Some Thoughts on Music

Growing up in a fundamentalist-ish environment, I used to think that only Christians worried about the way music influences people and I thought their only concern was in regard to songs with swear words. When I first began to read great thinkers, I was surprised at how often they wrote about music.

For example, Damon, a great sage in ancient Athens said: let me make the music of a state and I care not who makes the law.

Likewise, consider the founding of Sparta. Before Lycurgus set about changing the laws and reforming the constitution, he sent Thales the poet to sing to the people. He used music to prepare the people for his radical legal and social reforms.

Aristotle wrote that music helps us move toward different states of character. Aesthetic beauty (the way a thing looks or sounds) and moral beauty are one. According to Aristotle, if we love aesthetic beauty we will love moral beauty as well. From this it follows that listening to beautiful music will help us to live virtuous lives, while ugly, disordered music will move us towards moral depravity (to be clear, I am not talking about lyrics, just aesthetic qualities—melody, harmony, and rhythm).

But who is to judge what is aesthetically beautiful? One thinks an opera is beautiful, while another finds beauty in punk rock. Aren’t standards of beauty ultimately subjective; isn’t beauty in the eye of the beholder?

Plato discussed this. He said that democratic societies (like the one in which he lived and the one in which we live) train us to love equality. From this it follows that we hate it when others try to tell us that something is better or worse. People with so-called refined tastes claim there are some works of art superior to those that the masses enjoy and that they have the ability to recognize those superior works. This amounts to an explicit rejection of equality, so democracies tend to reject claims regarding the objective merits of art and instead allow for subjective judgments.

What is so harmful with people making their own individual judgements on works of art?

According to Plato, when we relativize aesthetic standards, we often make moral standards relative as well. For example, if there is no objective truth as to what music is the best, maybe there is no objective truth as to what course of action is the best either.

Consider, how individuals judge whether or not a song is good. We judge it based on whether or not we like it, on whether or not it makes us feel good or happy. If we consider a song aesthetically good based on how it makes us feel, then maybe an act is morally good based on how it makes us feel. In both cases we take something outside of ourselves, and instead of applying objective, external criteria to the thing, we judge it based on how we experience it. In both cases we reduce what is good to what we like.

While I don’t think it is possible to prove that allowing subjective assessments of art leads to the subjectivizing of morality, we should be careful about assuming that art cannot be objectively evaluated. We should also recognize that many wise people before us have believed that musical qualities, apart from lyrics, influence us profoundly and we should thereby be discerning in what we listen to

What about the influence of lyrics?

I remember being very young at church and reading a tract about heavy metal. The tract associated heavy metal with hard drugs and suicide and warned Christians against listening to heavy metal. One of the bands that the article mentioned by name was Led Zeppelin. I remember thinking to myself, ‘well, this article can’t be completely true, because my dad listens to Led Zeppelin, that’s actually his favorite band, and he doesn’t do heroin and he hasn’t committed suicide.’ I came to the conclusion that the tract was bogus and that music doesn’t influence people like that.

Likewise, when I was told I should not listen to music with swearing because that would lead me to swear, I used to think, ‘then I guess I am not supposed to spend time with my relatives, because they swear more than any music I am listening to.’

In short, in response to these simplistic arguments, in response to the ways others misunderstood the influence of music, I made a corresponding error: I assumed that music had no influence.

When you are listening to music, how often do you think to yourself: ‘I am not sure if that is an accurate premise.’ ‘Does that conclusion logically follow?’ ‘Is that really a valid syllogism?’ I am sure that few of us ever have those thoughts because listening to music is not a rational endeavor. For better or for worse, music bypasses our rational faculties. And that is what makes it so powerful.

The music we listen to assumes things about the world, assumes things about the nature of reality. When we listen to music, we are hearing over and over, and probably repeating to ourselves time and again, things about the nature of the world.

For example, consider these lyrics from the song “I Believe in Symmetry” by Bright Eyes.¹

An argument for consciousness
The instinct of the blind insect
Who makes love to the flowerbed
And dies in the first freeze
Oh, I want to learn such simple things
No politics, no history
So what I want and what I need
Can finally be the same

When we hear this song, few of us think: Schopenhauer! But this is straight out of Schopenhauer—a 19^th century German pessimist that brought Buddhist thought to the West. He thought unrequited desires overwhelm us with pain. In response to this he taught that we need to mystically join the one world spirit (or will) and let it act through us.

When we walk into a record store we don’t expect to get philosophy and religious theory, but that is often what we get.

Plausibility Structures

Songs often assume things about reality and we often unknowingly and uncritically accept those assumptions. Imperceptibly over time these assumptions build things called plausibility structures in our minds. Plausibility structures are patterns of thought within our minds that dictate whether or not we will believe something is plausible (or possible). They dictate not only what we do believe, but what we will be able to come to believe.

For example, I don’t believe in aliens. If someone told me they saw an alien, I would not believe them. Instead, I would assume they were confused, without their glasses, deceived, or on drugs. Likewise, if I thought I saw a UFO I would think I must have been confused, deceived, or even drugged—I wouldn’t believe my eyes because the possibility that I was confused or saw something unclearly is more plausible to me than the possibility that aliens exist.

This is a funny example, but our plausibility structures can have significant consequences. For example, if I think Christianity is boring and my worst fear is boredom (which is the case for many Americans) I won’t give it a chance.²

In these two examples I can have reasons for my beliefs. They may not be good or true reasons, but there are reasons—when asked why I don’t believe in aliens or why I think Christianity is boring, I can explain where those beliefs come from. But what happens when plausibility structures are formed by non-rational things?

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When plausibility structures are formed by non-rational things, like music, we come to believe something, or we fail to believe in something, without knowing why or how we came to our decision.

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Music isn’t the only thing that creates plausibility structures, but when it does, the structures it creates have no rational basis. To put it another way, music doesn’t connect so much with our minds as with our emotions. It forms and shapes our feelings. And because we make decisions primarily based off of our feelings, music has a tremendous impact upon us.

So, for example, I talk to a lot of people, even Christians, who say things like, why is it a big deal if people live together before they are married? When I follow up and ask them what they mean by that, they say, ‘well, they aren’t hurting anybody, so what’s the big deal?’ To which I respond, ‘where did you get the idea that the basis of morality is whether or not something hurts someone?’ You see, they have an active philosophy at work, but they don’t know why they believe what they do, and they don’t know where their beliefs came from.³ They feel strongly, and I write, feel, and not think, because they did not rationally come to their opinion—they simply feel strongly that something is right or wrong. If it hurts someone it is immoral and it is moral so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone.⁴

Assuming that something is morally right insofar as it does not hurt someone will make one incapable of understanding or accepting large chunks of Biblical morality. Think about it—many things that God prohibits do not seem like they hurt anyone. If harm is the standard of morality and God prohibits things that do not seem to harm us, then God’s commands are arbitrary and unjust. Why would a good and wise God make arbitrary commandments? Either God didn’t really command those things or God isn’t wise and good. At that point one has two choices. (1) One can throw away biblical morality or (2) throw away God. I think a lot of Christians are in the former position. They claim to believe in God, but they don’t really take His commands seriously. When push comes to shove, they trust themselves and not God, and they do what they want to do. That is why Christians’ rates of pornography use, premarital sex, divorce, etc. are very similar to those outside of the church. We believe in God, but we don’t take Him seriously. And we don’t take God seriously because our plausibility structures don’t allow us to.

