There are many different genres of music such as pop, country, rock & roll, jazz just to name a few.
Music comes from within and explodes into many different forms. The question is, with all the different kinds of music out there, why do we love it? What makes a certain kind of music our favorite?
THE EMOTIONAL ASPECT
Music is a form of expression from within. It croons and cries about love, heartaches and heartbreaks. It yells in anger, screaming; it speaks in dull tones. It makes us want to get up and dance and move our feet.
Music reaches into the hearts of listeners and says things when they cannot find the right words to say. Cedic Baggett, a graduate of SUNY Plattsburgh, has a bachelor’s in communication and audio/radio production. Music is inside all of us, he said, “It speaks to me.”
SELF-DISCOVERY
Finding out what kind of music genre we like is never a problem. We may only like one genre of music, or we may like various artists/bands of different genres. Liking or loving music is universal, but why do we prefer that type of music? Is it because we grew up listening to it? Is it because we prefer a certain beat? Maybe we love a specific musician or what the lyrics say in a certain song.
Finding out why we love music and what we love about it, that is the key question.
SURVEY SAYS…
After asking students at SUNY Plattsburgh what genres of music they preferred, there was a mixture of answers. Their answers varied from hip hop, R&B, reggae and rock to indie, folk and alternative. The students had lots of different tastes in music, but they all said the same thing. They loved their preferred genre of music because they grew up listening to it. Paige Letourneau, a nursing major at SUNY Plattsburgh doesn’t have a preference. “I kinda listen to a lot of everything,” she said.
MORE THOUGHTS ON MUSIC
Baggett said his favorite genre of music is Neo-Soul, which is otherwise known as progessive soul. This genre of music came from soul and R&B. A couple of the artists in this genre are Lauryn Hill, who starred in Sister Act 2, and D’Angelo.
Baggett has been listening to Neo-Soul for the better part of the past three decades. He says it first caught his attention while he was growing up in the ‘90s. He started to watch and listen to this music on FlavaTV, which was local to Dallas, Texas and popular in the Black community.
When asked why he liked Neo-Soul, he said: “It captured who I was. The genre pays respect to the original soul artists.”
Mykel “Quince” Myrick, who resides in Watertown, New York, works at Tunes925 as an on-air DJ. His preferred genre of music is hip hop and rap. When asked why, he said: “There are no instruments. It’s poetry; it’s art.” His passion for this style of music was obvious.
PASSION
Passion, our reason for living and the reason music lives in us all. The beat in our soul connects us. All we have to do is listen.
So open those ears and listen to the beat and find out what could be accomplished. “You use words and make something out of nothing. It gives me hope,” Myrick said,
APN 