Music as Storytelling

I woke up at 4 this morning, after 3 hours of sleep due to immense pain all over my body. This is related to being sick because of gluten. This is the worst bout I’ve had to date and means that I’m going to be taking some more stringent moves when it comes to what I eat.

When I had woke up, I had a song stuck in my head… a song I don’t think I had heard since it was out. And now, I’m going to age myself a bit. The song I had stuck in my head was “They Reminisce Over You” by Pete Rock and CL Smooth. I have no idea why it was stuck in my head because I haven’t heard it since the early nineties.

When I saw the link in Wikipedia, it was listed as the Golden Age of Hip Hop. It’s interesting, because I’m curious what qualifies as the Golden Age of Hip Hop. Did I live through it without realizing that it was a golden age.

The more I pondered that thought with my sleep-deprived brain, the more I realized there was a lot of powerful stories being told through Hip Hop at that time.

And it made me start thinking of music as a storytelling medium. After all, a lot of ancient ballads were precisely that. Music can be a powerful way to tell a story.

Then I started to think of modern storytellers, people like Lou Reed and Bob Dylan. People who told stories that we may not have wanted to hear, bet we needed to. It made me realize that music can open eyes and give people a new point of view.

Then I think about what we largely hear now… and a part of me laments, but not for long.

We are due for another renaissance in music. Something that is that flash point that fills the world with new music, music that tells a tale. That tells a story we may not want to hear, but one that needs to be told.

I realize that a lot of the music I like to listen to tell a story. Granted I like to listen to some fluff as well. We can’t always listen to powerful stories, but I’m actually excited to see where music goes next. Who will be the next heralds to tell a story of the times we live in now?

We live in a much different world now than we did during the Golden Age of Hip Hop. We live in a time that is more about appearance than substance. In many ways it reminds me of the eighties. Out of that came some amazing changes to music. Maybe we’ll see something like it sometime soon. I think we’re overdue.