Bitterness in Music
Written January 13, 2004

I love bitter songs. While most music nowadays primarily focuses on the more primeval and fundamental emotions of anger or sorrow, every once in a while a tune will manage to touch on the perfect subtlety of bitterness. I have a peculiar admiration for songcrafters who manage to grasp that elusive formula of helplessness, harbored frustration and explosive cynicism. I’m sure that most people who hear these particular songs don’t think twice about them, and they certainly have no idea that they’re hearing something that stands out so prominently to me.

One of the things that continually amazes me about music is that the listener can make the whole experience as meaningful or as shallow as they want. You can treat a song like poetry, reverentially poring over every line of lyrics in search of some kind of innate meaning. You can use music to recall past events, with ‘classic’ albums like the Offspring’s Smash and Live’s Throwing Copper immediately conjuring up images of lame school dances and awkward, fumbling sexual moments (man, those bras were hard to unhook back in the day). You can passively listen to whatever the radio and MTV want you to hear, limiting your musical experience to whatever’s popular for the time being.

And that’s fine. Some people don’t want the level of depth and involvement that music can potentially offer, getting their emotional kicks elsewhere. If you see tunes solely as a source for providing beats so you can dance and potentially grind your crotch into someone’s leg, then chances are that depth isn’t the first thing on your mind and mainstream hits should serve you just fine.

But sometimes I worry about the kids who don’t know any better. Over the break, I happened to watch a MuchMusic interview with Evanescence front-woman Amy Lee. During the audience interaction portion of the show, a young girl began talking about how the smash hit “Bring Me To Life” had touched her, awkwardly trying to relate the band’s hugest song to her life with a kind of desperation that bothered me. It almost seemed as though this girl was trying to clumsily cram her romantic experience into the mould of the song’s lyrics, despite the fact that they barely appeared to be related at all.

At first I was baffled. Several hours later I was hit with the revelation that perhaps she was trying to identify with the song in this way because she had no alternative – because she was restricted to the limited sphere of popular music which glaringly failed to offer the kind of emotional reassurance and depth that she so obviously craved. I see this as a problem in a great majority of the pop music which the youth so eagerly consume. As a general rule, pop songs cover a very limited range of emotion (anger, lust, generic unhappiness) and offer little to the dreamers and poets, the kids who are firmly locked into ‘cool’ popular culture but constantly seek depth in their music.

I’m not propagating a massive rehauling of popular music. Nor am I suggesting that anyone is a helpless victim of an evil mass society – with effort, it’s easy enough to find music which appeals to your specific needs with the advent of widespread file-sharing. It just seems wrong to me that the inexperienced, pop-culturized youth of today may have to unknowingly settle for the blind rage of Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff” when many of them are really looking for something more precise, subtle and refined to identify with. Possibly something with a taste of bitterness?

This was filler for the Entertainment section, pure and simple. I can't remember much about why I selected this topic (maybe I like bitter music?) but I'm sure there was some kind of earth shattering logic involved. Really.