I am widely known for listening to darker genres of music. It makes some people feel I am
a complete weirdo (which is true). A few weeks ago I was sitting in a cab with a full
album (!) of Aqua playing on a radio. Happy songs of happy days, so unauthentic. It
thankfully ended with me putting my headphones on :).

Why do we fear darkness? When walking on a street at night, with no lights on, we don’t
fear darkness itself; we fear that something unseen could harm us. The fact? It can
happen on a clear day. Thanks to bystander effect,
we are not even much safer during the day.

Getting comfortable with darkness, with things that seem evil and with the unknown is a huge
asset in life. Our minds infer causation from correlation. We fear darkness because it may
be evil and we fear it because it’s unknown. And then we infer that the unknown
is evil, which is incorrect. There’s so much hatred and misunderstanding in this world already.

Happy songs with happy melodies, positive texts and beautiful performers have their place
in this world. But there are tracks that are unexpected. Computer-generated noise, glitches
and yelling can come at any time. And that prepares us to understand that dark and
unexpected is not evil (please show me a person who died of listening to dark music if you
disagree). While happy music can increase our mood, from the unexpected, we learn.

Here’s an interview with Coil
about the same topic.

My favorite bands that are dark, but nice are Coil, Current 93, The Residents, Orphx and
The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble.