April Fools: The Music One

As is traditional, every year on April 1st, I write a description of the world that I was originally from, in preparation for being transported to some other world every year on April 2nd. This body has entirely too many inhabitants.¹

I had an easy time adjusting at first. This world isn’t very different from my homeworld: we have basically the same clothes in basically the same styles, basically the same restaurants serving basically the same cuisines, basically the same social norms and basically the same people violating them. I didn’t even get to escape Trump.

I first noticed a difference a few days after I came in, when I walked into a grocery store to pick up a few things and there was music.

It’s not that my homeworld doesn’t have recorded music. Most people listen to it at least sometimes—especially now that the Internet exists and you can get an infinite supply of free music without anyone knowing. I’m not a Puritan: recorded music and normal music play different roles; you can’t get a group together every time you want to listen to something.

But it was shocking to me to hear music playing in a grocery store, without even a content warning. I spent five minutes looking around for very quiet performers before I realized what was going on.

It turns out that, on Earth, recorded music isn’t stigmatized at all.

My parents were strict, so I didn’t get to listen to recorded music until college. I remember my first time buying headphones—my palms were damp with sweat and I was convinced the clerk knew what they were for and was silently judging me for being so pathetic. Which was ridiculous, of course; probably she got a dozen frightened eighteen-year-olds buying their first headphones every week. But I wasn’t a teenager anymore. I thought I’d grown out of my silly opinions about recorded music.

But I was totally unprepared for Earth. Parents put their children in front of Baby Shark videos when they were even the slightest bit tired of singing. Instead of asking a friend to perform at their wedding, brides and grooms put on a record made by a complete stranger. TV shows and movies don’t just have diegetic performances by the actors: they put on completely unrelated songs that don’t even exist in universe. I’m not going to lie, I spent six hours straight listening to recorded music and bopping around the house.

My next discovery came two weeks later, and it was an unpleasant one. Noticing that we hadn’t gotten together to make some music, I innocently asked when our next household group-singing event was planned and reassured my housemates that I was happy to learn Earth songs as we went. (The sheer volume of recorded music would help.)

“Oh,” came the reply. “No one wants to hear any of us sing. We’re so bad it’s practically a violation of the Geneva Conventions.”

I pressed. An entire household of people who couldn’t sing? It was unbelievable. I needed to hear this for myself.

Finally, after I swore up and down that I knew what I was in for and I wasn’t going to make fun of them or hold their bad singing against them, they sang. And you know what? They were fine. Untrained, sure, but nothing a little practice couldn’t fix.

I soon realized that this wasn’t an isolated incident. Families don’t sing together. Parents joke that they sing lullabies “until my child grows up and realizes just how bad I am.” Parties have no singing unless everyone is so drunk that they’ve lost all their inhibitions. When asked what instruments they play, people say “oh, violin in high school, but I haven’t picked it up in a decade.” Karaoke is primarily a form of group bonding via public humiliation. The few people I knew who sing are all part of a choir that does regular performances: on Earth, what I thought was a human universal is a hobby somewhat less popular than rock-climbing.

And all these people are fine at making music. I want to emphasize that I wasn’t from some utopia of musical perfection. We were better at singing than Earthlings were, but only because we sang more—Earthlings have normal voices for a ten-year-old from my world. People get out of rhythm, don’t hit the right note, have a smaller range than the song really calls for. This is normal! This is how music works in real life and not in the media.

Except on Earth it’s not, is it.

On Earth, everyone listens to professional musicians: people who are quite literally one in a million, or at least one in a hundred thousand, in terms of vocal talent. These musicians perform hundreds of takes, and you only get to hear the one that’s the best. Any time they miss a note is left on the cutting room floor. Innovations like Autotune make singers’ voices superhumanly beautiful—presenting a standard of vocal quality that literally no human being can meet. Popular songs are written for these extraordinary outliers: of course you don’t sound good, your favorite song wasn’t written to make a normal voice sound good.

Back home, you hear professional musicians at concerts a few times a year, and maybe when you listen to recorded music at home two or three times a week. Most of the time, when you listen to music, it’s because someone you know is making it. On Earth, some people listen to literally ten hours of recorded music a day. Normal music is one percent of the music that an average person listens to. Maybe less.

Of course you’re ashamed of your voice. Of course you don’t want to listen to other people singing. You’ve been habituated to the greatest singers in the world. You can no longer tolerate normalcy.

And so much is lost. Humans didn’t evolve to listen to Spotify. We evolved to make music. You have all lost a basic human capacity. It’s like I’ve come to a world where everyone lives on Soylent and protein bars and had tasty food once for their bat mitzvah, or a world where no one has friends because large language models are so much less stressful and drama-prone, or where no one fucks because porn’s hotter anyway. And worst of all, no one seems to know what they’ve lost.

Making music together creates a sense of belonging and unity. When you make music with someone, you trust them more, you want to cooperate with them, you’re more likely to make small sacrifices that bring them great joys, you feel like you’re all on the same team. Is it too much to attribute the high divorce rate on Earth to couples not singing together? Is it too much to say that you’re all lonely because when you sing you connect to no one but a speaker?

It hurts to see someone, full of un-self-conscious joy that they want to express in wholesome song, shut it down because being heard singing is as shameful as being seen taking a shit.

I am begging you, people of Earth: sing! If you haven’t ever learned how, you can take lessons or learn from an app. (A friend swears by Singer’s Studio.) Gather together your family, turn off the recorded music, and make your own. Invite friends over and hand out lyric sheets. When you feel joy or grief and want to express your feelings in music, let it out. When you have a boring task to liven up, try a favorite song or two. You can have recorded music to sing along to if you must, but for God’s sake make music.

1. My husband says he appreciates all the surprises.