What Came First, The Music or The Misery?

I love ‘High Fidelity’, it’s an amazing book in which the adaptation is one of few where the transformation between cultures and cities works and even though the book is a larger sense than the film as well as in a critics opinion as in its content, John Cusack characterization of the main figure Rob Gordon is really good and Jack Black with Todd Lousio totally makes the character generation perfect. But what High Fidelity deals with is one of the most interesting issues. The issue on the effects of popular music and how it controls us. In the film Rob asks the audience or himself (it’s an interpretation issue) about the differences in the question; ‘What came first, the music or the misery?’.

It’s a really interesting issue because if we take at our selves we have to admit that music is a ‘mood’ setter, it can make decisions for us a somewhat decide our emotional position. Take a break up for instant. We are dumped, in our saddest desperation we listen to deep music, with a sad mood in it. There is actually ‘Break Up Songs’ out there. Just take Ani DiFranco’s ‘You Had Time’ or Tom Petty’s ‘Free Fallin’ ’. After a while, we are still sad, it can be minutes, hours or maybe days. Is the music the factor that stirs our rebuilding process or is it just a time requiring process?


Rob keeps on saying ‘People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture violence will take them over. Nobody ever worries about their kids listening to thousands...of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss’. And this is of course true, or in many cases it is like this, our parents have listened to music themselves so a kid listening to Nazareth’s ‘Love Hurts’ is just a flash back from their time, they seem so much more concerned of the 'out-of-the-universe' gangster rap that was on just 10 years ago.

Our parents like us doesn’t really realize that in emotional means, music, sad music has an even greater effect on us than most art forms, because it sets tensions and it helps us get through terrible days just as it helps us in setbacks or in times of inspiration. It’s both motivating and ‘de’-motivating if you can call it that.

Rob close with the question ‘Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable ‘Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?’ The answer is through my personal study that it’s a little bit of both. We become miserable though music, if we want to be miserable. Also it decides our tensions and can help us be happy, just that we choose to put on a sad song in the case of misery and this proves the point that music is a powerful medium and that we all love it, just in different shapes and different portions.

To all of your readers, have a great 

Saturday Morning, Day and Evening.