To the Ones Who Played the Unplayable

In the grand narrative of human civilisation, politicians shape the laws we follow. Scientists shape the world we understand. But musicians?

They shape the world we feel.

And if we dare entertain the idea that consciousness itself is tethered to something like frequency—if music is a bridge to that vast, unseen realm—then perhaps it’s the musicians who are the most gifted of all.

Not because they merely entertain.

But because they channel.

Unlike scientists, who use instruments to measure the world, or politicians, who speak through platforms and institutions, musicians often bypass those tools entirely. Their instruments are themselves. The voice. The hands. The breath. The silence.

Many of them channel something vast and wordless—truths that can’t be spoken but can be sung. Frequencies that can’t be graphed but can be felt in the chest like a storm rolling in.

It’s not just their notes or lyrics—it’s the presence they invoke.

“Where others build telescopes to peer into the unknown, musicians close their eyes and become it.”

That line clings to me like a chorus. It says everything. The scientist observes the cosmos. The musician becomes it. And in that act of becoming—in that raw vulnerability of allowing the current to flow through them without resistance—something profound happens.

Some call it goosebumps.

Some call it transcendence.

Some call it madness.

I call it channeling.

“If consciousness were a frequency, musicians would be the first to catch the signal, the first to tremble with its meaning.”

And what of those musicians who left this life too soon? The Jeff Buckleys, the Amy Winehouses, the Kurt Cobains. Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison. Bob Marley, Avicii, Chris Cornell.

Is it so far-fetched to imagine that their ability to channel grew so powerful, so intense, that it overwhelmed their physical existence? That the current they rode was simply too strong to remain tethered to this world?

Maybe they weren’t taken.

Maybe they were called back.

Maybe their work here—brief and searing—was to open a door.

To remind us of the pulse beneath the silence.

To echo a truth that can’t be spoken, only played.

Some frequencies aren’t meant to be sustained.

Some souls arrive not to build, but to burn bright and vanish,

leaving behind a trail of soundwaves and sensation that echo far longer than their physical presence ever could.

They didn’t fall.

They didn’t fail.

They faded into the very song they came to sing.

We are left with what they gave us—those impossible melodies, those lyrics that seem to understand us before we understand ourselves. And when we listen, we honour the gift. We attune. We remember.

And it begs a larger question…

The Other Space Race

While the world marvelled at rockets piercing the sky and men walking on the moon, another kind of space race had long been underway. Not among nations—but among realms. Not measured in kilometres, but in vibration.

Scientists built spacecraft.

Musicians built portals.

And perhaps—just perhaps—the scientific space race wasn’t just about beating the Soviets to the moon. Maybe it was, on some level, about proving that science too could explore the unknown. That it could go further—not just than Russia, but maybe even further than the dreamers with guitars and drum kits.

Because by the time Armstrong planted his boot into lunar dust, Hendrix had already split open the sky at Woodstock.

By the time satellites blinked overhead, Nina Simone had orbited grief, rage, and glory all within a single chord.

The space race was loud.

But the other race—the one into the human psyche—was louder still, at least to those who were listening.

This wasn’t a contest of speed. It was a contest of depth.

Of who could touch the ineffable.

Of who could bring back the proof.

And while politicians brought moon rocks and flagpoles, the musicians brought something far stranger, far more powerful: feeling.

Reckoning.

Truth in a minor key.

The Early Explorers

Before the synth and the stage light, before the vinyl and the viral, came the explorers. Those who didn’t wait for permission. Those who didn’t know it was impossible, so they did it anyway.

Mozart heard symphonies in silence—math made divine.

Beethoven fought fate and found freedom in chaos.

Wagner sculpted emotion into architecture.

Robert Johnson conjured ghosts with six strings and a bottle.

Miles Davis bent joy into a trumpet and blew it around the world.

Then came the psychedelic voyagers. The Beatles. Hendrix. Floyd. They dissolved the veil entirely.

The punks tore it down. The hip-hop poets sampled it. The grunge prophets stared straight through it.

Electronic music gave it a pulse. And artists like Björk painted it with frequencies the rest of us had never dared to hear.

They didn’t follow maps.

They made them.

Each one stepping further into the uncharted, into the darkness, lighting the way with sound.

Each one leaving behind a piece of themselves in the form of a song.

So in the end, maybe it’s not the politicians who lead us forward.

And maybe it’s not the scientists who define our boundaries.

Maybe it’s the musicians—those strange, beautiful souls who channel something older than language, louder than war, deeper than any cratered moon.

The ones who didn’t just compose the soundtrack.

They became it.

And invited us to listen.