WELCOME TO ASLAN MEDIA MUSIC!

Breaching the Surface

The cacophony and chaos that seems to confound the world daily often makes it difficult for us to find any inherent value in something as seemingly trivial as music. Music, songs, poetry, etc., are viewed by some as nothing more than “leisure”. The various modern mediums (television, radio, the web, etc.) that inundate us demand that we focus on a myriad of crises, disasters, and injustices rather than the more quiet beauty that is easily overlooked.

Recently, I was sitting in front of the television trying to catch a basketball score when the horrific events of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan began to unravel before me on various news channels. I was spellbound by the destruction; by its otherworldly power, as it razed towns and cities. I jumped online and found various feeds documenting the devastation and felt, perhaps for a moment, just how insignificant our existence can seem in the grand scheme of things. A dissonant cynicism swept over me as I readied myself for an existential kind of Nausea.

Then, suddenly, while stumbling through the digital landscape I found a song, a simple, resonant song about overcoming some kind of pain or longing in one’s life. Imaad Wasif’s live take of his song, Oceanic, was a marvel to hear as I sat in front of my computer in the AM dark. It’s not about anything momentous or grand, yet, it speaks with a profundity that echoes the lines of the great American poet, William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult

to get the news from poetry

yet men die miserably every day

for lack of what is found there.

It’s not that I felt compelled to forget the world around me as I listened to the song. No. But I felt lifted and carried along by the gentle melody. The song had allowed me to breach through myself and within those brief, few minutes in a small, cluttered bedroom in one of the world’s most hectic cities, it let me float above our sad world and see its beauty.

*Photo Credit: Darren Tunnicliff

• < Prev
• Next >