I have heard people try to take this idea—that something is only wrong if it hurts someone—and tie it into Christianity. They say, in effect, your sin hurts God so you shouldn’t sin. I remember being told as a kid, ‘don’t do that, you’ll make baby Jesus cry.’⁵ But this is false. As if the actions of finite creatures have the power to hurt the uncreated, infinite, and eternal God!⁶ God is above us and our sins and that is why He can save us from them. God doesn’t need our obedience. God doesn’t need us. It was not from boredom or need that He created humanity; God created us out of love. The pagan gods needed the obedience and sacrifices of their people. God does not. We have a God that does not take, but rather gives to us. Because God does not need our obedience, the commands He gives us are for our sake, not His. They are not arbitrary or unjust. God knows what is best for us. He knows how He made us and understands us better than we understand ourselves. He gives us commands to keep us from pain and harm—from harming ourselves and harming each other. We often do not recognize how our sin will bring about harm at the time we are tempted to commit a sin. That is where faith comes in. We have to believe that God is good and that He knows what is best for us. Trusting in God’s goodness and remembering that he knows what is best for us give us confidence to resist sin and trust Him.

What does music promote as good, true, and beautiful?

Plato said the most dangerous type of music is that which implies that a man can be happy (or blessed) while being unjust and that a just man could ever be unhappy (or wretched).⁷ Plato was very worried about music that glorified what was unjust. In fact, in his most famous dialogue, The Republic, he said that he would do everything except put a person to death for making music that promoted what was unjust or evil. He would exile them, he would put them in prison, he would confiscate their property, all because he believed that this was an incredibly destructive thing to do to.

Why was he so worried about music that glorified evil? Because music creates powerful plausibility structures. If you think you can be happy while living wickedly you are going to act quite differently than if you think that all wickedness leads ultimately to misery and destruction.

Are there any songs today of the type that Plato worried about? Are there any songs that teach that one can be happy living in sin? I am sure most readers can think of more than I can.⁸ Katy Perry has a song ‘this Friday night’ or ‘that Friday night’ or something like that, that I seem to hear every time I get groceries. Here are a few lines:

Last Friday night
Yeah we danced on tabletops
And we took too many shots
Think we kissed but I forgot

Last Friday night
Yeah we maxed our credit cards
And got kicked out of the bar
So we hit the boulevard

Last Friday night
We went streaking in the park
Skinny dipping in the dark
Then had a menage a trios

Last Friday night
Yeah I think we broke the law
Always say we’re gonna stop-op
ooh-ohh

This Friday night
Do it all again
This Friday night
Do it all again

Think of all the sins that this song glorifies: drunkenness, sexual immorality, rebellion, monetary waste, etc. Perry makes light of sin and makes it sound pleasurable.

Now can this song force anyone to sin? Of course not. Its effect will be much more subtle. Consider this: have you ever felt despondent and discontent? Like, you aren’t happy, but you just don’t know why? You feel like there is something out there that you are missing out on and that you would be happy if you could just have it? Perhaps you’ve even thought that Christianity is responsible for your boredom and listlessness. If only God didn’t have all these burdensome and pesky commands, then you could have fun. We all have these feelings, but I think it is music, specifically music that glorifies sin, that exacerbates those feelings. Think about it. How can you hear (and repeat to yourself) time and again that happiness is found in sin without it affecting you? In the back of your mind, somewhere subconsciously, you can come to believe that the reason you are unhappy is because you aren’t engaging in activities that you know to be wrong. This creates a lot of frustration and leads us to blame God, who commands us not to do things we want to do.

How do we decide what type of music we should listen to?

As a baseline, I would highly advise against listening to music that glorifies sin. Does it follow that we should not listen to anything that deals with dark or sinful things? I don’t think so. While I would not listen to music that glorifies evil, there can be value in music that discusses bad things to expose their badness. For example, consider “(Antichrist Television Blues)” by Arcade Fire.

I don’t wanna work in a building downtown,
I don’t wanna work in a building downtown,
Parking their cars in the underground,
Their voices when they scream, they make no sound.
I wanna see the cities rust
and the trouble makers riding on the back of the bus

Dear God, I’m a good Christian man,
In your glory, I know you understand,
That you gotta work hard and you gotta get paid,
My girl’s 13 but she don’t act her age.
She can sing like a bird in a cage,
Oh Lord, if you could see her when she’s up on that stage!

