I can assume that the reason you are reading this is that you like music.  Pretty safe assumption, huh?  As a professional musician, I'd like to take this opportunity to fill you in on a few details about the art form which we all so dearly love.  Call it a historical retrospective.  And yes, this is a credited class and these topics will be on the final.

Musicians are scumbags - It's TRUE!  If you dig into the history of music like I have, you'll find that musicians are actually a notch under prostitute on the social ladder.  Up till very recently, musician was synonymous with pickpocket, carnie, thief, hobo, homeless alcoholic, and mugger.  Musicians were made from a pool of scumbags that traveled around fleecing the locals.  For centuries, the occupations of actror, prostitute, and musician were one and the same.  You listen to Cheryl Crow sing, then you pay to fuck her.  It's TRUE!  In polite society, being a working musician was the modern equivalent of saying you'd quit dentistry to become a cock fight promoter.

Musicians are crazy - It's TRUE!  Think about it.  To be competent, you really need to put in 10 solid years of practice.  You'd have to be friggin' crazy to put all that time into learning to do something that's basically useless.  Like every musician before me, I locked myself in my room from the ages of 13 to 18 and practiced 8 hours a day.  And it wasn't like there was anyone forcing me to do this - I did it out of some sick quest for self-satisfaction.  The kids that burn ants with a magnifying glass are normal by comparison.  You may have noted that every really good musician you know has a whole shopping list of personal flaws and missing bits of humanity.  They are basically retarded in the truest sense of the word.

Technology dictates music - It's TRUE!  When the first recording devices came around in the very late 1800s, they sounded terrible and couldn't reproduce music very well.  The way these ridiculous recorders worked was by directing sound at a thin aluminum membrane with a needle in the middle of it.  The sound would vibrate the membrane, the needle would vibrate, and then it would punch dents in a rotating cylinder of aluminum foil or dense wax.  For playback, you reverse the process, and the dented wax vibrates the needle, in turn vibrating the membrane and that's your speaker.  Pretty low-fi, huh.   Well it turns out that recording this way only reproduces the mid-range of the frequency spectrum, which happens to be RIGHT where the human voice falls. String bass?  Forget about it, too low frequency.  Piccolo?  Forget about it, too high frequency.  Enrico Carouso belting out opera at the top of his lungs?  Perfect!  Right in the exact range that the machine can capture.   

The recording machine, and its ability to only make certain sounds, turned the music world upside down.  Purely instrumental music, like classical, was out of the question.  The low brow pop song was the only thing that could be heard on the record.  The popular tune for the uneducated masses was what you were going to hear.  Before the recording machine, music was divided into sophisticated orchestra stuff that high society went to hear, and a one chord song about getting laid that a pickpocket sang to distract you while his prostitute girlfriend stole your wallet. Even as late as the early 70s, musically was specifically constructed to sound good on AM radio.  Country, folk, blues, bluegrass, skiffle and ska, rock and roll, swing, and pop are all designed to be reproduced in mono on AM radios or on 78 records.  To a bigger extent than you think, technology dictated the art form.  

In the 60s/70s, the advent of multi-track recording dictated the music - think of Pink Floyd or the late Beatles stuff.  In the 80s, the advent of midi, sequencers, and drum machines dictated the music.  You got endless Boy George and Billy Ocean hits with the giant synth sound.  In the 90s, affordable hi-fi and monster car stereos dictated the rise of hip hop and other forms of bass heavy music.  There are forms of music now that have NO other purpose than to be played at a dance club with a huge sound system with fancy lights so people can dance.  It's called house, trance, eletronica, hip hop, etc.  Which brings me to my next point.

Music is all about dick - it's TRUE!  With the exception of gospel and church music, music has but one function, which is to get you laid.  Here's how it works: musicians make big thumpy noises that make girls dance.  The guys see the girls waving their vaginas all over the floor, and they run out there and wave their penises at them. Everybody starts sweating, so they drink.  When they are drunk they fuck each other.  As a professional bass player I often give my job description as, "I make loud thumpy noises that induce people to fuck each other."  Remember, this is historically the function of music - dance and dance only, as a prelude to fucking.

And the popular recorded song is an extension of this.  The topic of every song is dick and vagina.  You hear the song on the radio and it's catchy.  You start thinking about dick or vagina.  You buy the record.  Every time you listen to the record, it puts you in the mood of dick or vagina.  30 years from now you buy the song on an oldies compilation, and you are instantly transported back to the past, and you fondly recall which dick or vagina you were interested in when you first heard the song.  Anybody who tries to make music out to be an art form is a hyper-intellectual sucker.  It's all just dick and vagina.  

You might argue that music is a form of social protest.  WRONG!  Storming the Bastille is a social protest.  “The Thong Song” is not.  You might argue that music is about describing the human condition.  WRONG!  The most recorded song in history is “Yesterday” by Paul McCartney, and it's pretty much about vagina.  Or loss of dick, or something like that.  You might argue that music spreads joy. WRONG!  Music spreads dick and vagina, and thusly we are joyous.  Let's run the song topic tree:

Lonesome - lack of vagina

Angry - lack of vagina

Sad - lack of vagina

Joyous - got some vagina

Homesick - missing your favorite vagina

Teen angst - do I even need to say it?

So let's sum all of this up.  The extraterrestrials land and ask "what is music?"  Music is loud repetitive noises arranged in such a way that they make humans fuck each other.  If the humans are stupid, there will be lyrics that tell them to fuck each other.  Since the people have a short attention span, there will be a guitar solo between each verse.  In thanks for making the thumpy noises correctly, the bar owner will give the bass player $75 and a drink special.