• So last night I was feeling pretty down, probably connected to having an exam today that I was in no way adequetly prepared to sit and wanted to listen to something cheerful to lift my mood. Searching for such an album proved a daunting task. Like Antoine Roquentin's reflection, my music collection was transformed into an amorphous abstraction of ugliness and despair. One of the questions asked by High Fidelity is which comes first the music or the misery? Do we listen to sad bastard music because we are miserable or are we miserable because we listen to music? Despite studies having failed to find a correlation between depressing music and negative mood, today I was thinking of this in relation to Nietzsche's often quoted phrase of he who fights monsters should take care so that he himself does not become a monster himself and when we gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back. If we listen to sad bastard music, we should take care that we ourselves do not become depressed, as listening to depressing music will affect us, although research does not support this. Earlier today, I was thinking of the popularisation of depression through albums such as Nine Inch Nails' "The Downward Spiral". I was wondering whether musicians as a side-product of their recounting depressive episodes facilitate depression amongst their listeners or make it seem desirable. I was thinking of this in relation to the propagation of "emo" and "goth" subcultures, in which negative affect seems to be a defining charcteristic, although this is clearly a stereotype. What I find alarming is the potential popularisation of the desiribility of depression, although as stated earlier there is no evidence supporting a causal link between depression and depressing music. Depression is an extremely dehabilitating illness and as someone who has been diagnosed with it, I wouldn't wish it upon anyone. It is crippling. One of the predictors for suicide is knowing someone who has themselves attempted to kill themselves, or who has in fact killed themselves. I was wondering whether this effect could be also seen through music which deals with such subjects. I'm not saying that such music isn't valid or that depressive episodes shouldn't be chronicled, it is possible that experiencing such works of art might prove to be cathartic to the listener, but we must tread carefully lest the abyss gazes back. I think that depressing music faces a similar dilemna to that of movies that depict the Holocaust, in that any attempt to portray it is simply going to be by necessity an abstraction of reality. You simply can not accurately depict an un imaginable horror. You can not fathom the pervasiveness of depression, and how it can instantaneously ruin a day unless you experience it first hand.

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