Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…He’s talking a little music theory there. Seventh and ninth over the chord that he’s playing. So if you’re playing a C chord, he’s singing a B, would be the seventh, D would be the ninth. And he does use a lot of those notes. But almost all these people that we’re talking… No, all these people that we’re talking about use these notes, and this is why their songs… And when I interviewed Sting, I called them surprise tones, and Sting’s like, “I like the way you use the word surprise.” Notes that are outside the chord that are dissonant with the chords that they’re playing, but then that creates emotion. Dissonance equals emotion. And that’s what I like. I want music to be… to depress me. Yeah. What is that? I don’t know. But melancholy, and I think you articulate it in Aries, it’s not actually that depressing. There’s something about that melancholy feeling that is somehow the other side of the coin of happiness. It’s a kind of longing. Or there’s a hopefulness to it. That aloneness that you feel. I mean, that’s actually like one of the intimate connections you have with music, is when you’re alone. There’s nothing like you’re alone in a car driving, listening to, like, whatever it is, Bruce Springsteen. Well, I think Louis CK has a bit about that. And was it Bruce Springsteen? But sometimes he has to pull over to the side of the road and just weep, or something like this. It’s just there’s something about that. Sometimes a song just connects with you. And I don’t know, nothing like a melancholy song could do that. It… You think about, like, maybe things you regret or how life could’ve worked out. And sometimes it’s not even about, like… It’s not even real. It just connects something in the soul. The uneasiness that we all feel. Maybe the loneliness we all feel that underpins so much of the human condition, and it just connects with that. I don’t know what that is. There’s a Kurt Cobain lyric. It was on the In Utero record, from the song Frances Farmer. The chorus part is, “I miss the comfort of being sad.”… and I was like, “Yes.” <> I was like, “Yeah, that’s it right there.”…

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