Why Do We Listen to Sad Music When We're Sad?

The album cover of Stranger, by the Swedish rapper Yung Lean.

A young man sits on his bed, having just learned his father has passed away. He has headphones on, listening to ___ music.

What word did you fill in the blank with? Sad? Why?

To illustrate precisely the absurdity of listening to sad music while one is sad, let us turn to Family Guy. Our hero, Peter, begins sobbing in his car, listening to the radio blare Iris by the Goo-Goo dolls. As the song ends, Happy by Pharrell Williams begins playing. Peter hears this, stops sobbing immediately, and starts dancing with a grin. He turns to the observer, and explains his odd behavior: “[I’m] very easily influenced by music.”

Is this absurd scenario not a mirror image of the phenomenon where we sit on our beds, already sad after hearing some piece of news, and turn on a sad song? Peter hears a sad song and becomes sad, which is portrayed as absurd. Perhaps this is not because music is neutered and shouldn’t make us feel anything: Perhaps the real humor is that this is an example of reverse causation. In the real world, we listen to sad music after we’re sad.

If we listen to happy songs to make us happier, and exciting songs to make us more excited, why do we listen to sad songs? Rather than making us happier, sad music sinks us deeper into melancholy. Do we do it to make ourselves sadder? How is this rational?

Perhaps we can look at psychoanalysis to uncover what is going on: the truth is that sad music isn’t necessarily making us sad, but rather, mapping our sadness onto a safety net of cultural signifiers, a mirror that doesn’t reflect our sadness-in-itself, but a figure of sadness distorted into the shape of Radiohead’s Creep.

Let us take romantic music as a jumping-off point to examine sad music. Take an expensive restaurant playing violin music over its speakers.

Was the romantic environment really “there” before we played the music? If you think that it was, was the romantic environment really there before the candles were lit? Was it there before the restaurant was even constructed?

Most people would say yes to the music, but would eventually have some sort of bright line where they say “The romantic environment is gone”. But candles, restaurants, and music don’t contain any romance themselves, just like how a piece of wood shaped into a cross contains no religion inside of it. Rather, it is the symbolic significance constructed from the relations between us, from culture, from religion, from our experience with the world.

The fact that abstract concepts really are stored inside material objects is interesting, but the real insight to be gained is that the relationship works backward. These material objects link up to other signifiers, simultaneously losing concepts they try to represent and gaining other concepts. The violin music is not just romantic, but it links to some sense of antiquity, some sense of grandeur, some sense of class. If the candle is made from cheap wax, it signifies falsehood, some grander sense of deceit.

Lacan, the progenitor of these concepts, formulates the mediator of these cultural symbols as the idea of the Big Other. The world is presented to us as a chaotic mess, and we separate things from each other (a tree from the ground) using symbols mediated by our cultural authority. The Big Other is the thing that gives objects symbolic potency; the Big Other imbues a candle with romance, a song with its sadness, and a soldier with honor. Lacan believes that the process of consciousness is perceiving something, and then presenting it to the Big Other so that the Other can induct it into our symbolic order, link it up to other signifiers, and ascribe it with meaning.

Crucially, during this traumatic process of symbolic mapping, one experiences a sense of catharsis: “My pain is symbolized: thus, my pain is real. Let us now return to sad music, and see how this specific instance of symbolic mapping generates a sense of catharsis for the listener.

When I feel truly sad, my body’s intrinsic way of handling it is crying. Why? It is not just enough to cry in front of other people, which signifies, and communicates my pain to them; after all, I have cried alone, in my room. Everyone has. The question becomes: Who are we crying to? What good do we gain by signifying our pain into the void?

The answer is within the signification process: By crying, we map our pain onto something identifiable, something concrete: We map our pain onto the cultural lifeworld of signifiers and signified. By crying by ourselves, we are telling not other people per se that we are sad, but the cultural big observer, the Lacanian Big Other, that we are sad. We are mapping our sadness onto a real-world phenomenon: By crying alone in our room, the most sincere form of sadness, we are telling the world that we are sad. We are hanging up our sadness into the world of signifiers, next to the violin that signifies romance and the candle that signifies cheapness.

Why does signifying our pain generate a sense of catharsis? Three hypotheses:

One solution is simply the process of communication itself. We always experience catharsis when someone else has been through our problems when our pain is communicable: Misery loves company because it detests alienation. Our own identity is fabricated on the signification process: Any attempt to define our identity must use words, cultural touchstones, and interact with the cultural big other. Thus, by listening to sad music when we’re sad, we’re not just telling the cultural lifeworld we’re sad: We’re adding this sadness to our identity.

Another reason is that during this signification process, something profound is lost. The trauma unique to communication works in its favor: When I color my sadness with an album that textures it in a specific way, my sadness transforms to resemble that song. The map precedes the territory.

Finally, and perhaps most radically, the signification process allows the subject to lie. Before communication, one cannot lie. It is impossible. No mask exists without communication. But as we develop language, we also gain the ability to slide the “mask” clean on. Crying alone, or listening to sad music, signifies our pain to the big other: So objectively, sadness is signified: But we are free to think of what we want in our head.

If this example seems odd to you, look at Zizek’s example of the Tibetan prayer wheel. Zizek, a Lacanian, demonstrates this objectivization by pointing to a Tibetan tradition of writing down one’s prayers and placing them on a windmill. This is done alone, so it is not for other monks: Rather, it is for the big Other. The human mind is impure: This externalization allows the mind to think of whatever fantasy it wants while praying still occurs.

Observe how many people instinctively draw the cross before doing something risky: These people are not lying to you about being Christian, but believe that the big Other (in this case, god) will really fall for it. Objectively, prayer is still occurring.

As a final example, a well-known phenomenon in leftist circles is the misogynist non-misogynist. Here, a leftist figure spouts feminist, anti-sexist words: Then, is discovered to have been committing some awful crime against women. What happened here? How could have come to the right conclusions, yet really harbor these thoughts?

Perhaps what is going on is inside the signification process, within the process of talking to people. As long as feminist words are said, the cultural big other (the leftist circle) believes that I am a feminist, and thus I can hold on to the mental state of being a misogynist. In a similar, less dark way, the song feels for me: Because my sadness is reflected into the signifying mirror of the big Other, I no longer need to hold on to this mental state. I have already integrated it into my identity. The song is how I am feeling.

To return to the young man at the beginning of this essay, the reason he listens to sad music is not because he wants to compound the sadness of his father’s death: Perhaps he listens to sad music to mirror his sadness into the cultural lifeworld, to mirror it until it slowly starts to disappear within the endless chain of signification, deep into the arms of the big cultural other. The young man is listening to sad music precisely because we are observing him. Don’t blink!