‘Scientists’, as a generic, oft-quoted sub-group of society, sure have a lot to answer for.

Heathens of nature who never subscribed to the comforting hereditary notions of ignorance being bliss and that not knowing something neuters its ability to hurt you, these starch-coated, hairy-eared Bunsen-jockeys seem intent on detailing precisely how each and every aspect of modern life will eventually kill us. Fags, booze, randy promiscuity, burgers, chocolate, fizzy drinks, E-numbers, recreational drugs and good old fashioned laziness will apparently dispatch us quicker that a fist fight with an oncoming Volvo, and as soon as the belief that just one more slimy pasty will send us wobbling into the next life sufficiently terrifies us into venturing outside for a run we are informed that the sun’s carcinogenic rays will delight in giving us tumours almost instantaneously, with the only consolation being  that the steady oozing of the icecaps into the oceans ensures that you’ll certainly have drowned before they do.   

Just as a sane person, in light of the overwhelming empirical evidence that life itself is out to kill you, may, in these morbid times,  turn to religion – the last bastion of the desperate and ignorant – ‘scientists’ have discovered that the inherent human belief in a god is simply due to a gene; nothing more than an atavistic relic of an amino acid that predisposed the carriers to work together in their shared pious reverence, allowing the stray gene to be passed down within the group’s descending generations while a smug Charles Darwin looked on voyeuristically from a nearby thicket.  

So thanks a lot science – everything enjoyable in life will do nothing but hasten death and once that happens there’s absolutely nothing afterwards beyond The Great Abyss. This is the same science that reduced love to a simple splatter of neuro-chemical impulses akin to the one that occurs after the consumption of large quantities of chocolate. And now, in a final attempt to ruin life for everyone in the world before the Large Hadron Collider folds it up like an origami goose and pulls it through a hole the size of a flea’s face, ‘scientists’ are attempting to dissect and ascertain what makes music music. Nothing is sacred to these people. 

In trying to ruin the world by explaining it completely, like having a man on screen at all times during The Thunderbirds shouting ’But look at the strings!!’, science has created the horrifically named but actually quite interesting discipline of Biomusicology. This is the study of the evolutionary implications music had on the grunty, ‘me Tarzan!!’ hominid brain right up through the Descent of Man, and also its functions in other species who also like to ‘get down’, including the funktastic whale and hip ‘n’ happening bird. Any self-respecting hippy will gladly pontificate on the brilliance of whale song as a medium, but without the requisite level of amyl-nitrate and mescaline in the blood any song structure can go unnoticed by a layman, who may be surprised to learn that whale music contains rhythm and rhyme in much the same way as our own, despite monkey/sea-cow evolutionary branches diverging from one another over 60 million years ago. So man didn’t actually invent music - just the keyboard and the triangle. 

In one of those ‘No shit, Sherlock’ moments the benevolent cult of life-sapping scientists has proved what everyone who survived the hormonal foodfight of puberty already knows: music elicits a strong emotional response in the listener. In scans by large, frightening tomb-like machines the limbic system, the emotional nerve centre of the brain, lights up like Blackpool illuminations in response to musical stimuli. This is one of the most ancient parts of our brain, and one we share with virtually every other mammalian species on the planet, suggesting the appreciation of music has been around for millennia and may even predate human language. Primitive bone flutes (You, sniggering! Get out!),  the oldest of which has been dated at around 55,000 years old, have been found at sites across Europe,  possibly dropped by The Rolling Stones around the time of their first world tour.  

Why would California Man go to all the effort of sitting in his cave painstakingly crafting instruments when he could be outside in the sun doing something else? Science is always good at explaining hows, but what about the whys? That pervert Darwin said the only reason for any trait or behaviour to persist over time is if it provided a beast with some evolutionary advantage over its jealous peers. Some ‘scientists’ claim that music, like religion, promoted social cohesion in early man and hairy woman and helped usher in an age of living in groups protected in numbers and never more than twenty feet away from another convenient club-and-drag sexual encounter, but anyone who’s had an inexplicable crush on someone for no other reason than their musical ability knows this isn’t the whole truth.  

The notches on the bedpost of Gene Simmons are proof incarnate of music’s place as a courting technique. In evolutionary terms, musical ability suggests the presence of creative lateral thinking and complex pattern recognition which would be useful survival traits in any troglodyte singleton in the anticipation and evasion of predators and in the procurement of tasty seasonal snacks. Many animals use song to unleash some serious woo on potential mates, and brain scans on humans also revealed that the songs that triggered the largest emotional response also triggered neural pathways most associated with eating and having sex. So one can deduce that, biologically speaking, the all the brain wants is food, music and some naughty lovin’. There can’t be too many people out there who would disagree with this notion.  

So for all its ills and as the Earth suffocates under the rolling clouds of a nuclear winter, at least we will be able to say that science has done something good for us in proving that music’s as much a part of our makeup as any other primitive urge, and also in proving that, as long suspected, people with no interest in it are in fact less human than the rest of us and should be painstakingly ignored. But picture in your head a Neanderthal man hammering out tasty beats on the skulls of his vanquished foes, then picture Ian Brown playing bongos. Not moved on that much have we?      

Weren't that educational? Agree with all us humans want is 'food, music and naughty lovin'? Ian Brown- what is he?

Posted In Comment, Sep 09 2009. Words - Luke