More on a personal tangeant this time around, recently I have been consuming music faster than food, digesting every single word and injecting subseqeuent thoughts into my fist-sized organ resting upon my shoulders.
The fascinating thing about music is the many different interpretations produced from it. Music serves as a purpose of entertainment. Or does it?
The Wiki definition of music is "an art form whose medium is sound organized in time". Simplistically, it acts as a means of entertainment - time wasting, time consuming, boredom fighting, thought provoking entertainment.
However, music isn't just this. It is also a way of life for artists, a way into Hollywood even, a basis for living.
Dip deeger and it could be interpreted as an educational tool. West Ruislip to Woodford, an hour long Underground train journey from East to West London, must be ranked up there on the 'dull journeys' table, right? Not if you've got a voice tape with you. Imagine, you leave Woodford station at noon, departing from a loved one with a simple "Goodbye, speak to you later". Fast forward an hour or two, and you've arrived at your destination, greeting another loved one with a far from simple "привет, я тосковал без Вас, как дела ?" (for you very few people who don't understand Russian, click the link) (For those who don't want to, it translates to "Hi, I've missed you, how are you?")
Digression really is a habit of mine; wheter this is good or not is undecided. Anyway.
I was on the bus on Thursday to my local gym, to get in shape for my half term holiday, and was away with the faeries, spending quality time with my phone-turned-mp3-player (I hate iPods). When music is pumped through your eardrums, you are forced to listen, and in this case I did. With this task the audience experience three things: interpretation, imagination and identification.
Sadly, I can't quite identify myself with the artist Iwas listening to, Ne-Yo- I'm not American, I can't sing (well), I'm comparitively poor, and I'm white. But the messages in his songs are something I can relate to. Coincedentally at the time, the night before I had a fight with my better half, "Mad At You" came on my iTunes, my favourite song and therefore one I sadly/proudly know every word to due to this. 
The impact this song had on me upon listening to it on the bus was amazing. Everyone's had that tingling feeling in their spine through shock, be it from a scary film, an epiphany or a random muscle spasm. Well, I had this - and no, it wasn't a random muscle spasm - and things like this force me to recollect random things about the song, the artist, my life, my girlfriend. And it is because of these things that I believe Ne-Yo has made it to the top. The identification model in a song is rarely commented on, but the purpose of such songs is to relate to the audience. After all, if you can't relate to a song, why buy it? Popularity is success, success is fame, fame is money. At the end of the day, artists attempt to transfer a simple situation into a song, and this is where the professionals differ from the amateurs. They get it right, time in, time out. Just look at Ne-yo's recent hits. "Mad at You", "Single", "Miss Independant". For those of you unaware of Ne-yo's music style or target audience, all his songs relate to the objectification of women with focus to masculinity and the role of the male. Miss Indepedant has had 18 million views since September, and that's just based on one YouTube video.
The point I'm getting to is blurred, the point I'm getting to realistically doesn't exist. But the topic of identification struck me hard enough to write about. And anyone reading this will no doubt become aware of Ne-Yo, identify with a song they like, or both. The ease of manipulation is scarily easy to do through music, I for one have been captured by it. But without this, music would be meaningless. And a part of me would be crushed if I had to go from Woodford to West Ruislip without my trusty iPod-beating-phone-thingy.
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