While accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, Bob Dylan reflected on his early experience with music, describing it as if he’d “been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated”. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes of uncertainty, a young Dylan found clarity and purpose through music: “Songs…are at the vital center of almost everything I do.” Even if you’re not a Minnesotan folk singer, widely considered as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, and even if your likeness hasn’t yet been replicated by Timothee Chalamet, it is almost impossible to be human and not have been life-changingly moved, in at least one moment, by music.
It is unsurprising that in this same speech accepting a prize typically reserved for prose, Dylan quoted the traditionally sung opening of Homer’s 8th-century BCE epic poem The Odyssey: “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.” There is an intrinsic human connection to music that dates back long before we could share our meticulously curated Spotify Wrapped on our Instagram stories. It is what inspired rhapsodes to spread poetic songs they had learned across the sunlit hills of Ancient Greece, Beethoven to compose his Ninth Symphony while profoundly deaf, and Queen to perform for 200,000 people in the middle of Hyde Park. This is the drive to immortalise the fleeting moments of our existence through melodies and verse. Evidently, the way we understand ourselves and the world around us is deeply shaped by song. However, it is not only that we preserve ourselves through creating melodies. It is just as intrinsic to temporality that we crystallise moments through listening to music: love, loss, joy, defiance — emotions too big to hold silently are suspended in sound.
We may not have rhapsodes, or bards, or pied pipers with flutes, but we do have YouTube. In that cataclysmic myriad of mukbangs and gym-bro video essays, vulnerable flash autobiographies are written underneath music videos, which immortalise the most important moments of our transience through music. Just as rhapsodes spread tales of unwinnable wars and prophecies and the opulent gods who acted as epic reflections of real human failures and desires, the act of commenting becomes a new form of storytelling:one that speaks, often anonymously, into a void, yet still reaches across the tidal wave of a “common” humanity with uncanny resonance. We share our memories in the hopes of immortalising a moment and ensuring its infinite existence in the minds of others between the crescendos of our favourite songs. We eulogise the greatest, most heartbreaking, moments of our life into bite-sized reflections that meet the character requirements for YouTube comment sections.
Take ‘This Must Be the Place’ by the Talking Heads, for example. While @carljonas6583 is “driving through the Welsh countryside … my girl is singing along and giving me ‘that look’… we’re holding hands,” @jstearns66 immortalises her memory against the looping rhythms and gentle synths, speaking into the void of internet ephemerality: “I have Stage 4 Cancer. When I die I want my husband to have this played for my services.” There is no way of knowing where these two deeply personal commenters are today, only that their individual relationships to the song resonate with a collective human understanding and will be remembered, time and time again, as we scroll through the comments of the Talking Heads music video. While one recalls a moment of pure, intimate joy and reminds his audience that “life’s hard. Take those moments,” the other reflects on the permanence of love against the impermanence of mortality, affirming that music, even amid profound tragedy, “speaks to…love” and is “happy, not sad.”
The star-crossed harmonies and tragic basslines of Radiohead’s ‘Exit Music for a Film’, evoke a similar response. Under the haunting drone of Thom Yorke’s melody, @Mr_Judge_Benny_Hinn tells us he “played this at [his] daughter’s funeral.” @isabellariver is “listening to this as i’m about to leave my childhood home forever. moving onto a new start. i’ll miss you.” Under a live performance of ‘Landslide’ by Fleetwood Mac, @itsmelol9467 eulogises her grandmother, explaining “this was [her] favorite song,” and @sherrychristl3362 confesses she “just ended a 41 yrs marriage and I play this song everyday to give me courage to keep moving.” While @katherinefurgeson4538’s daughter “walked down the isle [sic]” to ‘Here Comes the Sun’ by the Beatles, @bethkrantz1562 tells us she “played this for my 18 month old granddaughter, while we watched the sunrise.”
It is within these two-sentence confessions that strangers become storytellers, etching their lives into the digital margins of song. They have immortalised their lost grandmothers, daughters and marriages and rekindled the flames of their youth to remind us that music doesn’t just accompany life, it carries it.
