Blog #1

Music has a way of comforting me even when I am unable to describe my own emotions to myself. I often find myself stumbling upon a few seconds worth of notes that distinctively stand out to me whether it’s discovering a personally profound understanding of lyrics or a resounding connection to a melody of bottomless meaning to me. For example, after my parents and I dropped my sister off at college for her freshman year, I listened to Coldplay the entire eight hour drive home. Though my sister always refers to it as depressing, Coldplay's reassuring music soothed my exaggerated sense of sadness and abandonment. The meaningful sounds and lyrics lead me to realize that I was ironically not alone in my loneliness. I was able to lose myself in the strengthening words and profound notes.

Similarly, the invisible man is able to gain a better understanding of himself through music. He desires to "feel" the "vibrations" of Louis Armstrong's "What Did I Do To Be So Black and Blue" (Ellison 8). The song describes the emotional exhaustion that accompanies continual, unwarranted discrimination and hatred and the desire of acceptance. Though blacks are equal to whites on the inside as human beings, they faced bleak futures at the time due to society's longing for light skin. The song is particularly meaningful to our narrator because it embodies his feelings of invisibility. Though Armstrong, according to the invisible man, was unaware of his invisibility, he was able to honestly sing about the blacks' loss of humanity and hopelessness.