In honor of Black Music Month, I believe it is necessary to give flowers to my very favorite medium of expression: music.
Source: whitebalance.space / Getty
Coming from a musical family — and having multiple symbols of music tattooed on my skin — I know intimately that few things can capture the full spectrum of human emotion the way music does. And I mean the full spectrum. The kind of range that makes you laugh, ugly cry, throw your hands up, and feel seen, all within the same three minutes and forty-two seconds.
Music isn’t background noise. For so many of us, it’s the thread woven through every significant moment of our lives. It’s the song playing on the night you fell in love, the one that got you through the worst morning of your life, the one you can’t hear anymore without being teleported right back to that place, that person, that version of yourself. A good friend of mine described it perfectly when he said, “A song can be a marker for a time, event, person, or experience. It’s an emotion creator.”
Music as Catharsis: Feeling It All So You Don’t Explode
Music can be a vehicle for cathartic release. It’s a safe place to feel all of it: the love, the rage, the longing, the sorrow, the joy and pain, and the victory lap (shouts out to Frankie Beverly and Nipsey Hussle for those last two). There’s something profoundly freeing about a song that meets you exactly where you are and refuses to rush you out of your feelings.
Take Erykah Badu’s Green Eyes. In that song, we follow a woman reconciling the deeply complicated emotions of a relationship coming to an end. If you listen closely, you can hear her moving through the stages of grief in real time: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, achingly, acceptance. It’s not a song so much as it is a sonic therapy session. And anyone who has ever loved someone through a painful ending knows exactly what she means with every note.
That’s what music does. It takes the unspeakable and makes it singable.
When Words Aren’t Enough
Sometimes, even language fails us. The English language has its limits when it comes to expressing the depths of human suffering. This is where music steps in and does what words simply cannot.
There’s a particularly poignant scene in the Oscar-winning film Sinners in which Delta Slim, played brilliantly by Delroy Lindo, recounts the harrowing and traumatizing story of his friend’s brutal lynching. At one point in the scene, Slim is so overcome by emotion that only a guttural moan — raw and unfiltered — can accurately convey the agony conjured by the memory. That moan, accompanied by Sammie’s guitar, morphs into an impromptu Blues tune. In my opinion, it’s one of the film’s most powerful moments because it perfectly illustrates music’s ability to express what we feel when our own words aren’t up to the task.
The Blues, after all, wasn’t born in a recording studio. It was born in the fields, in the grief, in the survival. Black music has always been a container for pain that could not otherwise be safely articulated or held.
Music as Motivation (For Better or Worse)
Here’s where it gets interesting — and a little complicated.
Music can motivate us, both positively and negatively. We’ve all been there: you’re in the gym, you’re tired, you’re done, and you are *this close* to packing it up early. Then a banger drops in your playlist that somehow rewires your entire nervous system, and suddenly you’ve got three more sets in you. That is not a coincidence. Music activates the brain’s reward system, releases dopamine, and genuinely shifts your physiological state. The right song, at the right moment, can push you past what you thought your limit was.
Beyond the gym, music can move people to make real changes. It can drive you to finally do that thing you’ve been sitting on. It can restore your faith when it’s running on fumes. It has historically started movements, not figuratively, but literally. Think about the role of music in slavery, in the Civil Rights Movement, in the rise of hip-hop as social commentary, in protest anthems that galvanized generations. Music doesn’t just reflect culture. It shapes it.
We also can’t ignore that the power of music can go both ways. Some of us can recall a time when hearing a particular song put us in the mood to do a very wrong thing and feel completely justified doing it. You know, the ones that can “make you do wrong” (*cough*…hot grits…*cough*).
The power of music is morally neutral; it amplifies whatever it touches. There have even been legal cases where people tried to argue that “the music made them do it.” That should tell you everything you need to know about just how deeply music can reach into our psychology.
Music as Medicine: The Neurological Component
Dr. Oliver Sacks, renowned neurologist and author of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, put it this way: “Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears — it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more — it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”
Read that again. Even when no medication can.
Music therapy is a legitimate clinical practice used with patients experiencing dementia, Parkinson’s disease, stroke recovery, trauma, and more. Patients who have lost the ability to speak can often still sing. People with severe memory loss can recall songs from decades ago with perfect clarity. Music accesses parts of the brain that standard treatment sometimes cannot reach. It doesn’t just feel healing; it is healing, documented, and clinically supported.
Music as the Group Therapy We Didn’t Know We Were In
In some ways, music benefits us the same way group therapy does. One of the reasons group therapy can be so powerful is that it allows us to hear our own feelings articulated by someone else, which validates our experience in a way that our own personal reflection may not. You stop feeling like something is wrong with you. You realize you’re not alone.
Music gets us. It sees us. It confirms that someone else has felt exactly what we’re feeling: the jealousy, the anger, the grief, the hope, the heartbreak, the complicated joy. It tells us we’re not crazy and we’re not alone. And when we sing along, or rap every word, or hum it quietly under our breath, we get to release it all. The good, the bad, the ugly, and the in-between.
That’s not a small thing. In a world that often pushes us to perform wellness rather than practice it, having a space (even if that space is just your car, a pair of headphones, or your shower) where you can feel it all and let it move through you? That’s medicine. And Black music, in particular, has been giving it to us for generations.