You know that I’m a God fearing man,
You know that I’m a God fearing man,
But I just gotta know if its part of your plan
To seat my daughters there by your right hand
I know that you’ll do what is right, Lord.
For they are the lanterns, and you are the light.

This is song written about Joe Simpson, the father of Jessica and Ashlee Simpson.⁹ Joe Simpson is a self-professed Christian, who in the song is praying to God to help his daughter become famous so he won’t have to work anymore. The author of the song thinks that Joe Simpson is a hypocrite, a Christian in name only, that was willing to sell out his morals and children for money.

In short, the song is about the manipulation of religion to justify the exploitation of children. The song talks about something negative, but in order to shed light on and condemn it.

And I think Arcade Fire is right about this particular case. Years ago I remember seeing a reality TV show with Ashlee Simpson on it; I was flipping through the channels and I saw the last 30 or 40 seconds of the show. On it Ashlee was talking with some friends and the conversation was completely depraved. I remember thinking to myself, ‘I can’t believe they can talk like this on television;’ it really surprised me. As I was watching this, I also thought, ‘I wonder what her parents think?’ I knew that her dad was a pastor and I remember thinking that this has just got to break his heart, to see his daughter on television acting like this . . . how humiliating! how appalling! And as I was thinking about this the credits began to roll. The first credit that popped up said—producer: Joe Simpson.¹⁰

But what about songs without any message? How can you judge a song without a message?

I would argue that most songs have a message, though that message may be subtle and hard to discover. Consider the following lines from “Title and Registration” by Death Cab for Cutie:

There’s no blame for how our love did slowly fade
And now that it’s gone it’s like it wasn’t there at all

What metaphysical assumptions does this chorus contain? What is it asserting about the nature of reality? It contains some assumptions, they are not immediately clear.

After I broke up with a girl she posted lyrics from this song on her Facebook page. She thought they were just so profound, and that they explained perfectly how we ended up where we did. I now realize that this is not profound at all. There was blame as to how our love did slowly fade, namely, me. I broke up with her because I was bored. I was selfish and I wanted a more exciting relationship. I was insecure, and she was not interesting because she liked me already, which meant I needed a new girlfriend. Our love, and it is a stretch to call it that, was a choice. For love is a choice.¹¹ But this song claims that love is something that just comes to you and leaves you and there is nothing you can do about it. It might hurt, but that’s just the nature of love.

Or consider “Falling Slowly” by The Swell Season:

I don’t know you, but I want you
All the more for that
Words fall through me and always fool me
And I can’t react

And games that never amount
To more than they’re meant
Will play themselves out

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time
Raise your hopeful voice you have a choice
You’ve made it now

What does this song claim about love? It claims that it is something immediate and that it can save you. Now is that true?

Well, yes and no. Can a mere warm feeling toward someone change their life? No, it can’t. But aren’t we saved by God’s love? Yes, but God’s love is not a transient feeling. It was God acting upon His love that saved us. Think about John 3:16. It does not say ‘God so loved the world that everyone that believes in Him will receive enteral life.’ No, it says that because God so loved the world He sent His son and made a way for us to receive eternal life.

True love is not passive. True love impacts everything—most of all our choices. True love sacrifices itself in order to bring about good in the life of the beloved. That is what God did. He loved us, so at a great cost to Himself He made a way for us to have life everlasting.

Love is not a powerful thing in and of itself. It is not some mystical or spiritual force that has existence or being independent of lover and beloved. Love is only powerful in what it leads us to do. But if we divinize human love, as this song does, and if we think romantic feelings alone have the power to change us and give us life, we will blind ourselves to the true nature of love and the True Life that God’s Love has brought us.

