Ah, music. My old mistress. Sometimes I would make love to her, sometimes I’d fuck her brains out. Music, music, music. Music. It can be fast, or slow. It can be sang, or sung. Some of it is in very poor taste. Mind you, some of it isn’t. It’s a funny old thing, music.
I began my quest of listening to music around 3 months ago. Until then, I had never heard a ‘song’. By complete chance I was walking past an off licence and heard the strangest of noises. I immediately ran in, purchased a bottle of the highest percentage cider, and asked the man over counter what the unfathomable noise was. His reply? “Music.”
Well, to be more specific, he told me the song was ‘I Feel For You’ by Chaka Khan. Marvellous thing it was. I didn’t have a clue where to begin! I guess until this point, music had simply passed me by. ‘No more!’ I said. From that day forward I was a music fan, and have now made it my goal to open more people's minds to this fabulous thing we call ‘music’.
It is with the greatest respect to myself that I write this mind blowing accomplishment for you all: A guide on how to understand music properly.
The first thing you have to know about listening to music, it’s all in the ears. You’re going to want to open those ears up nice and wide. I tend to use lubricant that’s ordinarily reserved for doing lots of sex. This will stretch out the ear nicely. Simply lather it over someone else's finger and get them to do a nice spread of it around the inside of your ear. They will need to start waggling their finger once it’s in there pretty quickly. You’ll know you’ve done this correctly if there’s blood on their finger when they remove it.
Step two! Choice. The music you choose to listen to that very first time is very, very important. If you want to understand music properly, then you don’t want to start at the deep end. I made that mistake. While still in the infancy of my music listening I attempted to listen to the record ‘Is This It’ by the Strokes. It was a wildly complicated piece and I couldn’t quite fathom what I was listening to. I threw it in the bin post-haste. At this stage, you’ll want to start with some basic classical compositions.
Now, I know nothing of the classical canon, so we won’t do that, so instead the track selected is ‘The Take Over, The Breaks Over’ by Fall Out Boy. Give this a good listen, and please, until you follow this guide and fully understand how to listen to the track, do not attempt to listen to other music. If you over-complicate your brain too quickly you could instantly die in a particularly awful way (explosion).
Congratulations! You’re currently listening to music! But are you understanding it? Probably not, you fucking idiot. Below are a few tips and tricks you’ll need to master once the song is playing to really get what’s going on.
One great trick to understanding music is to incorporate other elements of media. Watching a loud television whilst music is playing can stimulate the bones in your ears to contort in a way that allows extra understanding. I sometimes like to read very old, vintage, pornographic magazines while listening to Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions. By allowing other media to co-exist with music, you allow music to become white noise that infiltrates the music nodes in your brain.
Another way to ease yourself into music is to allow animals to listen to it. Perhaps your pet has some hidden knowledge on Merriweather Post Pavilion that you were unable to discover yourself? The music nodes and frequencies in the minds of animals are different to our own. They tend to hear things at 1.5x speed. If you’re interested, try putting on an album you like on youtube, and changing the speed to see what your animal hears. Just remember, sheep can’t hear at all and binturong don't understand hip-hop.
An epic way to really understand music could also be praying! Over the past few months, every night before bed, I’ve prayed to our God almighty to allow me to understand music better. Each morning, when I wake up, God has left me a little treat. Ordinarily, the treat comes in the form a shit in my bed sheets, but occasionally, it will be piss. I then get up, put on my headphones, and select a few of my favourite Green Day albums. Without fail, I always understand what’s going on a little more. Recently, through this method, I learned that Green Day use something called a ‘drum kit’. Perhaps one day on my adventures in music I’ll discover what it does!
Now, I can’t reveal all my tricks, otherwise I’d be out of a job, so we’ll leave it there for now. Perhaps in the future I’ll do more guides (I saw a painting the other day, give me a couple of weeks to have a think and I could probably come up with some tips for that too!) and maybe even a second part to my music guide if you’re looking for a few more music listening tricks! For now though, go and listen to a bit of music, and do your best! You’ll like it!
If you have any cool tips on how to listen to music, please, tell Aidan Shard on the bar! If you give him a really good trick, he’ll unshackle Jack from the sound booth and allow you to feed him by hand!
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