Mood-altering Substance

Music has become a big part of life since its creation. It has been used in many ways but none more common than to express our emotion and mood. If your feeling sad you usually play something with a slower tempo with depressing lyrics. If your feeling happy you most likely play something mid-tempo with lyrics that are very optomistic. Whatever your feeling at that moment usually determines what kind of music you would insist on listening to. If this is true than is it possible that the opposite is also true? For example, if your listening to R&B do you start to feel sad and depressed? To this question I respond by first saying that I think its highly possible that music can control what mood we feel. However, I don't believe that it has the power to completely influence our mood. Second, I want anyone reading this to think of a time when they were mad, sad, happy or whatever. If you were mad were you listening to country? Most likely you weren't because you were in a mood to listen to something with a stronger tone to it like heavy metal, hardcore rap, or rock. Whatever mood you were feeling your music choice most likely reflected the mood you were feeling. Does this then mean that we can blame music artist for the feelings that we get from listening to their music? The answer is quite simply no, because even though the music may influence our mood it doesn't necessarily decide what mood we're going to be in. However, in some places music has been banned because some people believe that it's a mood-altering substance. You might be asking yourself as to why someone would be stupid enough to do something as lame as this. The answer itself is more obvious than you would think. It is simply because people don't want anything to do with something that they see as a threat to their way of life or something that might be offensive to someone. The same thing happens everytime some new type of music comes up. It happend way back when rap and rock came into the business and it's happening now with a new type of rap music known as grime. Grime is a fast paced type of music that requires you to rap at extremely fast speeds. It's still relatively underground but has gained enough of a fan base for someone to hear it and find something offensive about it. So far complaints have come in about how it caused teenagers to experience aggresive mood swings and so called "episodes". Is it true that this music has enough power to truly influence someone so much that they experience mood swings and "episodes"? I would say that its very unlikely, but I suppose it might have some influences. However, any influences, if any at all, would be so small that I seriously doubt that it would really have any affect on anyones mood. So is it true that music can control our mood? I say no, but there is always a possibility. I would say that music is a strong contributing factor in putting us in a situation to feel a certain mood, but no more than that.