Op-Ed: Music makes you nicer, if it’s the right music

Apparently listening to all that unforgettable rap and other ho-hum stuff might be a negative influence. (The hell you say!) Listening to positive music, however, has now been shown to have the opposite effect.

You become tolerant, perhaps tolerable. Even in England, listening to music with meaningful positives seems to help. A study at the University of Sussex included study groups exposed to positive messages and neutral, or “meaningless” lyrics. The positive groups blew the others out of the water. They were found to behave more considerately. (No minor achievement in England’s current Grieved and Unpleasant mode.) A researcher knocked over a tin of pencils, and the positive groups picked up five times more of the pencils than the others. Apparently the results were very consistent. This finding will amuse those who remember the Love and Peace era, and the sheer hatred of rednecks, criminals, politicians and other businesspeople it received. To this day, there are people who hate “hippies” having never met one. It’s taken 40 years to discover the obvious. The medium may be the message, but the message has been murder for a long time now. Not that any of us who remember the sheer corruption and greed are exactly likely to be surprised by this result. The Great Society went to the grave it made for itself with the muzak accompaniment it deserved. The PC psychos didn’t even exist then, they just tacked on a set of other people’s values to a series of banal agendas. Music is bigger than people. It deserves more respect. To quote The Fugs:

I saw the best minds of my generation rot…

I just wish I didn’t have to listen to Ho Hum as an alleged replacement.