Music does so much for us in our daily lives. For some, it can serve as a way to help get through a troubling moment in life, it could serve as a way to help concentration for those who have trouble paying attention sometimes or it could just serve as just a distraction from the hustle and bustle of daily life.
No matter who you are, music is guaranteed to have played a role in your life. Nowhere is this concept clearer than in the media. Video games and TV shows all contain perfect examples of this. What is an action seen with powerful music to accompany it? What is a death scene without either the lack of music or the inclusion of somber music? No matter if it is TV, a movie or a video game, music is necessary.
Take the Persona series, for example. If there is one core thing the Persona series is known for, other than its amazing storytelling and characters, is its music. Persona music can be heard almost everywhere. From streams on Twitch to Youtube videos, it can be found in all of these sorts of places. The question is then, what makes the music so popular? Well, there are several reasons for that.
The first reason is that it is catchy and can be very emotionally driven. In the series, you have songs like “It’s Going Down Now” and “Counterstrike” that play during battles. These songs are filled to the brim with energy. Anytime you start a fight in a game, it is always such an encouraging and powerful experience listening to these songs. This also is due to the help of the other reason, the lyrics.
Lyrics in Persona songs can be the most heartbreaking thing, such as “Heaven” in Persona 4, or they can be the biggest hype up like “You Are Stronger”, which helps promote higher and quicker flow for some people through the energy it tends to carry wherever it goes. In the snap of the finger, it can manage to change the whole mood of the environment around you.
I mean, just look at “Stranger Things”. With its collection of older music, it has managed to traumatize and embed some of those songs into hearts of its viewers, such as “Running Up That Hill”, which remained popular for several days following the end of season four. Then, there was the song “Dream a Little Dream of Me”, which in my personal opinion, left me feeling almost unnerved when hearing it after the events of season four.
The song “We’ll Meet Again”, I feel, is another example of a song that leaves an impact on the viewer. Showing up in shows like “Stranger Things”, season three and “Gravity Falls”, it has always left this feeling of deep terror within my heart. Despite being a more sad yet joyful song, through these shows it is able to gain this sinister feeling to it. It starts to take on this identity of a powerful and horrifying threat returning after having died or disappeared for a long time.
Something else cool is that the music doesn’t always have to fit. Take the new Deadpool movie for example. In “Deadpool and Wolverine”, it starts off with this really cool action scene with Deadpool using Wolverine’s skeleton as a weapon. Now, in most movies, you would expect to hear some really cool and intense music to accompany such gory and brutal visuals, but this is not a normal movie. Instead, it is followed by the song “Bye Bye Bye” by NSYNC.
Despite being far from normal for action scene music, it still manages to fit perfectly into the scene because Deadpool is a goofy character.
The song manages to add a sense of goofiness to the scene befitting a Deadpool movie, all the while still allowing the scene to come across as cool. It also helps through how recognizable the song is, as it was already a popular song long before the release of this movie.
In the end, this all goes to show that music is a vital part of our life, containing a deep connection to our mental state and conveying such emotions both with and without imagery.