How music changed the way I see the world..

“Without music life would be a mistake”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Music is one of the most important things in my life,, and I can not imagine a life without it.
Music has changed my life, and the way I see the world and the people in it.

Living as a teenager in Denmark, the amount of radio-stations playing music was limited. One day my high-school teacher installed Napster on the computers in our classroom and I can still to this day recall the feeling I had when I first opened it, searched for a song and was able to download it within 10 minutes. It was amazing and for me, very addictive. I started to go further in the search of my daily kick of finding new music and started hanging out on IRC-chatrooms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat), where people would share their passion for new music and share with the others.

The way we shared music with strangers can be described with the way Jan Pieterseen describes one of the factors of globalization:

“Globalization crosses boundaries of government and business, media and social movements, general and academic interest.” (Nederveen Pietersen, 2004, p. 7)

Even though we were pirates and most of the people never bought any music, we shared the same passion, and soon started friendships because of this. Because of this I met a lot of cultures I would never have thought about meeting and shattered a lot of my prejudices I had about various sub-cultures.

An example to this is the heavy –and death metal culture. Before I got to know heavy-metal fanatics, I thought most of them were some form of violent bikers that would hate a ‘regular’ guy like me, who were not dressed from top to toe in black and head banging. As it turned it this was not at all true, and I got to realize that heavy-metal fans are some of the most pleasant people in the world and are very passionate about "non-violence" at the concerts/festivals.

Copenhell Festival 2011, courtesy of bt.dk

I was surprised by the diversity in the heavy-metal culture, where you see people from all over the world, different cultures, age and professions. Through my passion for this genre of music, I got to know people from all over the world, students to lawyers, all connected through their passion for the music.


References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat

Nederveen Pieterse, J, 2004, Globalization: consensus and controversies, Globalization and culture: global mélange, Rowan & Littlefield, Lanham, Md.

Copenhell 2011 picture: http://a.bimg.dk/node-images/219/4/620x411-c/4219389-copenhell.jpg