Finding Your Beat: The Soundtrack to Teenage Years
The transformative potential of music exerts a universal appeal on people, bringing joy and comfort, in addition to evoking sadness. As such, it acts as a wonderful stimulant in our mind that not only can calm us, but also supports our physical, mental, and emotional health, in addition to regulating our emotions, lifting our mood, and refining our creative instincts.
Therefore, music can become a great companion for us in our teenage years, as we struggle with a cluster of things and fields while trying to find our footing in this increasingly convoluted world. Finding one’s soundtrack then is a matter of identity, as music is one of the foremost avenues through which we can explore our tastes and proclivities, while at the same time also expanding our tastes and broadening our horizons.
Hence, music then serves to crystallize the personalities of teenagers and becomes a medium of expression. What music one likes is a marker of who they are. This is because music allows people to express their ideas, emotions, and life lessons in a deeply personal way through a form and medium of their choosing.
This explains the enduring popularity of pop music, with pop stars enjoying legions of diehard teenage fans, all of whom find themselves and their experiences reflected in the works of pop art. This is how music is a powerful tool for countering isolation, as teenagers feel heard and seen in the lyrics of their favourite artists. This allows music to exist as a tool for catharsis as well, by allowing teenagers to release their pent-up emotions through singing along to their favorite songs.
Closer home, platforms like Coke Studio have served to expose millions of teenagers to the infinite variety that marks their cultural heritage, while at the same time inculcating the ethos of multiculturalism and tolerance in them.
The music one listens to in their teenage years continues to resonate with significance throughout their lives, and this is precisely how music comes to assume a personal significance in the lives of people, by becoming significant to the daily rituals of their everyday lives. Music thus helps in the formation of lasting cohesive bonds among people, by allowing social collectives to be formed on the basis of mutual styles and preferences. Sharing music with others then becomes a pleasurable experience, for both the giver and the receiver, who are able to engage with others in meaningfully creative ways over their music tastes.
Therefore, curating one’s own personal playlist is a deeply important milestone that every adolescent goes through in the process of forming their own identity, thereby acting as an enriching refuge for individuals in their tumultuous teenage years.
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