Lately I've been revisiting my youth by filling my Android playlist with Guns N' Roses. I used to listen to a lot of GnR when I was a teen; they were among the first few bands I took an instant liking to (the other notable being Skid Row) in my adolescence, but I didn't start forming an opinion as to why they stood out. Until recently.
Music, in its basest form, exists to elicit a mood, to evoke one or more emotions. If we take a look at Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions, we can categorize a basic range of emotion which includes Joy, Sadness, Trust, Disgust, Fear, Anger, Surprise and Anticipation. Which of these emotions translates to feelings which can be lyrically expressed in music? Joy and Sadness, certainly; love and loss are common musical themes. But what if there is an absence of lyrical content in music? What is left?
I've noted that the building blocks of music are threefold: beat, groove, and melody. Defining at least one of each of these three gives you a basic song. Likewise, the absence of any one of these three may very well leave a basic song feeling empty and unfinished; the listener feels as though the song is missing something.
This topic warrants further exploration; I'll return to it in a later blog entry.
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