next era

By: Kassandra Dugi & Nour Attalla

Singing together

‘Living in the wake of overwhelming changes, we’ve all become strangers, even to ourselves.’ These words echoed around The Roundhouse concert hall in London on a cold winter’s evening last year, sung by indie-folk artist Weyes Blood to a crowd of over 3,000 people. 

Ironically, whilst her lyrics are about how social isolation is increasing in the 21st century, that evening, her concert was a reminder of the exact opposite: the power of music in bringing together people through a joint experience. As Weyes Blood reminds us, ‘We’re not meant to be our own angels all the time.’

The existence of music as a shared act has existed throughout human history. Yet today, in an era of streaming and listening to music alone through headphones, that is often no longer the case. 

And that raises an important question; how can music help us come together again in an increasingly fractured society?

The essence of music

For most of human history, creating and listening to music was never a solitary affair: until 150 years ago, without the option to record sound, you were always in the room with others when listening to music. Even with the rise of recordings in the early 1900s, music’s communal aspect didn’t disappear, with families gathering around the household’s single gramophone or radio.

This shared experience is central to music’s important power: bringing people together. Scientists have argued that this is not just a by-product of music, but its central function, something that has become coded in our biology. It allows us to find like-minded people and to transcend social boundaries by connecting over something fundamentally human. It is no coincidence that most songs focus on human emotions and experiences, and that many religious and cultural rituals incorporate music. Just think of church choirs or singing the national anthem before sports matches. 

While you can still enjoy a beautiful song and be moved by its lyrics when it plays through your headphones on your daily commute, the shared nature of music is lost. That is the key point: as social creatures, sharing experiences with other people provides us joy, and isolation negatively affects our mental and even physical wellbeing.

With rates of loneliness, especially amongst young people, being at all-time highs, how can we revive the conviviality of music and take advantage of the social bonding it offers?  

Bringing back the shared funk

Live music is perhaps the most powerful way to bring this human connection back to music. For example, queer pop star Chappell Roan uses her concerts to foster a sense of community in each city she performs, particularly amongst LGBT fans. She does this by encouraging the audience to dress up according to the show’s theme, having local drag queens as opening acts, and choosing LGBT-friendly bars for the audience to meet before and after the show. 

Another act travelling the world is Syrian band Tootard, who marry traditional Arabic instruments with dance music. They give voice to a modern Arab identity in a time of conflict, where Syrians are spread out all over the world due to the country’s civil war and the region’s instability more broadly. 

It is clear that our 21st-century challenges require fundamental societal and cultural changes. To bring about such change, the constituents that make up culture – be it music, literature, visual, or performing arts – must each individually participate in this transformation. In a time of uncertainty, they allow us to experiment and shape our worldviews more accessibly and organically than politics, science, or even activism.

A single artist will never alone bring about radical social transformation, just as an individual voice does not make a choir. But together, artists across genres, alongside their varying audiences, can use music to bring attention to the issues of our contemporary society, create connection between people, and start imagining new modes of action.

Rocking into the future

Facing the many challenges of the 21st century can seem daunting, but, as Weyes Blood sings on ‘Children of the Empire’, ‘we don’t have time anymore to be afraid.’ By bringing people together, music has the ability to be a conduit for creating much-needed connection and community. 

In doing so, it not only helps counteract the increasing loneliness of our time, but also harnesses our collective power to build a new and better future, one of hope and connection instead of despair and isolation.