There are some great songs based on happy emotions. “My Guy”, “My Girl” and “Good Day Sunshine” come immediately to mind.<\/p>\n
But the list of such songs is easily overshadowed by the far longer songs that tell of pain and sadness, of happiness thwarted. These range from great recent songs like “Bad Romance”, “Rolling in the Deep”, to classics like “When a Man Loves a Woman” and “Blues in the Night”.<\/p>\n
Clearly, as I wrote in an earlier post, people everywhere enjoy hearing songs of sorrow and heartbreak. As several people pointed out in response to that post, the expression of such emotions can be cathartic, and therefore hearing sad songs can help us to deal with our own inner turmoil in a safe way.<\/p>\n
It now occurs to me, as I see “Rolling in the Deep” stay atop the charts for so long, just as “Bad Romance” did before it, that there is a great net increase<\/i> of happiness as these artists find powerful ways to express their own inner pain.<\/p>\n
Perhaps there is some conservation principle at work here. Individual heartache can turn to art, and the diffusion of that art through the population creates a positive counterbalancing emotion within the larger society. Perhaps, on some level, what we are seeing here is an instinctive survival strategy on the part of our highly social species.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are some great songs based on happy emotions. “My Guy”, “My Girl” and “Good Day Sunshine” come immediately to mind. But the list of such songs is easily overshadowed by the far longer songs that tell of pain and sadness, of happiness thwarted. These range from great recent songs like “Bad Romance”, “Rolling in … Continue reading “Conservation of joy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7874"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7874"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7875,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7874\/revisions\/7875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}