Music makes us feel. It can make us cry, it can give us a rush of adrenaline, it can make us nostalgic. In Sherman Alexie's short story with a long title, "Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Woodstock," the narrator Victor's, details his father's drift away from his family. It portrays many themes and issues like alcohol and cultural identity, but it also shows the uncanny power of music.
In the story, Victor only slowly started to understand his father's idolization of Jimi Hendrix. Until he states "The first time I heard Robert Johnson sing I knew he understood what it meant to be Indian on the edge of the twenty-first century, even if he was black at the beginning I the twentieth. That must have been how my father felt when he heard Jimi Hendrix." How can someone understand your struggles, yet have no experience with them? How does that sad song know exactly how you're feeling? Sure scientifically there are components of a song that invoke complex reactions in your brain, but music is art, and the age old adage of art that lies somewhere along "art is how you interpret it" explains it. Sure it may be a complex idea detailed by some French guy long ago in "The Death of the Author," but it makes sense. You're the one listening to the music.
Whatever Jimi Hendrix and Robert Johnson put emotionally into their music wasn't the same thing that Victor and his father got out. This "universal language" is a whole lot more complex and meaningful than any other language.
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