Sounds of Silence 

Music is a medium of communication and entertainment, for some people it is art. 
Communication and entertainment can be sold. They are products, made under the rules of money. 
What can be sold is, at least in parts, a thing which can be used. Music is a communication and entertainment thing which
can be used. Its use must be accurately categorized in genres and styles. Seldom music is found without related style and genre because these categories help us to bring the perfect thing to its willing recipient. Who, hopefully, spends some money for the thing. 
Hip Hop to the Hip Hopper, Jazz to the Jazz-Freak, Mozart to the classic lover. A splendid world of fittings. But...
"The rest is noise" as the title of Alex Ross' brillant book indicates. Or, for those, who like it softer: The rest is silence and its songs.
John Cage and his "4'33" - a masterpiece with no score, because it only exists in natural sounds during the moments of its concert.

And there we are, trapped and snared in an ambigous world between total consumption and applicability and yearning efforts to escape in calm realms of art and meditation. Which, for long, are products of consumption themselves. So there is no escape. No light at the end of the tunnel? 

It is not wrong to consume. The world is made of natural and cultural things. We have to do something with them and we don't have to run away from the threat of allover materialism. Possibly we are human, living things amongst ourselves. We are having these strange encounters with some things which are simply another part of us.

Not a biological part, but a "living" material, we created to be not alone amongst us living organisms. 
Music is such a living material. We can decide how we will use it. Do we need musical genres like "adult comtemporary"? Telling us, that most other musical stuff is childish and rather ridiculous? Or can we be real adult persons, who create music or listen to music without being controlled consumers in the glittering machine of music marketing?

So, let's listen to something else. To the silence and its messages. To sounds we never heard before, as they are reported in Bernie Krause's book "The great animal orchestra". To something which makes us more sensitive, not more rude.