Songs reflect the times

I LOVE love songs. I listen to them whenever I can, but

especially when driving for hours in my out-of-town trips. Of course,

they make me feel good and the driving less tiring.

            If my skills are up to it, I sing along with my heart,

adapting their passion but converting their lyrics, with proper

modifications, of course, into a heartfelt prayer. Thus, if nothing

else happened on the road, I usually arrive at my destination still

looking good and feeling fresh and inspired.

            These days, however, I feel the need to be very restrained

in this pastime. Most of the songs I hear now, all minted in recent

years and surprisingly rating high in the charts in the so-called

developed countries, have lyrics that give me some discomfort. They

often speak of anguish, frustration, depression, of a lover spurned, a

person misunderstood and despised, etc.

            Many cuss words enter into these songs. Sexual references

too. The sentiments projected are mainly the casual, highly transitory

and inconsequential ones. The love expressed seems not to be based any

deeper than the passing instincts and passions.

            They give the impression that they are stuck in some mud

of emptiness to which they react either by wailing, lamenting and

complaining, or by some naughty if not wild and violent expressions.

            Th melody itself has become a monotonous repetition of

notes that give one the feeling that the singer is trapped in some

predicament from which he can hardly escape. It’s a repetition of

boredoem and angst, not the one usually associated with being in love.

            What is happening, I often find myself asking. Is this

just a generational thing with me, or is there something objective? I

believe that there is certainly something generational and subjective

in this issue, but I also believe that there is something objective

going on these days about which we have to be alerted.

            I believe songs reflect the temper of the times. They

somehow express the status of the culture of the people at a given

time. My suspicion is that these songs are only the product of the

years of permissiveness, secularism, unhinged liberalism that have

been fiercely afflicting many Western countries.

            These cultural viruses have a way of confining us into our

purely subjective ways. They can give us the sweet sensation of

floating freely in a sea of relativism without any absolute moorings.

God is discarded even as we make ourselves our own god. We bury

religion and unwittingly make our own version of it with us as the

main deity.

            Especially when we happen to be quite talented and

brilliant, with many ideas, initiatives, discoveries and inventions to

prop our ego, we can think that we can just depend entirely on our own

powers and throw God into the dustbin of ancient history.

            We fail to realize that no matter how gifted we are,

without God, those gifts which actually are God-given, not only have

their limitations that sooner or later we will experience, but also

will pose as a mortal danger to us.

            Many modern “love” songs, I believe, are mere symptoms of

a much graver crisis taking place in the world today.

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