Music Manifestation: How our playlists shape our realities
Some of our favorite artists contribute to how we feel without us knowing. Fellow Sky Stephens chose to curate her listening for better mental health.
By Skylar Stephens
When I heard “Normal Girl” by SZA, I really liked it. I felt like in that song SZA doesn’t see herself meeting the beauty standards that society has set and wishes to be desirable.
At the time that she dropped this album, I was a black girl attending a predominantly white high school so I wasn’t the beauty standard either. However, in the song, SZA normalizes having insecurities and being a “normal girl.”
As a singer, she sings from the perspective of a “normal girl” that someone like me could relate to. She sings about her insecurities and rough times which made me feel more comfortable with mine, knowing that everyone, even celebrities, have them.
When SZA dropped “SOS” in December, I was really excited for one of my favorite artists to have new work of hers that I could relate to, except that wasn’t the case.
When I listened to the album, it sounded great, but it was super sad. I played the album while I was in the shower so I could just think about it, free from distraction. The second song on the album is “Kill Bill” and SZA really raised my eyebrow with that one, saying she might kill her ex. She followed that up with saying how she’d rather be in jail than alone and that just does not resonate.
I spent 2022 building myself up, feeling comfortable with solitude and in my own skin. I just want to live a positive life and that starts with feeling positive about myself and the world around me, so that’s what I prioritized. SZA’s album involved a lot of her tearing herself down, and I’m in a good space, self esteem-wise, so when I’m listening to her song called “Special” and she’s repeatedly calling herself a loser, I just can’t relate to that.
After listening to the album, I saw a video of someone feeling the same way on TikTok. In the video, they basically expressed how they love SZA but her album is sad. As a healed person, they didn’t feel comfortable repeating some of her lyrics like “I’m just a loser” and putting that into the universe because they don’t view themselves as a loser.
After watching that video, I deleted all the sad songs from her album off of my playlist. Not because I didn’t like them or not that I don’t like SZA, but because I didn’t want to repeat those kinds of things either because I believe in the power of the tongue and something called music manifestation.
Manifestation means using our words and thoughts to shape our realities. So it’s easy to do this through music and I first heard about that on TikTok. It was interesting to me because it just made so much sense.
Music manifestation is using music to send messages to our brain. Music has the ability to influence what we’re feeling. I read on The National Library of Medicine that sad and slow tempo music cause the mind to wander more than fast and happy music. When we listen to sad music, we’re sad. When we listen to positive music, we feel positive emotions.
When we’re constantly repeating happy or sad lyrics in our head, we’re manifesting those lyrics in our mind, and then our realities. So, if I listen to Pharrell’s “Happy” a million times, I’m going to have it stuck in my head and have high energy for the day.
I already say daily affirmations. Since I listen to music everyday, I realized that was a part of affirming what kind of day I would have.
To test the theory of music manifestation, I tried to cut heartbreak songs out of my daily routine. I started by building a playlist of positive songs and one of the first songs that I added was Jhené Aiko’s “Stay Ready.”
Her lyrics in this song are a perfect example of manifesting the life that you want. She’s encouraging you to just be present in the moment and give yourself credit for how far you’ve come. It’s the perfect way to give yourself gratitude. I built a playlist with songs that used similar affirmations and played this when I did everyday things like shower and clean and noticed that I felt better than days when I listened to SZA nonstop.
Now that I know what effects music have on my mental, I pay attention to what songs
I add to my playlist. I still love artists like SZA and Summer Walker that specialize in heartbreak songs because they have a way of using descriptive lyrics to make you feel something. I just know now that I have to limit listening to them or wait for them to drop more positive songs.
Listen to my positive R&B playlist on Apple Music.
Skylar Stephens is a Fall 2022 Community Reporting Fellow. She is a journalist, emerging photographer and a student at Xavier University of Louisiana, where she writes from the Xavier Herald. Stephens, 19, grew up in Canton, Ohio. She recently completed a fellowship with the Black and Missing Foundation.
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