Listen, not even the strongest man, or the most person, can resist a good beat, especially when there are many of his fellow human beings clapping along with it. People who found themselves surrounded by extremists report needing to put their hands in their pockets to avoid clapping along, and even your wife’s father, who hates you, can’t avoid dancing when the wedding band starts playing.
Simply put, catchy music can make us do plenty of things that we don’t intend to. But don’t think that words are off the hook. Well-recited poetry has charmed many defenceless maidens, and a strong propagandistic slogan gets mindlessly repeated time and time again, regardless of whether the people who say it agree with it or not.
But what happens when both the music and the words are impossible to resist? And, even more importantly, what happens when the music and the words pull in opposite directions? This is the experiment that Fox Run Sounds conducts on the single “Yuh O!” and it’s, frankly, up to every listener to provide evidence of their findings.
Listen to “Yuh O!” from a safe distance, and you’ll inexplicably find yourself on your feet to that smooth groove and to the clean guitar lines. Move closer to your speaker and listen to the words being sung, and you might well collapse to the floor and start asking yourself just what it is that you’re trying to achieve in this life of yours and why you’re so damn scared of everything all the time.
And if that’s precisely what happened, good! That’s what the DIY singer-songwriter going by the name Fox Run Sounds wants it. Now, which instinct is going to outweigh the other overall?
But, before you’re off to a dance club or to a corner for a healthy cry, also take a listen to the vulnerable, yet funny “My Medication,” a folk lament about anxiety and over-stimulation in which the singer-songwriter dares to ask if the things meant to bring us relief are also the ones keeping us in a loop of suffering.
Where does it all leave us? Entertained, but also, hopefully, with the aid of this small sample of Fox Run Sounds’s work, considering why we do what we do a little more clearly, and thinking of ways to break old patterns before they take us apart.
Social media links
