Music is one of the most influential presences in my life. In fact, I play drums in a band because I love the music so much. Many of the things I’ve learned from music is mainly about music; however, there are other lessons I’ve come to learn through music that could be taught to me in no other way. Many life observations have been brought to my attention through music, such as politics, media, government, war, emotions, love, and hate. For the most part, what I know about music is that music should be so good, it needs no lyrics to go with it and should be able to stand on its own without verbal direction. There is one song that I recall in particular; I was going through my dad’s old records and I found a 45 of the 1983 music group Bad Brains. Their song, Rise, is the most influential song in musical history to me. Their lyrics caused me to question those things I had already come to accept as what it was and never thought about again. I remember hearing the raw power of the music combined with the singer’s raspy voice and just thinking, "Wow." I had been exposed to true beliefs and this album, I Against I, led me to stop accepting everything that came my way and form ideas for myself and think for myself and be my person, disallowing anyone to decide for me what I was going to be like and what I was going to believe.

After hearing this music, I went back to some of my old favorites that I enjoyed for the musical aspects and listened to the words again. War Pigs by Black Sabbath became a voice to me from deep inside my own head that caused me to realize the simply complex (like the oxymoron?) hypocrisy of killing in the name of a ‘good war.’ To put it this way, music opened my eyes in one respect but closed my eyes in another; I began to ignore other truths that didn’t suit my arguments and I artistically managed to word anything so backwardly that I could make Mother Teresa look like a cold-blooded masochist. That’s one of the few ways I’ve been negatively influenced by music but it’s all part of life’s big lesson, so screw it.