Many times it is difficult to know why one likes a song. Generally one thinks about the evocations it awakens, about what one experienced when one heard it for the first time and the subsequent times, that is, about the associated memories. We are then talking about a conscious dimension that can be easily associated with “loose” images, so to speak, but which, however, could well be the expression of a more complex emotional process in the listener, as a response or in communication with the listener. or with those who interpret the theme.
Sounds – like smells – seem to activate deep emotional traces, therefore also unconscious, that in some way unite us with our fellow human beings, establishing a bridge between those who listen and those who sing, as well as with those who play an instrument, but also between those attending the live presentation of the musical piece – the audience with the artists and with each other.
If the song is of mass taste we can think that it portrays, refers, translates, reproduces then a universal experience with its conscious and unconscious dimensions, which the authors and performers transmit to be evoked in those who attend its expression.
And perhaps the most universal thing is to love another, with all the vicissitudes that it entails, within which difficulties stand out as a source of inspiration, as one would say, heartbreak, pain constituting a powerful emotion that strongly mobilizes beings. humans towards their expression, to be shared in musical pieces.
It seems that, especially in the vast popular songbook, expressions linked to pain tend to be expressed mainly in two ways: either as inconsolable crying – tragedy in its purest expression, we would say – or as triumph over adversity: We will love each other despite death, I will love you even if you are with someone else or I no longer need you, I don’t care about you, I found someone else, etc.; modalities that portray two ways of functioning: sinking into pain and being destroyed, on the one hand, or, on the other, appealing to an omnipotent, and therefore largely unreal, magical fantasy.
Both alternatives (plunging into suffering or magically skipping it) leave out the possibility of tolerating the pain for what one does not have or did not have (what was lost) in a way that implies being able to do something positive with that experience, such as using it to a kind of synthesis of what happened, which makes it easier to let go of what was lost and brings about inner growth, which in turn allows us to better cope with the next new similar situations that life will inevitably throw at us. Both possibilities have something “deceptive”, “trickster”, in the sense that both the sufferer and the denier remain united to what they no longer have: the absence, the lost remains illusorily present through precisely the inextinguishable suffering in the first case or through the denial of their estrangement or their devaluation in the second case.
Both alternatives arise – we can think then – due to the difficulty of suffering, that is, of enduring the transition through the suffering caused by realizing that one no longer has what one wants or desires. We are talking about the ability or inability to tolerate grief.
Therefore, it is a much broader, more general, more universal experience than (only) loving (or losing a love): the grieving process, suffering from a loss, a psychological conflict with a search for a solution, with a way of trying to understand him, which could involve the two alternatives described or a third that does not necessarily lead to staying suffering forever but nor to magically getting out of the pain.
In summary, a musical theme inspired by the loss of a love could transmit these three possibilities to try to understand oneself with the pain, it being apparently less common to find songs that transmit the third, that is, that emotionally pass through the finesse of the nuances that They live in difficulties with a love, sharing the suffering, but accessing a hopeful result without staying stuck in the suffering or denying it.
We can propose, then, that the listener’s taste may have to do with how much the modality expressed by the author and interpreter resonates with them to understand their own suffering, that is, how much the auditor/spectator identifies with the modality transmitted to face grief.
From this perspective, the third form would correspond to what we can call elaboration of mourning as opposed to the “melancholic solution” (staying stuck in the pain) and the “manic solution” (illusorily triumphing over the pain and over who causes it, denying an important part of the emotional experience).
The broad, general, universal nature of grief has to do with the fact that it is a ubiquitous experience in life, inherent to existence: we are not only grieving when we lose a love or when a loved one dies, but also when we leave the house for work. , when we say goodbye to someone, when we start drinking coffee and when we stop drinking it, with each sip we lose something: a previous state is left behind, which elicits feelings linked to a loss. Every time we lose something, no matter how minimal, pain is generated and how we process that pain is the grieving process, so called because of its inherent suffering, which we can elaborate or not elaborate, “defending ourselves” through the (apparent) melancholic or manic “solution.”
Even the act of thinking requires facing painful feelings, for what is left behind, for what is no longer, for what could not be, at least, for example, when moving from one idea to another. And this, which may seem so strange, is so important that it is even suggested that the difficulties in thinking that occur in some people or that we can all have at some point, could have to do with alterations in these emotional processes that are at the base. , understand yourself with limitations to tolerate feelings of grief. We enter here into the (fascinating) terrain shared between – we would say – thought and emotion.
A musical theme that transmits the process of mourning, therefore, will offer those who receive the message the possibility of accessing a much broader and more complete emotional experience, beyond their tastes linked to their own way of facing the problems. losses on the part of the listener; emotional experience – the elaboration of grief – that could in turn increase their repertoire of response possibilities, expand their versatility to face future grief, and that “expanded” experience (as opposed to just suffering or denying the pain) could be the that generates satisfaction experienced as a particular aesthetic enjoyment, which in turn reconnects with hope despite the desolation felt in the face of loss.
“The photo album”
It is a song by the group Congreso (in Luz de Flash, 2022) on whose lyrics (Pancho Sazo) we will focus our analysis, although the music (Tilo González) is inseparable from the verses to transmit the message that, in this way, arrives through multiple sensory pathways to the person of the recipient.
The title already places us in a scenario of images of memory, that is to say that the proposal is – from the beginning – to let ourselves be carried away by evocations.
After a masterful musical introduction in which the drums, through soft cymbals, take on the importance of maintaining a cadence like the heartbeats of life throughout the song, the song unfolds:
Faded from the photo album that photograph in which you laughed at love.
I have the paper with chopped edges left today a mute witness, evaporated soil that departed.
