Obviously, listening to music is essential to its enjoyment. You do not need me to tell you that. Music is much more than just sound, and it provides more than the proverbial ‘soundtrack to our lives’. It plays an integral role to the social functions of many modern-day situations, shaping and influencing our social interactions with one another. Allow me to take you on a little tour through clubs, gigs and festivals. Follow me if you will.

Music played in public for the public allows for a range of social activities. In the club scene, regardless of the fact that different clubs cater to different tastes, the social functions remain the same no matter the musical genre. People come together to enjoy themselves and express themselves by listening to music (the shy ones), by dancing to music (the not-so-shy ones), by courting potential partners (the cheeky ones), or by doing all three at once. Nevertheless, without music being played in clubs, how many ways are there for us to express ourselves so intimately and uninhibitedly in public ? Unfortunately, not many.

Moving on to consider the next part of our music tour: concerts. Concerts often have an audience already familiar with the band’s music. Similarly, many music festivals are orientated to a particular group of music lovers, and the best festivals have tents that cater to almost all popular musical genres. Nevertheless, what gigs and festivals have in common is the way they unite people. They provide opportunities for people with similar tastes in music to come together, interact, engage and socialise with one another . The audience shares a collective sense of appreciation shown first by their attendance, then augmented by their participation in singing along and/or dancing to the music.

Of course, the successful staging of live music is as important as the music itself. In some cases, music is not the most interesting part of the show. Through the musicians’ showmanship, pyrotechnics, lightshows and more, music can be relegated to second place although never consigned to the background. These extra special techniques not only entertain the audience, but also create an atmosphere in which the audience’s attention is fully focused on the performers. Nevertheless, live performances that seek to break down the barriers between audience and performer are always the most interesting. The fact that the performer and the audience are in close physical proximity already blurs the usual divide between them. This divide is further broken down by the intimacy of the gig. There have been times, however, when this divide has been notably demolished. Nowhere has this been more explicitly demonstrated than in the punk subculture and other musical genres informed by it.

In the late 1970s, punk music burst out in London. With the Sex Pistols and The Clash forming the vanguard for this music-based movement, punk demonstrated the different ways that music can alter social interactions. Whether by the violence that erupted from moshpits within the audience, sometimes overflowing onto the stage, or through the torrential rain of phlegm which was fired both at and from the stage, the sacred divide between performer and audience was smashed apart. Furthermore, punk also showed that the audience could become the performer; both Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious were originally members of the audience until their participation in the punk subculture encouraged them to become members of bands themselves— Siouxsie Sioux with her Banshees, and Sid Vicious with the greatest punk band of them all, the Pistols.

Music has often been a form of response to the state of society at the time. The violence and nonconformity of punk was a result of the hopelessness that the participants felt at a time when the economy was in a sharp state of decline and the future seemed to hold nothing for the young. Music was thus short, abrasive and brutal, symbolizing the way youths saw their lives. Likewise, punk concerts were often scenes of sickness, vulgarity and sex, everything about life that the establishment did not want talked about. Nevertheless, punk was not the first or last subculture to be informed by and based around a musical genre.

From the Teddy Boys, to the Mods and the Rockers, to the Hippies and the Skinheads, there have been many cases where musical predilections have combined with fashion to create entirely new ways of living. Cultural codes are formed and adhered to, demonstrating that music has a part to play even in social formations. Clothes, for example, provide a valuable source of cultural identification. In musical genres both pre- and post-punk, certain fashions have been specifically identified with certain musical genres. Whether it is the cultural capital of safety pins and leather of the punk movement symbolising the bondage and constraints placed on youths by society, or the Italian tailor-made suits worn by working-class Mods to symbolize their social aspirations, music forms the basis for decoding these cultural codes. By enabling a collective identity to exist, music allows members feeling out-of-place in society to find a niche and solace in the fact that there are other people who share their tastes and experiences.

Though my examples have gone as far back as the 1950s, the fact remains that the way people dress is often reflective of their musical tastes. It is a generalisation, and as they say, generalisations are often false (including this one). Before you get lost in a spiral of philosophical self-doubt, let me make the point that there are still people who are called, and call themselves Emos, indie kids who listen to a certain genre of music and dress accordingly. Hip-hop music has cultivated a fashion culture so pervasive it is almost impossible to locate a single defining feature.

Nevertheless, the point remains that music is always more than just music.
It is multi-dimensional, taking on different forms depending on when it is played and for whom. It is integral to youth culture, helping young people cultivate a sense of identity and find solace in the knowledge that there are other like-minded individuals out there. Music is clearly more than simply the soundtrack to our lives.