Another Look on Gratification and Philosophy

I maintain that writing needs to entertain and should educate. If it isn't entertaining, nobody will care. But while you have them hooked, you should tell them a story that has deeper thoughts in it. It gives people things to think about and it also tends to make for better stories. Sometimes, though, I question if this is right.

I have a strange relationship with music. A good song is dangerously addictive to me. There have been times where I listened to the same song on loop for 8 hours straight. Then I did it again a couple days later. For whatever reason, it was the perfect combination that it never got boring, so I had no reason to listen to anything else. A perfect song has a musical hook and meaningful lyrics. The musical aspect is difficult to explain; the best I can do is to say that the chord progression interests me. The lyrics follow similar principles to any other kind of writing.

Interesting lyrics, to me, present a thought or a belief that I have never considered before (or sparks me to further think about a thought or idea). The irony with music is that I can never understand all of the lyrics. Some stuff is clear as a bell, and other parts are muddled and incomprehensible. So for me, it's more a matter of the lyrics I hear being interesting. This is where music comes crashing down.

Eventually, if I love a given song, I will look up the lyrics to it. Shortly after that, I lose the desire to listen to the song. The lyrics in music are always pathetic, which depresses me. The words themselves are always so abstract or nonlinear that they could never stand on their own. But what's worse than that is how little there actually is. So many songs are built the same way: Intro, A section, Chorus, B section, Chorus, Instrumental Solo, Chorus. On top of the very repetitious structure, The A and B sections are also very similar, sometimes having two or three (out of four) repeating lines. All of a sudden, this four-minute song only has 10 unique lines of lyrics, none of which are particularly catchy.

What I find odd here is that music can be so popular and so addictive, yet none of their components are particularly outstanding. Somehow, the flash of putting the music and the lyrics together makes people happy, no matter how meaningless they are separately. It makes me wonder if philosophy matters at all. Maybe all we need is enough mindless gratification.

I certainly hope that's not the case. I like to think and I like making other people think. I know that even I appreciate mindless gratification, so I'm not even any better than others. I just know that I need more than that to survive. Maybe other people are the same way and want a little philosophy in their entertainment, too.