, when even airports are shut and almost no hotels provide any service, turned out to be actually entirely unrelated to the fall, and was simply the worst fever I've ever had, for it was the first sign of a very common viral infection of dengue.
In such a catatonic state, the guards of that child lowered, and he finally allowed to be soothed with the music that the algorithm kept recommending but he kept avoiding it coz he learned to believe it was objectively bad music.
And soothed he, the child, was. He can't explain why he loves this music, it makes his stoic persona want to dance, it makes him happy even though the lyrics are far from his acquired personality, but he feels an unexplainable connection to it which his objectivity cannot rationalize.
And that's how I got through a hard time, by learning to let that child enjoy the bliss of subjectivity.