Should there be emotion in music? asks Malcolm.
There are some fools about who will tell you that real music is all about that time you felt really fucked up and had to listen to the same album thirty-six times a day whilst continually moaning to your friends and regarding razor blades with a melodramatically 'unhinged' eye. This is all very well for the mini-Reznors, the teeny-Richies and the kiddy-Kurdts amongst you, but some others of you may consider that music is, after all, music, and that it should have some quality which makes it stand up and say "I am brilliant" outside your little world. After all, the sound of birds tweeting might take on a profoundly personal meaning to you one day, but this would hardly justify you staging huge gigs in the park and telling the bemused audience "just listen, man! It's about Marjory and that time when I was a kid, don't you see?" On the other hand, the sound of birds tweeting might make quite a lively ambient album, but I'll leave Elliott and Mark to argue that one away.
The point, the whereabouts of which you might well have been questioning, is that music is an art, not an emotional side-product. Tunes, songs, tracks, whatever: they are objects made of sound long before they reach your ears. But of course, I hear the kids shout, the artist makes them, and puts all their emotion inside. Hmm. Well, this may be partially the case with a vocal track, but it displays more than a slight mythologising tendency if it is applied to instrumental music. Of course, part of the challenge for a musician is to make something sound as if it possesses human emotions, for example when Jimi Hendrix makes his guitar talk. But think about this: would Jimi ever have written half of the material he did if the electric guitar had never been invented? We take so much for granted, but the truth is that instruments do a lot of our thinking for us, just like words do. There isn't often a direct line between feeling and finished music. You could easily write a blues tune one day when you weren't even mildly dischuffed with life.
Mind you, there are many who will let you argue until you are blue in the face about this, and then say 'well, I feel about it that way anyway.' Fair enough. But when this argument is applied as an absolute, a base for criticising music, then you open the door to luddites talking about how 'dance music's got no soul, man.' Why not listen to music because it makes you think? What if music could be enjoyable to listen to, while keeping you at a certain distance? Well, there is plenty of it around. When you treat jazz rather than blues as root for modern music, it's really not so pretentious to think that a musician might come up with something that makes you think, whether it be about the weird movement of the music itself, or about landscape, or about politics. (Dirty word! Dirty word!) Check out a Meat Beat Manifesto album, 'Dubnobasswithmyheadman' by Underworld, 'Timeless' by Goldie, or even 'Muse Sick n Hour Mess Age' by Public Enemy. Free your ears: your mind will follow...