Let me end by considering a Christian song, “The Secret of the Easy Yoke” by Pedro the Lion:

The devoted were wearing bracelets
To remind them why they came
Some concrete motivation
When the abstract could not do the same
But if all that’s left is duty
I’m falling on my sword
At least then I would not serve
An unseen distant lord

If this is only a test
I hope that I’m passing
Cause I’m losing steam
And I still want to trust you

Peace be still

In this song the singer expresses doubt about God, but ultimately comes back to God. It reads a bit like a Psalm. The problem with it is that its author bases his return to faith on experience. He’s falling away from God, but in the end God returns and says to him: “peace be still”. But if that is the basis of faith, then what happens when it seems like God is not there? What happens when God’s elusiveness is experienced or perceived as absence? If a person’s faith is based on experiencing God, then will not that person reject their faith when that experience changes? Something like that seems to have happened to David Bazan, the author of the song above. He thought that God wasn’t there, he attempted to reach out to God, God didn’t reply, and years after writing that song he walked away from the faith.¹²

If we listen to feeling-centered Christian music, we can be tempted to make our feelings about God, as opposed to God Himself, the center and source of our faith. Our faith cannot be grounded in our feelings and thrive. To reappropriate Martin Luther, feelings are the devil’s whore. They will always deceive us, we can never trust them, and we can never remember them accurately. That is why God revealed Himself to us from the outside. That is why He gave us an objective and universal revelation to hold on to when our feelings point us elsewhere. Because they do. Our feelings are always changing and as a result they are not always in line with the truth.

Consider the following example from Martin Luther. Imagine what it was like for the disciples of Jesus on the first Good Friday. They had given up everything to follow Jesus; their whole reason for living centered on Him. He seemed to have the answers to all their questions. Then, in front of their eyes, He was taken from them, humiliated, tortured, and publicly executed. At this moment God was experienced as being absent. No one experienced God as being present on that occasion. In Matthew 27:46 Jesus Himself declared, “My god, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But this demonstrates how unreliable experience and feelings can be as guides to the presence of God! Those around the cross did not experience the presence of God—so they concluded that God was absent from the scene. The resurrection overturned their judgment: God was present, but in a hidden manner that experience mistook for absence.

God’s revelation as laid out in the Bible must interpret our feelings, even to the point of contradicting them when they are misleading.

Conclusion

Music does influence us. It assumes things about the nature of reality. Because music is a non-rational mode of communication we often unknowing accept these assumptions. But when we do, these assumptions create plausibility structures that significantly impact our ability to receive truth and reject falsehood.

My purpose in writing this article is to assert that we cannot remain ignorant to the ways in which music influences us. We have to analyze what we are listening to. Though messages are often subtle, we need to be aware of what music is assuming about reality, about God, and about our humanity. We need to take what we are hearing and compare it with what God has revealed to us in the Bible.

I would encourage everyone who reads this to ask themselves: what type of person do I want to be? And then listen to music that furthers that pursuit.

1. Sorry, I am totally going to date myself with these examples.

2. How do I change this plausibility structure? Well, do you think one exciting Christian will change that? No, I’ll explain it away. Likewise, even if I meet a few I’ll think ‘they must not really take their faith seriously’ or something like that. It is going to take a lot of exciting, legitimate Christians for me to question this belief of mine.

3. It came from J. S. Mill.

4. I can’t fully develop this here without getting way off track, but that isn’t a rationally defensible position, the main reason being that it would require omniscience (complete and perfect knowledge), which none of us have, to determine whether or not something will hurt someone.

5. It may not have been these exact words, but that was the sentiment.

6. God grieves over our sin, but that is different than it doing harm to Him.

7. And by happy/blessed he meant something like what we mean by joy.

8. I just don’t have the stomach to read lyrics by, let alone listen to, Kesha or Sabrina Carpenter or whoever is currently in vogue.

9. The original working title of the song was “Joe Simpson (Antichrist Television Blues)”.

10. We don’t have cable television or any streaming service and I don’t feel like I am missing out on anything. Ever.

11. Technically love is a virtue—habituated good actions grounded in faith, empowered by the Spirit in agreement with sanctified thoughts, emotions, the will, etc. But it starts with a choice to transcend one’s feelings.

12. It also seems like he could not accept God’s teaching on sexual ethics, particularly as they apply to same-sex attracted individuals.