Music is the highest drug you can take. Sure you've heard all sorts of people who insist that they "get their best high off of LIFE" say foolish-sounding things like this, but c'mon and hear me out. Can it get you higher than heroin? I don't know, with a hundred percent surety, because I've never taken heroin. But what heroin does is give you a chemical shortcut to happiness. It activates you, it activates you super hard, but in one direction, no?
Sit at the symphony and hear dozens or even over a hundred people belting out their full capacity, channeling their concentrated souls through their instruments. That isn't one direction, that's a thousand bloody directions all coming at you at once. You aren't taking one chemical and shooting it into your arm or the space twixt your toes, you're plugging your head and your crotch and your heart into the souls of a whole stage full of people, and not just them but the artisans before them who crafted those instruments too.
Music is a totally insane thing. There's not a reason it should "work." The sounds that any man makes are dreamt of in the space of pure originality in that person's mind ergo
necessarily completely foreign to the experiences of the listener, yet the listener doesn't find them offensive, or revolting, or even unusual (unless of course that's a compliment): they find them pleasant, reaffirming, resonant, relatable, and even comforting. The fact that we all group around certain songs can't be irrelevant to the fundamentals of human nature, and by extension the universe (I understand if you see that as a dramatic leap, which today it surely is. But of course every thing is a variation on the same "things," and the same could be said for vibrations, so it isn't a tremendous stretch to say music is the most extreme & advanced articulation of the fundamental universe we yet have). The facts that certain songs sound excellent in every genre, or that metalheads can be swayed by electronic freaks, and that classical die-hards can be thrilled by hip-hop compositions, are not trivial.
In that way, music is a critical interaction twixt people much the way that writing-&-reading is...except far more fundamental. Where writing requires a person to take the interwoven complexity of his thoughts and emotions and force them to condescend to the level of language only to be re-interpreted up an identical but reversed pathway through the reader, music bypasses all these steps completely: a musician & a listener are a pure, evolved, human sense communicating with another human sense. It's one [or many] people -- temporary collections of energy, vibrations -- creating vibrations to be received by other people, other vibrating collections of energy. It is surely among the purest forms of one mind talking to and actually understanding another outside of
literally Being John Malkovich, that is to say experiencing not just a person's physical sensations but the entire worldview that informs their 'soul,' if I may take and use such an overly-dramatic and over-employed word (for I feel here, now, it is necessary).
So to get back to the point, music may just be the highest drug we can take (on our own, at least. To steal much popular culture before me, "the most fun you can have with your clothes on."). With music we aren't just accelerating our mind's chemicals with one [admittedly complex] chemical that we smoke or snort or shoot or swallow. We are intoxicating ourselves with the minds of others, with the exorbitantly complex interactions that are going on inside our fellow man (there is a universe inside each of us). We are getting high off of
their brain chemicals, by extension their entire beings, for a body could not exist without a brain and vice-versa. Name a fan of narcotics who does not identify among their most enjoyable activities when high "listening to music." From weed, liquor, and LSD up to cocaine, barbiturate pills, and heroin, and everything in between, music remains universally enjoyable and even essential to the experience of any given drug, commonplaces like marihuana and liquor included (to say the very
least. I could include sex and Netflix on my list of narcotics if I were so inclined). The point is these are all things people do --
absolutely all of them, from the most wholesome to the most depraved -- to make their situation better, by whatever their present notion and definition of "better" is. And
all of these people include music in their plan for betterness. All of them.
In no way are we more connected with one another - even if at a distance - than though music. And that comfort that comes from connectedness is the thing for which we're all looking; it's the comfort that sells every Coke in the country, and every square of LSD too. There's some
Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom in all of us.
The
full movie Being John Malkovich appears to be available free on YouTube, at the time of this posting, leastways.
