Music and emotional resonance

Music is an important influence on people, especially when they are young. It is one of the significant social cues from which men receive the misinformation that impairs their socio-sexual development and sends them on the slow dry train to gammatude. I was thinking about this the other day as a song from the BackStreet Boys came up on the vehicle's iPod mix while I was driving home from the gym.

The choral lyric purports to be from a boy about his feelings concerning a girl.

I don't care who you are
Where you're from
What you did
As long as you love me
Who you are
Where you're from
Don't care what you did
As long as you love me

Now, this does not sound as if it is in any accordance with the relationship realities of Game. As we know, men care very deeply about what a woman did before, so much so that most men will refuse to involve themselves with women on more than a very short-term basis if she has too much experience. What tends to be forgotten here is that although the Backstreet Boys are male, their audience is not. While the common perception is that they are singing to their audience, the emotional reality is that they are singing on behalf of their audience. It may sound like a minor distinction, but the difference actually produces tremendous confusion among men who see what appears to move women and then misapply that information in order to reach exactly the wrong conclusion.

What emotionally moves us is what speaks for us more eloquently than we can speak for ourselves. And therefore, music that we find emotionally compelling can tell others a great deal about our inner selves. For example, once you know that two of the songs I find to be most emotionally resonant are "Do You Hear the People Sing" and "Killing in the Name Of", it doesn't take a genius to figure out that my political commentary is likely to be inclined towards the iconoclastic.

The significant aspect of the emotional resonance of a song isn't the sex of the performer, but rather, its emotional theme. The man who is moved by Fantine isn't so much moved by her sad story and failed dream, but by the way the song reminds him of his own, just as the woman who is moved by Linkin Park is probably one who would really like her partner to just shut up for once and stop bossing her around. This means that a woman who finds the Backstreet Boys' song to be emotionally compelling isn't attracted to a man who will love her unconditionally regardless of her past, she is instead a woman inclined to be attracted to a man regardless of his.

Once you know what music or other forms of entertainment cause a woman to cry or otherwise exhibit signs of strong emotional resonance, you can derive a tremendous amount of useful information from it. Fortunately, women tend to be rather less interested in this form of relationship analysis, otherwise they would be able to draw some similarly informative conclusions from one's own musical tastes.