Pleasure, music, and the WHY.
If you can just get your mind together
then come on across to me
Well hold hands and then well watch the sunrise
From the bottom of the sea
But first, are you experienced?
My mom did me a great favor as a kid by forcibly removing the New Kids on the Block cd that was illegal contraband cleverly delivered to me by a well-meaning grandparent in a Christmas stocking. That stuff wasn’t ‘music’ in my mom’s ears. I got a rocking good education on everything from old time real country a la Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, to blues by Muddy Waters and Bessie Smith, and then, of course, the music that rocked her world as a teen and early 20’s girl: ROCK. Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, all that stuff.
What’s my point? My point is, when I first heard Jimi Hendrix, I had this crazy feeling inside. A rush, of sorts. I was a young kid who blasted the ‘Annie’ soundtrack on my record player and yet I could totally appreciate the guitar riffs and marveled at my mom who would go into a sort of musical dance trance while washing dishes or something.
Most of us have had an experience like this. Why? A friend posted this journal article from 2001 and it was so great that I thought I’d pass it along here:Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in the brain regions implicated in reward and emotion.
Turns out, the brains structures that provide that euphoric feeling when you listen to music also go nuts with other stimuli such as food, sex, and ‘drugs of abuse’.
Interesting, no? Musical euphoria has come up for me a lot lately because a) I’m making a lot more music than I have in a great long while and b) I’m dating someone who loses the ability to focus on anything else or even speak when music comes on. Seriously. I do not hold him responsible for anything he agrees to, says or doesn’t say, or even gestures about when he listening to music. Now I know why. 
And here’s a live video of Jimi Hendrix just to bring it back ’round. I couldn’t find a video of him singing the song that started it all (for me), Are you Experienced? but here he is singing ‘Hey Joe’
All my grandpa would say is: Get a hair cut’
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