Are you listening?

When playing music how often do you think the person/people listening are actually listening? I use the term with emphasis because I feel there are two derivations one can acquire from the word ‘listening’. As I’m writing this blog I have music turned up, although it’s playing through my stereo I am still able to write with a steady stream of consciousness. I cannot actually listen to the music in a sense of connecting to the words and the instruments, but I can hear the song playing. If I were to stop writing and focus on the lyrical content and instrumentation of the current song (Jimi Hendrix- Crosstown Traffic), I would be truly listening rather than hearing the song.
This idea of listening has been around for about as long as humans have been communicating, maybe even longer if you believe there is conscious communication between other organisms on this planet. I feel that the cultural root of connecting to music is engrained in our history of spoken tradition. Early human beings used language as a way to communicate ideas and pass along knowledge; therefore oral tradition became a form of connecting. Music provides a space that utilizes more than just an oral tradition, but introduces instruments as another form of communication. Early civilizations used ‘simple’ instruments such as hide skin drums and rattlers but now we have access to an almost infinite number of instruments (talking about the use of computer programs to synthesize sound).
I feel that often within popular music today the lyrics and production are not geared towards reaching out and connecting to the audience. This is a transformation from the radical 60’s and 70’s where the ideas of feminism were just beginning to mesh into the public sphere. Whiteley discusses how folk music evolved beyond purely acoustic and this caused a shift in the music “in that the blending of musical boundaries led to a more broad-based acceptance of stylistic diversity.” (Whiteley, pg 74) This diversity therefore allowed artists to express themselves in new ways and open new doors such as discussing feminism in the public sphere. By changing the musical content these activists continued the evolution of consciousness.
Joni Mitchell provides a good example as someone who used these new opportunities to speak her mind and express her feelings. Another artist Whiteley mentions is Buffy St Marie who projected a diversity of images, “to write unconventional love lyrics and songs which confronted social and political issues, national and its impact on the American Indian.” (Whiteley, pg 74-75) This openness relates to my point about listening. The artists who speaks from their thoughts and their emotions is the one who wants you to listen. Although I admit to not listening to music 100% of the time, I make it a point to play music that was made to be listened too. The female artists of the 60’s and 70’s exemplified this aspiration to express themselves and therefore open doorway’s for women that had never been there before.