Does Listening To Sad Music Make You A Sad Person?
a generational question.
First, slowly, and then with an abrupt immediacy, I became acutely conscious of the music I put into my ears. Specifically, I became skeptical of the lyrics, fearful of the recording artist’s words. With a caution that approached superstition, I built fragile boundaries, attempting to avoid ‘sad music’ or, at least, listen to it sparingly.
Most of the time, I failed. To a specific type of music listener, avoiding ‘sad music’ is synonymous with avoiding ‘good music.’ This is something I had no intention of doing; while I believe that great art can be yielded from places other than sadness or an intense blue period, when I listen to some of the best albums of the past decade, I find that many of them are wrenched from the recording artist’s depression, loneliness, grief, or anger, emotions that I have no intention of occupying, but am transported to upon listening, regardless of the circumstances of my reality: Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters; Solange’s A Seat at The Table; Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell; Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN; Bon Iver’s I, I; Kelela’s Raven. Even Bad Bunny’s much-celebrated Debí Tirar Más Fotos is ultimately an album about mourning.
In the Scorsese-directed limited series Pretend It’s A City, Fran Lebowitz suggests that music is one of the world’s safest addictions. She refers to music as a sort of happy drug:
“Music makes people happier, and it doesn’t harm them. Most things that make you feel better are harmful. It’s very unusual. It’s like a drug that doesn’t kill you.”
I agree with this. The infectious levity of Christmas music in December, the communal shimmer of a big-hearted ballad at a wedding, and the colossal synths of house music at a crowded rave all spur feelings of euphoria, plucking me from the solitude of my thoughts and into a buoyant and warm emotionality.
But if music can make you happy, can the opposite also be true? Can listening to the hyper-specific illustrations of Audrey Hobert’s debut on pathetic desperation and loneliness make you feel pathetic, desperate, and lonely, the same way listening to Beyoncé’s Renaissance makes you feel like a god?
I love listening to all kinds of music, but frequently find that the songs I feel the most moved by could be classified as ‘sad.’ But I am not a sad person, clinically or vibes-wise, which is why, when listening to this sort of music, this ‘sad music,’ I can become disturbed. It can feel as though I am reliving a depressive episode that I thought I was completely over, its scenes flashing through my brain uncontrollably. Or worse: that I am inhabiting an anger or grief that is alien to me, that isn’t mine but is of the artist, somehow transferring itself to me via sonic possession. Have you ever had a dream where you were angry at someone, and then woke up and went through the day unreasonably mad at them? Kind of like that, but with music. Please tell me that I am not the only one.
Because of this, I try to stay away. But unfortunately, I can not – it’s just too good. And so, I listen with my walls up, not letting the music truly engulf me. I do this through a variety of bizarre techniques such as skipping words, as if the repetition of certain lyrics could curse my life, like when I belted out nearly every word of SZA’s ‘Kill Bill’ at her set in Primavera Barcelona but omitted the ruinous lines ‘would rather be in jail / hell than alone,’ or skipping some songs entirely on her SOS album – ‘Nobody Gets Me’ or ‘Special’ – out of fear that it will somehow haunt and soundtrack my life.
It’s beyond not wanting to be ‘low-vibration’ or something; it’s the fear of digesting an emotion that isn’t mine. It is possible to listen to music without internalizing it, but for me, that’s always been hard with good music. But: Does not wanting to feel the emotion of the artist mean I have strong boundaries, or does it mean that I am emotionally avoidant? Does being so easily absorbed by ‘sad music’ – immediately projecting my own experiences on the blue canvas drawn by the artist – mean I harbour unprocessed sadness? Or is that perhaps just how any human should feel? My superstition to avoid internalizing sad music is very Caribbean auntie-coded, I know, but that’s where I’m at. Research tells me that I am not the only one.
The researchers behind the study ‘Exploring the Impact of Music Preferences on Depressive Symptoms and Meaning in Life: A Network Analysis Approach’ conclude that there is a scientific link between a listener’s mood and the music they listen to:
While listening to sad music can be therapeutic for some, it also poses risks for individuals with tendencies toward rumination or severe depression. Repeated engagement can intensify depressive symptoms and reinforce negative emotional cycles, leading to hopelessness and a reduced sense of purpose… In contrast, happy music typically induces positive mood changes and promotes feelings of joy and excitement. Positive music listening is associated with various beneficial outcomes, including improved mood regulation, enhanced social connections, and increased motivation. In the context of depressive mood, listening to upbeat, happy music can act as a counterbalance to negative emotions, fostering a sense of light-heartedness that can encourage individuals to engage more fully with their surroundings and potentially discover new meanings in their daily lives.
With this knowledge, it could also be derived that the emotion of the song has a similar, if not increased, effect on the person who hears the ‘sad’ song the most, sometimes over and over again in the studio, with the added responsibility of singing it night after night on tour – the musician. When developing her third album, Radical Optimism, Dua Lipa was asked why she doesn’t include any of her ‘trauma’ in her music, like her contemporaries. The singer pushed back, remarking that writing a ‘happy’ song that unites is often harder to write than an isolating ‘sad’ one. Reflective of the study’s findings, Dua Lipa states that she does not want to perform sad songs each night and feel sad herself:
“I want to bring people joy. I don’t want to go on stage and cry every night. I want to feel good, and I want my audience to feel good.”
Radical Optimism sounds like an affirming vision of the life she’s manifested for herself. I mean, look at her life: she has a hot fiancé, an extremely popular newsletter and book club, can split the G, and is a professional-level vacationeer. I’m going to have to take her advice on this one.
