No need to apologize, it's interesting to share different experiences of music. I consider myself a pretty serious music fan, insofar as back in the CD days I b

No need to apologize, it's interesting to share different experiences of music. I consider myself a pretty serious music fan, insofar as back in the CD days I bought hundreds, and even still today I continue to buy digital music, "crate digging" on Bandcamp for hours. But I don't really listen to the words, I find they often interfere with what the raw emotion of the music would have been without them. I mentioned psytrance, and that's an example of a genre that is largely instrumental, but when they do include a vocal sample, it's invariably some kind of vapid nonsense about taking drugs, and to me - unless the song is deliberately silly - that often undermines the impact of what the music was saying on its own. I don't buy the idea that vocals are necessary for communication, because otherwise nobody would ever listen to lyrical music in a language they don't understand, except people do and it's very popular. I often prefer to listen to music in a language I don't understand, if anyway I am forced to listen to vocal music, since then I can just enjoy the sounds in their own right. The human voice is a very versatile instrument and can make some really cool sounds. (NIN tie-in: I think The Becoming is one of their best vocals-forward songs, not because of the lyrics, but because the choice of syllables in certain sections is very musical: e.g. "me that you know" is soft and open, but then "had some second thoughts" transitions into harder syllables, followed sharp explosions of "scabs" and "sore" in the next line. The sound communicates more than the lyric.) (Edit 1 hour later because I realize I forgot the best part: the final "me that you know" is followed up with "made up of wires", while "scabs" and "sore" have been replaced with "with" and "away". Musically, there is a progression from the call-and-response "eee aaa ooo ohh? suh! suh! suh!" to "eee aaa ooo ohh? wuh, wuh, wuh..." The sharp "S" sounds evoke the imagery of close and present danger, a rattlesnake or steam/gas leaking under pressure, whereas the "W" sounds are more distant, like a bird flying overhead or the rhythmic thrum of a fan. For me this emphasizes the sense of something kind of becoming weaker and smaller before the eventual transformation at the end of the song. Thus vocals help create a thematic progression even without the lyrical context.) But I also think that treating music like an ideal form of communication is a bit of an elitist perspective. There are some artists who get upset when people don't get the message that they are trying to convey, but I think most artists understand that the act of releasing a work to the public means they no longer have control over it. People are going to interpret the work however they want, they will weave it into the narrative of their own lives and make it into something different and unexpected and that's actually the beauty of sharing art in the first place - it enriches everybody. I think the problem comes from gatekeeper-like fans who imagine that the original intent of the artist is pure and sacred and anyone who is interprets it differently is a lesser fan, unworthy of the gift that was bestowed upon them. I think this kind of framing is unproductive, since to me all art is communal and ephemeral and if it's not being shared to elevate the collective conscious then what was the point to share it at all? People don't need to listen to music to wallow in someone else's ego trip, then they could just go to work, or watch the news, or whatever.