Aeterna's Blog

I’m someone who loves music and can get great satisfaction out of listening to it. For example in the morning going to work or maybe when I’m out cycling and it starts to rain. Other people tend to hurry home frustrated, I’ll find myself enjoying the trip with music. Probably aided by the fact that I don’t mind getting rained upon much, but the fact is that music makes everything better or at least more bearable. It’s something you can always fall back on when you’re feeling down or to give you hope or sheer pleasure.

Speaking to other people though, I don’t normally get the feeling that other people see it as much more than something to listen to. That is something I have never quite been able to understand, as I’ve loved music for many years now. To give an example; I play a bunch of games over others because I can mute them easily and listen to music instead. Even when I’m lying in bed after just waking up or sitting at work, or at any other moment I’ll likely have a song in my head.

One of the things I also love about music is that what you get out of a song will often change with time and as such many people will have a completely different opinion on what a song is about. This is what makes it such a personal and powerful thing and something that truly has no equal.

edit:
As for my music taste; I basically listen to metal and the seemingly endless subgenres the genre has. More focused on the symphonic/melodic types than others. But it varies from deathmetal to folkmetal to thrashmetal. To a lot of people it all sounds the same, but to someone who’s been in the genre it’s as different as it gets. I don’t think this really matters, except for the atmosphere at concerts/festivals. I noticed in the comments that you guys mentioned moshpits (&circlepits), which I don’t go in anymore. I tend to be right in front of or slightly to the side of them.

Concerts

As such I’ve been going to concerts for a pretty long time now, my first being when I was 13 in 2003. Ever since that concert I’ve loved going to them and the experience is always good to absolutely exhilarating. There is something about them, maybe it’s the people who share a liking, are maybe like-minded or the sheer release of living in the moment. Everybody is open to talk to anybody and you’ll often find yourself talking with a group of essentially strangers, which is something that otherwise simply doesn’t happen in the Netherlands.

Other than that there is the fact that you can completely lose yourself in the music at concerts, sure it’s loud, sure there’s (usually) thousands of people directly around you, but that doesn’t matter. When a band comes up on stage and starts playing a song you’ll just rock out/shout along with the song and at that moment in time; nothing else exists in the world. It’s such a release that I can’t even explain it, I’ve been sitting at this sentence for a good while and can’t find any sentence or word that would even approximate that feeling.

At the same time there are people standing in front of the concert who are just standing there, not moving, not participating at all. I always have to wonder what these people are doing there, especially at the front where the real fans normally are. This is also one of the reasons that I’m wondering if music just simply doesn’t mean as much to others as it does to me, if people are perhaps afraid of letting go, even at concerts among other fans? To me there isn’t a place where I would feel more safe or at ease than at a concert, I always think others feel the same way.

So I have some questions for you:

1. Do you merely listen to music or does it mean more for you?
2. Do you go to concerts, and if so, what type of concerts (think genre)?
3. If you go to concerts, how do you behave there?