“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”

-Bob Marley

I like sad music. Sometimes I love it. Many of my favorite tunes are melancholy.

I’m listening to one of those now: Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in G Minor.

I’m also reading an interesting essay by Markham Heid:

“Why Listening to Sad Music Makes You Feel Better” 

In the essay, Heid talks about the “science behind the coping benefits of melancholy art.”

Studies on what some researchers call “pleasurable sadness” suggest that different people enjoy sad art for different reasons,” he says. One reason, according to Jonna Vuoskoski, an associate professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo in Norway, is that it evokes emotions that people enjoy having, such as nostalgia, peacefulness, and wonder.

Another reason, says Heid, is that it can act as a sort of safe therapy for people that have suffered emotional hardship. He quotes Tuomas Eerola, a professor of music cognition at Durham University in the UK: “The fact that the music or art is non-interactive is actually an advantage in situations of loss and sadness since there is no judgment, no probing. An artwork or song that a person can relate to can provide comfort without the baggage of social interaction with another human being.”

Oliver Sacks put it this way in his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.Reflecting on a moment he experienced on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, he wrote:

“On my morning bike ride to Battery Park, I heard music as I approached the tip of Manhattan, and then saw and joined a silent crowd who sat gazing out to sea and listening to a young man playing Bach’s Chaconne in Don his violin. When the music ended and the crowd quietly dispersed, it was clear that the music had brought them some profound consolation, in a way that no words could ever have done.

“Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. One does not have to know anything about Dido and Aeneas to be moved by her lament for him; anyone who has ever lost someone knows what Dido is expressing. And there is, finally, a deep and mysterious paradox here, for while such music makes one experience pain and grief more intensely, it brings solace and consolation at the same time.”

This ties into a recent study by the University of South Florida on the musical preferences of people diagnosed with major depressive disorder. Contrary to what many assumed, the researchers concluded that such people do not choose sad music to intensify their negative feelings. They do it to relieve themselves from them. They report feeling “calmed” by melancholy music.

I have no doubt that listening to sad music moves people in positive ways. But despite the many studies that have been done, we still don’t know why. The explanations offered by researchers aren’t wrong, but they don’t feel like revelations. They are more like circular arguments – tautologies. Saying sad music is therapeutic isn’t any more informative than saying sad music makes you feel good.

Here’s my explanation: The most important thing we know – deep down at the bottom of our souls – is that we are temporary, that we are going to die. Everything we do to resist that terrible fact and everything we do to deny it is ultimately futile. Believe what we want about the universe and creation, our DNA  constantly informs us that one day our individual consciousness will cease to be.

Music is not only the universal language, it is the most profound language we have. It connects us not just to other people but to our inner selves. Sad music makes that connection. It helps us relax the egoistic impulse to resist the inevitable and come to peace with it.

And that is why sad music makes us feel better. It lightens the load of our denial and lets us understand that slipping into the unconscious universe may not be so terrible after all.

Want to listen to some sad music right now? Here are 19 suggestions:

* “Requiem Mass in D Minor” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

* “Sono andati?” (from La Bohème) by Giacomo Puccini

* “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen

* “Hometown Glory” by Adele

* “Nimrod” (from Enigma Variations) by Edward Elgar

* “Back to Black” by Amy Winehouse

* “May It Be” by Enya

* “Adagio for Strings” (from String Quartet, Op. 11) by Samuel Barber

* “Stay With Me” by Sam Smith

* “Adagio in G Minor” by Tomaso Albinoni

* “I Can’t See Nobody” by Nina Simone

* “Come, Sweet Death” by Johann Sebastian Bach

* “Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles

* Serenade for Strings in E Minor, Op. 20 (2^ndmovement) by Edward Elgar

* “I Will Remember You” by Sarah McLachlan

* “Dido’s Lament” (from Dido and Aeneas) by Henry Purcell

* “Candle in the Wind” by Elton John

* Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Op. 74(4^thmovement) by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

* “Famous Blue Raincoat” by Leonard Cohen

Sad Stories in an Age of Pity Porn 

 “The only thing that’s the end of the world is the end of the world.”

– Barack Obama

An acquaintance of mine, a bright guy, has created a large Internet following by what I think of as failure porn – telling stories about how he fucked up prior business relationships, lost gobs of money, and ended up in a darkened street crying.

He’s a good writer. His stories are compelling. But I’ve always wondered if he isn’t worried that this never-ending chronicle of screw-ups might diminish his credibility. Would it make his readers question the sagacity of his advice?

Apparently not. These confessionals have built him a big and loyal following. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Still, I’m skeptical of this approach.

