The joy and dangers of singing
If only for being an instant reliever of stress, singing already does a big service to mankind. I know of many people who consider singing as a kind of maintenance medicine that keeps them going even while the going gets rough.
But singing actually does a lot more than just to relieve stress. It can be a wonderful form of prayer, of praising God and the beauty of creation. It is understandable why St. Augustine once said that "he who sings prays twice."
And in the Bible and now adapted in our liturgy, we repeat often the words, "Sing a new song to the Lord," and their many variations. That is simply because joy can hardly be better expressed other than through singing.
I was happy to bump into a liturgical hymn recently that said, "In heaven our joy will be to sing eternally." I could not agree to it more.
Of course, as stress reliever, singing has a way of purifying the mind, heart and even the body of toxic elements and of stirring them to action in spite of tiredness. We may not have the scientific explanation for that but today people practically need no convincing that singing has that power.
Nowadays, singing is becoming a popular way of resting and relaxing. With the advent of the karaoke and many singing shows here and abroad, this practice has become a staple in the department of rest and recreation.
I suppose this is because singing provides a kind of outlet for what is welling up in one's mind and heart. The songs, primarily chosen for their tune before their lyrics and other considerations, usually reflect how the person is feeling or considering in a given moment.
But the lyrics also play a good part in motivating people to sing. They are ready-made poetic expressions of banal, common-place experiences or impressions or state of mind and heart. They supply an easy and beautiful language for the mind and heart to express themselves.
But we have to be aware also of what I may consider as emerging dangers involving singing and songs in general. Since they are a good mirror of how people are in their mind and heart, they somehow also expose the quality of culture a society or even the world in general has. And the prospect is not all too good.
Just like the saying, "Tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are," we can also say, "Tell me how you sing and what songs you sing, and I will tell you who you are."
Indeed the style of singing can reveal to a certain extent how a person is - his age, his temperament and character, his feelings at the moment, the culture he is living, etc. And what we can observe in this area is a big shift from the style of, say, 50 years ago.
Today's style is definitely more sophisticated, with a lot more of vocal gyrations and gymnastics, often interpreted as being more nuanced and textured in expressing one's feelings through the songs.
That may be good and welcome to a certain extent, but it somehow shows that today's people, especially the young, are more complex, if not more complicated. This can be very understandable given the increasing amount of things people today are exposed to.
Also the style today seems to give more emphasis on showmanship than on the substance of the song. It has becoming more concerned with external appearance, singing techniques and ratings from the audience.
Gone is the style of simplicity and direct, plain expression of what and how one feels inside his heart. I would say the style of former years was more sincere. It was more geared to make listeners to meditate and to touch base with more fundamental realities.
In fact, the songs today largely validate this observation. If we closely examine the lyrics of many of the songs today, they reveal a trend toward more worldliness and less soul and spirit, more action and less meditation.
In fact, there is a lot of noise and clutter. And even the love songs and ballads, which are supposed to be the more serious songs, appear contaminated with certain ideologies that speak more of relativism, subjectivism and rationalism. God, religion, piety, etc. seem like personas-non-grata.
The Bible actually warns us of this trend that show a drifting away from God and a sinking in our own man-made world that cannot help but be swallowed up by our miseries sooner or later. We need to wake up and do something about this.
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