The music is the message
Understanding the famous Marshall McLuhan’s quote: “the medium is the message” with a little help from music.
The medium is the message. A classic and often misunderstood phrase by Marshall McLuhan points to the greater importance of the medium over the message regarding the transformative impact it brings to society. When McLuhan said that the medium is the message, he didn’t mean that the message or the content didn’t matter; he suggested that introducing a new media had more impact on society than any content that its messages could have. Content is often merely transposed from the old media to the new media. Let’s take Shakespeare’s writings for example, despite being a masterpiece, they have transformed our society less than the theater, the book, the cinema, and the TV have. All of these media took Hamlet as content, each in its turn and style.
Understanding what McLuhan meant by the medium is the message requires a certain degree of concentration. I say this in the sense that we are always focused on understanding the content that the media transmit to us and not in its form. The content captures our cognitive process as in a spell. We think little about the way we absorb information. Analyzing the method we use to read a book, for example, there is a technique involved. First, you must understand the alphabet’s operation, juxtaposing symbols, and letters, to form meaning. Still, it is necessary to understand that you need to read the letters from left to right to decode it, and with the words, the same rule applies, reading from left to right, word after word, one line after another, one page after another. We do not realize how deeply this method has affected us throughout history, making us more serial, sequential, mechanical, and even individualistic, given that the habit of reading occurs in an isolated, solitary, concentrated way, without distractions.
This hypnosis or numbness that the content causes us is similar to the fact that we don’t usually notice the massive existence of oxygen everywhere or the weight it exerts on our shoulders daily. After all, we are used to it, although sometimes, at the end of the day, we say we had a “heavy day.” The fish also suffers from this disease and does not perceive the water in which it swims in an aquarium. Although it has always been there, the fish can’t see it.
But how can we get rid of this narcosis? How can we free ourselves from the charm that holds us to the content and prevents us from seeing the medium and its effects? McLuhan said that all media has content except light. An example that makes it a little clearer that the media has importance and impact in itself, and in the case of light, it has no content at all, except perhaps the objects it illuminates. What about nonverbal media like dance, do they have content? The messages become more evident if we understand the dance media as a language. How can one say joy, violence, desire, or love through dance? Doesn’t the Swan Lake ballet communicate many feelings without a word coming out of the dancers’ mouths? Even when not verbalized, the message is still there, contained in the movements, costumes, facial expressions, and artists’ interaction.
Music, in addition to dance, is another medium whose message is not always evident. Bob Dylan’s songs for example, indeed have messages that are sometimes objective and clear, sometimes more poetically veiled, but they are there because the words are expressed in the lyrics, using English. But what about the accompanying melody? What is its message? The melody is written in a language too, known as musical notation or musical language. You cannot write words using this language, not in the sense that one could describe objects, places, or people. That is not its designed purpose. Its symbols and phrases actually represent sounds, rhythms, and voices in different tones. Like dance, melodies can be written to express feelings like sadness or joy, serving as a background for the accompanying lyrics, such as the landscapes in the theater. But going back to the content, what happens when you don’t speak English? Do Bob Dylan’s songs stop impacting you because you don’t understand the meaning of their lyrics?
In fact, even if you don’t understand anything about the content, you end up understanding anguish, grief, or melancholy in a song written in a lower tone. For some reason, they sound sadder. In addition, Bob Dylan can convey much of his message through the rhythm, the speed he plays and sings each verse, with his pauses and accelerations when singing, this also impacts the listener, and is done in a planned way, to provoke certain effects that can complete the content. When music has no lyrics, this nonverbal content can be its whole effect or when it does has lyrics but you cannot understand them.
Finally, abstracting the whole thing a bit more, forget about Bob Dylan, all the singers, and all the written songs’ contents. We can easily agree that rock and roll has transformed our society much more than any individual artist’s songs and lyrics. Even the Beatles can’t be seen as more impactful than the very introduction of rock and roll style in the 60s. We see this even more clearly when we understand that the impact of rock and roll itself is dwarfed compared to the impact that music, in general, has had on humanity since its introduction into the tribes 10,000 years ago. In these cases, it is not the lyrics that are the message, neither is the melody, rhythm, or any content, however beautiful. When it comes to transforming the world, the music itself is the message.