On the one hand, it takes courage to admit to one’s mistakes and vulnerabilities. On the other hand, it can come off as an appeal for pity, which I see as a form of weakness. There is virtue in keeping a stiff upper lip.

I suppose the difference is in the intent.

When the purpose of confessing your mistakes and shortcomings is to give your audience hope, it is good. But if the purpose is solely to evoke sympathy, I don’t like it.

An example of the former:

One of the most inspiring presentations I ever heard by a fiction writer was given by Amy Tan, who, rather than give us examples of how skillful she was or how successful her novels were, read her first attempt at writing a short story. It was awful and brave and courageous. But most of all, it was kind. It gave us would-be fiction writers permission to feel that we could one day improve.

An example of the latter:

The other day, I read a blog by an up-and-coming guru complaining that his mother used to wash his mouth out with soap when he said bad words. At first, I thought he was being satiric, that he was poking fun at those overly indulgent parents that denounce such time-honored childhood sanctions. In fact, he was serious. He saw his childhood self as abused. Not only did his mother sanitize his dirty mouth, she occasionally spanked him! “I felt like I had no one to protect me,” he said. He grew up feeling “inadequate” and having occasional bouts of imposter syndrome. “It was all her fault,” he explained.

The very same day, I read an essay in the NYT Magazinetitled “I Was a Low-Income College Student. Classes Weren’t the Hard Part.”

In this mini-memoir, the author described his experience as a student at Amherst College. He was there, apparently, on a football scholarship. All his expenses were paid. But once, during school break, when most kids went home, he discovered that the cafeterias were closed. He was “expected” to pay for his own meals, he was shocked to learn. He managed to do so, he said, by working extra shifts as a “gym monitor.”

This wasn’t his first experience with “hardship,” he said. “Back home in Miami,” we knew what to do when money was tight.” They ate the 29-cent burger special at McDonald’s.

“Without that special,” he said, “I’m not sure what we would have done when the week outlasted our reserves before payday. But up at Amherst, there was no McDonald’s special, no quick fix.”

It gets worse.

As a teenager growing up in Coconut Grove, a teacher once yelled at him after he and some friends were fooling around in the parking lot. “She saw black, boisterous boys and deemed us, and me, less than,”he said. “She didn’t see my drive to succeed.” (Note to reader: I have worked in Coconut Grove. As far as I know, it’s all very posh and very artsy.)

And at Amherst, despite living in privileged circumstances for free, there was emotional trauma and financial pressure from his family. He would get calls from them about “bad news” from his old neighborhood. And sometimes they would write to ask for money.

“Neighborhoods are more than a collection of homes and shops, more than uneven sidewalks or winding roads,” he wrote. “Some communities protect us from hurt, harm, and danger. Others provide no respite at all.”

He put all that cruelty and trauma to work for him as a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaching a course he titled CREAM (Cash Rules Everything Around Me). In the class, he examines “how poverty shapes the ways in which many students make it to and through college. Admission alone, as it turns out, is not the great equalizer. Just walking through the campus gates unavoidably heightens these students’ awareness and experience of the deep inequalities around them.”

Gee…

My mother didn’t spank us. She used hairbrushes. She used them so well, we didn’t have one that still had a handle. My father didn’t use hairbrushes. He used his belt. The buckle end. The wallpaper behind my bed was shredded from it.

But I don’t talk about that because I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I don’t feel sorry for myself. I didn’t feel abused then and I don’t feel like I was abused now. I was very lucky to grow up in a family where, one time out of the 10 times I deserved a whooping, I got one.

As far as having to be a “gym monitor”(doesn’t sound too grueling) for extra money? I worked full-time all through college to pay for all my expenses, including tuition and books. I worked three jobs in graduate school. It took me a bit longer to graduate, but I did it… and with honors.

I could only wish I grew up in neighborhood as nice as Coconut Grove where a childhood trauma might consist of being yelled at by a teacher. I got my ass kicked regularly before and after school until I got tough enough to defend myself. I’ve been tied up and thrown in holes. I’ve seen friends die from overdoses and killed in war. I’ve been sexually molested. I’ve had a loaded gun put to my head by a car thief and have been shot at by cops.

As for “surviving” on McDonald’s burgers? I wish I could have been so lucky. Fast food was way above our budget. We ate B&J sandwiches for breakfast and lunch, vegetable soup for dinner, and drank powdered milk. And, yes, I wore hand-me-downs, etc., etc.

And as for helping out the family, check out “Shameless” on Showtime if you want to know how finances in our family worked.

Looking back at all that now, I’m nothing but grateful.

So please, spare me your soft-core pity porn. Unless you’ve got a hard story to tell me, speak to someone else about your oppression.