Day 6  of the Blogging Challenge is: Your Views on Mainstream Music

I love to sing, I like to dance and listen to music, and I’m going to try to not be one of those grannies that complains about everything “The kids are listening to these days”. Try being the operative word. 🙂

In my opinion, music is a gateway drug. Really. It’s a channel for relaxing inhibitions (cue genre referred to as Baby Making Music etc). I think that there is a lot of pollution, and danger, in what we listen to today under the guise of music. I find that when I feel low and I listen to a certain artist or genre or just a song, it has the capacity to draw me even further into depression, while a different one evokes a new emotion or takes me to a different place mentally. So music is clearly powerful. And insidious. And an insidious yet potent subject is very dangerous because it can possess and influence with little awareness from the party in its throes. And this is the same for almost all forms of entertainment.

A while ago I peeked into the comment section on the Instagram page of (pastor) Heather Linsdey, and some mothers were talking about the effect of certain television programs on their children. They found that their children were imitating actions on the TV, or listening far more closely to the directions of the cartoon characters than their parents’. Which is neither strange nor new… but is dangerous. And music has the same sort of effect.

The trouble with our world is that we expect that if the devil were to arrive, he’d come with chariots flaming, there’d be a drop in temperature, the sudden chill in the air would of course be followed by an immediate raising of our hackles as we suddenly see our nightmares and greatest fears flash before our eyes.

Because presence of evil.

Alas, that is not the case. The god of hell is a gentleman. Suave and savvy, if he is to influence the world with his potency then he will come gently, perhaps even through the strumming strands of a sweet guitar, the staccato beat of a vibrant drum accompanied by the waning strains of a soft piano serenading us with words encouraging a plethora of sin: fornication, self-aggrandizement, selfishness, greed…

Because if the self-styled prince of darkness were to stand on our street corners telling us to follow evil, we’d ignore him.

But give us a beat…now tell us one more time….

Photo Credit: Andrea Iyamah