A soundtrack for my life, and probably for the lives of most other people

by Hasan Makki

December 2003

ARIZONA - Have you ever caught yourself indulged so much in something, that you are not only doing it but also watching yourself do it? Most people say it happens mostly during sports. The idea of running and sweating and coming out ahead is indeed very cinematic.

It happens to me all the time, not only during sports, but also walking down a college campus with my books, or partaking in a passionate conversation with a stranger on a plane.

I find that these are all moments we recognize in movies. And when we find ourselves engaging in what may as well be a movie moment, we literally take the directorial seat of our life, transforming the real into surreal.

Recently, this process happened to me while I was in the middle of a zealous conversation at a party. We were talking about music. Our passion in the subject matter, and the flow of the conversation was so eclectic and energetic that it made me want to enjoy it from a third person’s point of view as well. So I was basically appreciating the moment and watching myself indulged in it.

In doing so, I realized that all the enthusiasm and heartiness involved was there because the subject matter was music.

 What exactly is it about music that makes us jump our seats as we talk about it? We label people based on it, we cram ourselves in packed arenas to hear it. How can anyone even begin to quantify the particular effects of music when it is so varied and diverse an art form?

 Very few of the arts affect us and supplement our lives like music. We may appreciate many other media, but music hits our psyche deep. And for good reasons. One of which is the fact that music is mobile. Also that it works well as background to other activities. These factors, and more, set music apart from the attention demanding film medium, and the stock-still visual arts medium. Over and above that, music allows for personal interpretation and an individual connection outside the scope of an actual plot or sequence of events.

Giving the listener a chance to personalize a piece and really place a time, sentiment and location to it is something great.

This flexibility ultimately allows music to become a non-definable delight, confined to and bound by nothing. We become empty vessels to its mutability and fluidity. And a friendship therefore is born.

Music was obviously a huge part of my life. I remember my mom blasting her Tom Jones as she worked the house in the mornings. I remember Boys to Men being the theme group for my teen crush years. Then there was growing up and falling in love to the sound of Andrea Boccelli. During early college days, I cannot but remember crazy rave days too.

Looking back and beyond, I feel music symbolizes a true companion, understanding and affirmative, to my life, the soundtrack of my life and perhaps the lives of others.

This explains why we bond with our music, and use the term “my” in reference to it, implying certain possessiveness, even though we do not necessarily refer to the physical records but the idea of the genre or style.

In how personalized and individualized we make it to be, music starts to transcend the notion of delight into a form of gratification and satisfaction.

In taking the form of our “vessel” of a life, music becomes a representation of us.

At the end, I just want to say that we all are stars, and we all live. Those lives we go about are the best selling tragicomedies there ever could be.

Music is the soundtrack to these realities. So the next time you are kissing someone, listen out for the Puccini in the background. It’s there. When you hear it, that’s when you pan out the screen and take in the whole setting, with you and your lover, in the perfect Hollywood moment. Or inversely, sit back one afternoon and put in that dusty tape you have back there in the drawer, and let it take you on a rerun.

It certainly worked for me. Try it. It might work for you as well. If you have nothing to win, you will have nothing to lose.

Just remember, no matter how it goes, music will remain a personal affair related to the different lives of different individuals.

Hasan Makki is a Lebanese Computer and Communications Engineer based in Arizona, USA. He wrote this article for Alternative