And the brightness of impossible time trembles Your absent figure now haunts me and you are not there.
The color of your image of mine disappears all colors flee towards white flash light.
I saw you, I loved you, one more day I lost, I won, I dream again.
I came to look for you from the center of the century I can’t forget this first love, he veiled
I saw you, I loved you, one more day I lost faith I dream again.
the sea told me that the moon keeps the lost photos that no one cried. Soledad.
Based on the previous approaches, we could make a preliminary, hypothetical and in no way exclusive or exclusive reading, as follows:
The speaker visits his emotional records (in the photo album) and realizes that there is someone who is no longer there (faded) but at the same time he realizes that something remained from that experience (the torn edges of the paper), which now It lives as if it were dissipating (the evaporated soil that left), that is, it recognizes and somehow relives the loss, which shakes the brilliance it contained (the brilliance trembles), realizing that it is irrecoverable (impossible time), This transforms into a persecuting figure even though it is not physically present, therefore what the speaker is feeling is something of his own: he realizes that what he is experiencing now with that figure that is moving away is really inside him (he fades the color of your image of mine) and within that, the brilliance that dazzles (flash light), absorbs the nuances (the colors that flee towards white): everything seems to be lost.
However, upon having this new experience with his evocations, he revisits what he experienced at the time with that figure ((now) I saw you (I see you), I loved you (I love you), one more day (again)), evaluating that There are negative but also positive aspects (I lost, I won) and that you can return to these evocations because they are your own, dream again, return to “search” from a more centered position (the center of the century) or perhaps more mature, to those first experiences (love first) that, because they were so intensely exposed, were disfigured towards being erased (he became veiled), needing to repeat this observation (like a chorus) to realize that he stopped believing (I lost faith), that he stopped being dazzled, to finally Finally, accept that somewhere you will find what you thought was lost (the moon guards) that which perhaps you could not cry about (no one cried).
In the musical piece we witness the painful transition through the evidence of a loss, but it is not experienced from the melancholic or manic perspective, but rather through the elaboration of mourning, recognized as a personal process that allows us to preserve what was lost (within of one) recognizing the positive and the negative that he left, with enough flexibility to go through these emotions again, to be able (now) to mourn his loss.
To elaborate, we could deepen the analysis by adding that the protagonist renounces the dazzle that generates what we call here “manic solution”, metaphorically represented by the “flash light”, the idealization of who was in the photograph; idealization that becomes veiled in the process of realizing that dazzle, whose renunciation may even be what triggers the image to fade, like the singer saying something like “I realized that I idealized you after realizing that you you laughed (you made fun) of love”; and making fun of love is equivalent to devaluing the relationship as a couple, to becoming so absorbed that the other is practically despised: it is not possible to genuinely couple in idealization (the brilliance of impossible time trembles), so there is no choice but to renounce this , choosing then to follow the path of mourning to build (reconstruct) a complete (true) relationship as a couple, represented in the lyrics of the song, by the sea (like a father) that, paired with the (mother) moon, knows that she can hold the memories of what was lost that can be mourned over.
The protagonist loses his idealized partner with great pain and rebuilds within himself a true couple in which one (the sea father) can recognize the capacity of the other (the moon mother) to contain the pain of what was lost, thus creating the duel.
It could be the story of an emotional experience, a mourning, in at least three dimensions: one that we could call external reality, that is, it is “really” about the loss of a love (a person with names and surnames) that He in turn mocked the possibility of love; a second dimension in which beyond what that person was like in “reality”, the singer realizes that he idealized him, therefore what is lost is precisely that idealization of that figure in the “internal reality” of the protagonist; and finally, beyond the “real” figure (external, which disappointed) and beyond how it was experienced by the singer (idealized), it could be that the protagonist realized his own tendency to idealize, and that it is In truth, the abandonment of that tendency to idealize what causes pain, triggering the grieving process that is transmitted to us.
“Loneliness”, as a final word, perhaps represents the emotional state of someone who has experienced the grieving process, in its double face: he is left alone because he no longer has what he felt was his own and at the same time, he declares its opposite as hope, since Whoever expresses loneliness inevitably invites us to think in company.
By way of conclusion, inviting us to hear the deepest emotions.
What is stated here is naturally very far from the actual experience that is generated when listening to the topic and has no other intention than to provide some hypotheses to try to understand the aesthetic enjoyment that it produces.
A musical theme with what it transmits evokes, generates, reproduces an emotional experience that, from the perspective of the grieving process, of the reactions to a loss, could imply the predominance of one of three modes of functioning that are largely unconscious: submerging in pain for what one no longer has (melancholy), denying the situation, either with an omnipotent fantasy that the event did not happen or disqualification of what was lost (mania) or a third possibility that has the cost of passing by the suffering through the loss, evaluating the negative that was experienced but also the gain of rescuing what is valuable that remains in one from that experience, that is to say that with the loss everything was not destroyed, what was gone did not take everything with it. of oneself; In the text, despite “losing,” even losing faith, the speaker won and can dream again, which implies greater emotional depth and flexibility, providing more resources to face similar future situations.
The listener could identify with one or another of these modes depending on their own predominant functioning, and therefore like certain themes (more suffering or more triumphant, for example), but a theme that conveys the experience of an elaborate mourning offers the opportunity to expand the emotional experience of its auditors (spectators), making it much more complete, encompassing situations from the external world (the lost person) as well as heartfelt processes in the internal world in relation to reality (realizing that one idealized that person), but also in the deeper structuring of his psyche (being able to renounce his own tendency to idealize), as in our opinion occurs with “The Photo Album”, whose verses we take as material for analysis to support our hypotheses, leaving open the enormous field of experiencing what is proposed in the sublime conjunction of lyrics and music.
