Music has been around for 35,000 years according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Music was created to help people coordinate their movements while engaging in productive activities. Music can raise someone’s mood, get them excited, or even make them calm and relaxed. But what happens when a musician dies? Is that purpose lost forever?
People create music in hopes to express their thoughts and feelings they’ve had written on paper. Music was created to bring people with a common interest together for pleasure and to share their art within the many genres. At some point, everyone has connected with an artist’s music on a personal level.
They let us see a different point of view through their music. It can be humbling for an audience that doesn’t have it as bad. Their words give hope to those who have it bad or worse, advising them to continue fighting their demons, because in the end there will come a point that all their troubles will vanish.
These late artists are the voice of the unheard.
Late rapper XXXTentacion was killed in a June 2018 shooting. As an artist he has inspired many teenagers with his lyrics, but a fan who was truly inspired was Swiss student Ambika Ramachandran, “his songs Hope and Save Me,” helped her, “connect to another zone teleporting me to another place in my mind where I just imagine a better life for myself,” she said in a phone interview.
In 2015 late rapper Juice Wrld had taken on the rap industry, escalating his career; becoming a prominent Gen Z rapper to break big fast. According to Vox, an American news website, “He attracted artists from other genres as collaborators because he had mastered a radio-friendly kind of misery, taking the sung-rap style to a much higher place than many of his peers.”
I spoke to Guillermo Cordero, a big fan of Juice Wrld to get his point of view on his favorite rapper and he had a lot to share. Cordero began by saying, “At the time I was very depressed, I felt like there was a lot of [things] wrong with me… my best friend Matt introduced me to Juice when all his music was about heartbreak and depression, It made me feel like I wasn’t alone anymore, because I related to his music,” he said.
In a separate interview Cierra Olvera also mentioned how Juice Wrld was the artist that helped, “teach her heartbreak through other’s eyes and struggles that others face,” she continued by saying, “he reminds me that we can all become numb but at the same time we have to move past pain and essentially thug it out,” she said.
Another highly popular artist was late rapper Lil Peep. Amongst many interviews Danielle Debock’s stood out the most.
“A lot of his songs deal with the direct impact of being alone like his song ‘Right here,’ which made me feel that he was going to be there for me or that someone else in the universe feels like how I do,” she said. “He talks about how people nowadays only want drugs and fake stuff and no one cares about life and living dreams.”
Debock credits his lyrics Lil Peep with “[helping] me realize that we are more than materialistic items and we are all people who are capable of feelings,” she said.
Although many popular music today is based around drug usage in the teen and young adult years the message artists send to their audience empowers through the message they try to get across. I believe artists try their best to warn us about the other side of life; the struggles they faced as a child, watching their family being killed in the streets, and losing their families to drugs just to follow behind in their footsteps.
The power artists have to influence a person to a generation is strong, and should not be taken for granted. Artists are the voices for those who can’t speak for themselves.