I met recently with some undergraduates who are helping out with a research I’m conducting. On my way to drop four of them – three ladies and a gentleman -, the ladies loved the ‘old school’ song I was playing in the car and requested I make copies for them. “But these are old tunes, some even released before you were born so why the interest?” I asked. Their answers were instructive.
“Sir, the lyrics in most of the songs makes me feel appreciated as a woman because most of them sure know how to get to a woman’s heart,” was one of their replies. That was how our discussion on music began. “But we have good musicians of your generation out there,” I reminded her. “Don’t even go there,” the three of them chorused immediately. One said of them “all they know is to go straight to the point.” Since I didn’t grasp what she was driving at, I asked her to elaborate.
Shyly she said “some of them are very raw in their lyrics.” Understandably, the discussion later veered to how the music is affecting young men in their generation and why young ladies dating ‘matured men’ appears to now be the trend. As one of them puts it, “most men my age that I’ve dated will come boldly to you and with a straight face say let’s have sex; just like that. I find that very disgusting and cheapening.”
One cannot but agree with these ladies if you listening to some of what is churned out today as music. In a show I attended two years, a popular comedian joked about current Nigerian musicians and asked whether they actually sit down to write their songs or just wake up from their beds and sing whatever comes to their mind.
The late Fela Anikulapo Kuti and Robert Nester Marley (Bob Marley) are two great musicians – among the many – I admire. Anytime I listen to some of Fela songs I always come away feeling they written and sang yesterday! Most of the social malaise and challenges he sang about are still with us. So are Bob Marley’s songs. Marley, it was, who picked up a speech the late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia delivered at the UN and turned it into a hit song – remember the track ‘war’?
My point is that every song should tell a story; a compelling story like Fela and Bob Marley did with their songs. Every artiste should tell a story; the nature of such message(s) however, depends on the artiste’s inventiveness and innate constitution. The essence and quality of their stories are responsible for their eventual rise to acclaim, immortality or obscurity. Today, the ladies in question can relate to songs written and sang even before they were born. What are our present artistes’ stories?
Most of them see “enemies” everywhere. Either people are envious of their ‘success’ or they are out to ‘bring them down.’ They seem to be following in the steps of the so called ‘gangster rap’ artistes of my generation who ended up shooting and killing each other on the streets of the United States of America. They became a bad influence on succeeding generation of African Americans.
I love music because it is something magical. It’s salve for all of life’s emotional wounds. The good thing about music is that there’s so much out there that there’s literally something for every mood imaginable. There’s music to calm you down, there’s music to put you in an ethereal state, there’s music to pump you up and there’s music that simply serves to take away silence.
Everyone has a favourite song or artist and it’s no surprise that liking the same music can be both a topic of conversation and a tool for connection. Personalities can even be determined by the types of music people listen to. Think about it, there are classical people, there are hard rock people, there are reggae people, and there are country people. There are so many facets of personalisation that come from music that it’s no surprise that music can be as contentious as politics, sports or religion. It’s different for everybody.
I can’t count the times I’ve been so overwhelmed by our world that the first thing I do when I get into my car or get home is put on some music to calm my nerves and lull me into a more peaceful and reflective state.
What makes music part of our lives and why were my three young female friends able to use music to send a message? Hundreds of studies have been conducted on the power of music. In the area of healing, some genre of music like calm music has been noted to produce results because of their soothing nature.
A sport psychologist, Costas Karageorghis of Brunel University in England conducted a research using danceable upbeat music for London’s “Run to the Beat” race. He learned how to devise soundtracks that are just as powerful, if not more so, as some of the not-so-legal substances that athletes commonly take to excel.
“Music is a great way to regulate mood both before and during physical activity. A lot of athletes use music as if it’s a legal drug,” Karageorghis told LiveScience. “They can use it as a stimulant or as a sedative. Generally speaking, loud upbeat music has a stimulating effect and slow music reduces arousal.”
The link between music and athletic performance is just one example of the inroads scientists and doctors are making into understanding the amazing power that music has over our minds and bodies. Science is backing up our intuition and experience, showing that music really does kill pain, reduce stress, better our brains and basically change how we experience life.
Linda Fisher, a pediatrician at Loyola University Hospital in Illinois, has also researched into playing therapeutic music for patients in hospitals, hospices and other clinical settings to improve their healing. “The music I play is not necessarily familiar; it’s healing music that puts the patient in a special place of peace as far as the music’s rhythm, melodies and tonal qualities.”
A 1990 study at Bryan Memorial Hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska and St. Mary’s Hospital in Mequon, Wisconsin concluded that music “significantly” lowered the heart rates and calmed and regulated the blood pressures and respiration rates of patients who had undergone surgery.
Equally too, Fisher said a 2007 German study found that music therapy helped improve motor skills in patients recovering from strokes. Other studies have found that music therapy can boost the immune system, improve mental focus, help control pain, create a feeling of well-being and greatly reduce anxiety of patients awaiting surgery.
Along those lines, music therapy was recently found to reduce psychological stress in a study of 236 pregnant women, according to researchers from the College of Nursing at Kaohsiung Medical University in Taiwan. Women in the study who listened to pre-recorded CDs of soothing music for 30 minutes daily showed significant reductions in stress, anxiety and depression, said researcher Chung-Hey Chen, who later moved to the National Cheng Kung University.
Good as some of these music are, to the extent they can have be used in medical researches, can we say the music of our present day artistes can or could be used for such researches? Answer that yourself.
I’ll like to sign off by reminding us that good music mixes with reality. My era boasts of artistes and a music culture that manifests as a rallying cry against poverty, oppression, apartheid, sexual violence etc. There’s a lot to write and sing about as Nigeria grapples with massive youth unemployment, terrorism, advance fee fraud, bad and insensitive leadership, kidnapping, gang violence, pipeline vandalism and a myriad of social challenges.
But all we seem to hear is unbridled materialism which often leads to laziness and the ‘get rich quick syndrome’ that has held us back for decades.