But still, I’m not obsessed with the binary the research suggests – that happy music makes you happy, and sad music makes you sad. I want to listen to James Blake without thinking he’s secretly making me depressed, or to play Tori Amos without feeling full of angst. There has to be a grey area for someone who wants to listen to Phoebe Bridgers or Summer Walker or Nina Simone – a chaotic, blunt rotation, but let me cook – and not feel heartbroken and taken for granted.
Which is why this study from Cell Press makes me feel slightly better. In the study, researchers exposed treatment-resistant depressed subjects to a mix of ‘sad’ and ‘happy’ classical music. What they found is that a listener’s mood is less tied to the emotional tenor of the song, but more to how they felt about the music:
The songs were a mix of sad tunes, such as Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, and more cheerful ones, such as the third movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. But the emotional context of the songs did not affect the listeners’ mood. “The improvement in depressive symptoms was not linked to the emotion of the music itself, but to the patient’s level of musical enjoyment,” explains Sun. The subjective preference for a particular song did have a significant impact. In other words, what most determined whether a patient would be cheered up by song was not if it was a happy or sad song, but whether they liked it. “People have different levels of connection with music, which can significantly affect therapeutic outcomes,” the expert adds. “This highlights the importance of personalizing music therapy.”
This tracks better for me. Listening to music I don’t like irritates me, and I guess, makes me unhappy. This ties more closely with how I enjoy and consume other art forms. I feel satisfied after reaching the sad end to a well-written book (the devastating human truths illustrated in any of Toni Morrison’s novels, the bleak interiority of Ottessa Moshfegh’s ‘unlikable’ protagonists, or, more recently, the wrenching conclusion of Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds), but feel pissed off after finishing literary fiction that is stylish but emotionally empty. I feel worse after watching a bad romance (Wuthering Heights) than I do after watching a good but depressing film (The Zone of Interest). Horror is my favourite film genre1, and despite its haunting misfortune and dread, I leave the theatre not with fear but a new thrill for life. I guess that’s true for all great art, regardless of how happy or sad it is. Great art is life-affirming, and there’s nothing that affirms your life more than being reminded of your capacity to live, an experience profoundly marked by both happiness and sadness. This is also why bad art = death.
With respect to music, I believe that its capacity for sadness comes down to the effectiveness of the artist and the receptivity (or fortitude lol) of the listener. All the artists that I have referenced are exceptional communicators, unlocking emotions in the listener not only through their lyricism but also through their delivery, the way they use their voice as an instrument. There are artists, like Robyn, who have become pioneers in disguising life’s most heartbreaking moments into dance floor hits. Her lyrics are sad if you listen, but the delivery and production are nothing short of uproarious. When I saw her perform her generational hit, ‘Dancing On My Own,’ at Brooklyn Paramount at the beginning of the year, I didn’t really know what emotion I felt other than alive. Conversely, when I listen to Cameron Winter’s ‘Drinking Age,’ – an artist I have yet to see live but need to – I understand less about the specifics of his fragmentary lyrics and more about how he is feeling. When the song ends, I’m left to wrench myself from the feelings he’s evoked in me and put a label on them myself. Good art does that, too.
Last weekend, I went to FKA twigs’ Body High concert at Madison Square Garden. Her music is experimental and avant-garde, but still has the accessible touchpoints of pop and R&B that make it feel both otherworldly and inhabitable. She headed towards the end of her performance with her most popular song to date, ‘Cellophane,’ a hauntingly fragile and somber portrait of the hardships of her two-year engagement to the actor Robert Pattinson, a relationship that fell victim to vicious, racist attacks from Pattinson’s superfans who were angry that their “Twilight prince” would be in love with a black woman.
That night, over nineteen thousand people watched in the stadium as she laced through the song’s refrain – “They want to see us, want to see us alone. They want to see us, want to us apart” – and trailed up into the climactic chorus of: “And didn’t I do it for you? Why won’t you do it for me? When all I do is for you?” At the song’s final inflection, with her shoes kicked off and her dress stripped to the side in a symbolic shedding of the self, twigs began to cry, beautifully whimpering and piercing the arena with emotion as she skillfully wailed through the remainder of the ballad. Her tears could have been a temporary flash of harboured resentment, or joyful tears of survival that, seven years after the song’s initial release, she has been able to convert a period of sadness into a breakaway hit that made her dreams come true. I gazed out at the crowd, all bound together by her sonic spellwork, and chose to believe the latter.
“They’re hating. They’re waiting, and hoping I’m not enough,” she concluded, mic to lips. I recognized the broken tension in her voice and felt my own throat grow thick, but I could not tell if the emotion was coming or going. And then the song changed, and the lights came on.
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The Grudge, Hereditary, and Suspiria are my Big Three.
Speaking from my own experience, a few years ago I was in a really depressed state and I saw some offhand quote on Instagram proposing the same idea - something like “of course you’re sad you’re listening to Melodrama by Lorde” - as an experiment, I started listening to “happier” music and I sort of attribute that switch to getting the motivation for getting out of the depression spiral. I still listen to sad songs & when I do, I make an effort to not empathize but rather to sympathize with the artist.
I’d hypothesize that sympathizing rather than empathizing with music might even make a person understand the music more, and get them out of their own feelings better.
Also just wanna say yay Robyn mention!! The dance x sad music combo really imitates life well imo - like yes there are sad moments but you’re still allowed (and welcome) to shake your ass and feel the beat!!! Both can exist at the same time!!! That’s life, baby!!!!!
love love loved this