What's music about?

 

At first, I thought music was important, and power was inherent within it - but after all these years, I think that might be nonsense. My understanding of chaos theory played a huge role in this - how everything dissolves into fractal chaos, yet there's a beauty and a grace within that disorder. Above all, I think music is utterly hollow until it attaches itself to us. Once that happens, it follows the fractal pattern of our lives, as they seek contextual belonging to a broader world of uncertainty.

My favourite XTC song is "Generals And Majors" - but is it because it's great? Again - I don't think so. It's not their best song; there are many others I admire more, and love more. So, why is it number one? It's all context. I love the song because I can see rows of the sleeves piled up in my local Woolworths in Devizes. I can feel how important it was for me to be connected to music and to a love of these objects. I can see how that single was an object of desire and slotted into everything else around it. The music, of course, is performed by a bunch of blokes from Swindon - it has the bucolic, West Country twang - melancholia, whistling, it feels - distant, yet close. And it's all about Cold War paranoia - I was living on the edge of Salisbury Plain at the time, and I can recall seeing low-loaders with ICBMs being driven through the streets of our village. It normalised armageddon and placed it into the bucolic little place I called home. Again, context. And those blokes from Swindon felt like me, too - outsiders - removed from the big city, slightly cast adrift. 

The power that song has is all contextual. It's power I bestowed upon the song, not power that the song had to begin with. 

I think that's what music is. It's nothing, but it's everything, so long as you can map out that personal context, and tie it to the ever-expanding fractal beauty that lies at the periphery of one's understanding. Beauty doesn't lie within; it lies on the outskirts, at the boundary where fractal lines blur and escape our power to control them.