Emile Cioran was nudging us in this direction when he suggested that…
…if everything is a lie, is illusory, then music itself is a lie, but the superb lie…As long as you listen to it, you have the feeling that it is the whole universe, that everything ceases to exist, there is only music. But then when you stop listening, you fall back into time and wonder, ‘well, what is it? What state was I in?’ You had felt it was everything, and then it all disappeared.
Admittedly, there were few lyrics in the music he listened to, but when lyrics and music really click, this effect is all the more haunting.
Consider, for example, the following: Judy Collins’s rendition of Billy Edd Wheeler’s “The Coming of the Roads”:
[b]Now that our mountain is growing with people hungry for wealth
How come it’s you that’s a-going
and I’m left all alone by myself?
We used to hunt the cool caverns deep in our forest of green
Then came the road and the tavern and you found a new love it seems
Once I had you and the wildwood, now it’s just dusty roads
And I can’t help but blamin’ your going
On the coming, the coming of the roads
Look how they’ve cut all to pieces our ancient redwood and oak
And the hillsides are stained with the greases
That burned up the heavens with smoke
You used to curse the bold crewmen
who stripped our earth of its ore
Now you’ve changed and you’ve gone over to them
And you’ve learned to love what you hated before
Once I thanked God for my treasure, now like rust it corrodes
And I can’t help but blamin’ your goin’
On the coming, the coming of the roads.
Once I thanked God for my treasure, now like rust it corrodes
And I can’t help but blamin’ your goin’
On the coming, the coming of the roads.
And I can’t help but blamin’ your goin’
On the coming, the coming of the roads.[/b]
This is a song of loss. But the loss is both personal and political. But, again, if it is something you cannot relate to in your own life it won’t seem haunting at all. It’s personal, rooted subjunctively in dasein.