Some people can say that music is just an entertainment, while there are many who claim that it has a deeper influence and plays a higher role in society today. Give two views on this and your opinion.
Some people can say that music is just an entertainment, while there are many who claim that it has a deeper influence and plays a higher role in society today. Give two views on this and your opinion.
Music has a unique place in both human experience and our social life that is almost impossible to categorically define — it is arguably the oldest and most universal entertainment source, but as thoroughly documented influences on psychology, culture, social cohesion, and political consciousness demonstrate, music can be far more than enjoyment. Exploring both views of music closely, I think the perspective that music only represents entertainment underestimates the case of its social significance to a great extent, while correctly identifies something real and significant about what is probably the most basic and universal functional role ascribed to all music.
Perhaps the most concrete and universal aspect of musical experience makes the case for considering music as entertainment above all. To the vast majority of listeners (in at least most cultural contexts), music primarily serves as a source of pleasure — it is a means to produce emotional enjoyment, relaxation, social milieu, and specific physical sensations such as the auditory gratification from particular rhythms or certain melodic patterns which appear to be among the most reliable mood-enhancing stimuli an organism can find outside of drugs. And this is based on the true and proven phenomenon that people will pay hundreds of billions of dollars per year via streaming, live show performance, and merch purchases to consume music as an entertainment product at a hugely commercial scale across the global music marketplace. This is not to pass off the commodification of popular music as a superficial or inadequate appreciation of what it represents in terms of art, but rather, to acknowledge the very real and important human requirement for pleasure and the important cultural role that entertainment has come to serve.
Additionally, the line between entertainment and higher cultural functions is blurrier than this question frames it. A film score capable of bringing an audience to tears needs to be both entertainment and honest-to-goodness emotional art of true impact. A pop song that defines the spirit of a given moment is both packaged entertainment and an artifact of cultural memory. The entertainment category itself is not trivial, and what primarily entertains music can also do things of enduring cultural importance.
In fact, the case for music as a broader social force is immense, well-supported and transcends mean-spirited entertainment. Psychological research repeatedly shows that music reliably and validly creates mood, alters cognitive performance, affects pain perceptual qualities, and fosters social bonding in clinically meaningful ways. The power of music to access and stimulate parts of the brain that words and visuals cannot, has been documented in the literature as benefits for patients with neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease or a n acquired Brain Injury (ABI). The therapeutic applications are indication enough that music touches human neurology at their most foundational level, beyond just recreation.
The utility of music as a vehicle for social cohesion has long been acknowledged in human cultures throughout recorded history. Building community through musicCommunal musical practices — whether when rehearsing a church choir, singing along in stadiums to national anthems or while participating with strangers (neighbors, coworkers and the like) during soccer matches or Olympic games — help individuals develop similar emotional states, reinforce group identity and ultimately bond despite individual differences. The ability of music to synchronise emotional states across groups of people is the basis for a hypothesis put forward in evolutionary psychology research that it was an important adaptive characteristic on our path to cooperative human beings, and something supported by casual observation of the social effects of music: it’s speculative in its evolutionary component, but not in what we observe.
The evidence of music as more than entertainment is perhaps no where so dramatically embodied than in the link between political consciousness, social change and musical expression. On the one hand, the civil rights movement, anti-war protests, anti-apartheid activism and numerous other social movements were genuinely played by specific works (and traditions) of music that can galvanise collective emotion and hold morale up during a period when many voices have sounded from control to despondency; musical forms through which messages of resistance and support in times of conflict possess a power that no verbal on intellectual format could match. Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Victor Jara and Fela Kuti were artists turned social actors whose musical work helped to move the course of history forward.
I think music is seen most accurately as a cultural phenomenon whose entertainment value is real and important but only the outer layer of a much deeper, far more complex human experience. The therapeutic, psychological, social and political aspects all combined show that music is much more fundamental to human life and society than the entertainment classification can cover.
Finally, although the entertainment role of music is real, universal, and worthy of respect in itself, the evidence for its broader significance—psychological, sociological, political—is convincing and diverse enough to warrant consideration beyond what might be explicable on account of mere entertainment.