We live in an age of terminological confusion. The original meaning of many words has been distorted within the labyrinth of a toxic contemporary narrative. What we call music today may no longer have anything to do with the reasoning and the purposes for which this practice emerged many millennia ago. The organization of sound objects in time and space fulfilled different roles and functions across the various histories humanity has passed through. Regardless of cultural periods, music has always manifested itself in an artistic, spiritual, and mysterious way.

Today—when everything around us is being diluted—a confusion has taken hold, as convenient as it is crude, between music and entertainment, and between musicians and celebrities. Not every sonic flow is music. There is a contradictory relationship between life and music. I have never heard of music sacrificing itself for life, yet there are countless lives that are consumed and destroyed by music. It is as if the two are engaged in an ancestral competition—one against the other—for the favor of the Divine. The frequencies of balance, perhaps—but Music is not the creation of the Supreme; it is merely the product of an illusory concept generated by fear, like all forms of art, ultimately. Life and music are principles that manifest differently, but they share one determining element: the ego.

We are programmed to believe that music can be learned, understood, performed—while life, in its abstraction, never can. If music is a life, then it is not a comfortable one and certainly not a democratic one. It is not offered equally to everyone, and it does not promise happiness. It is a life lived at the edge, at the limit, where meaning is not given but earned through attrition, repeated failure, and a form of fidelity that today borders on indecency. Music does not teach you how to live more easily; it teaches you how to endure, lucidly, the fact that life has no obligation to be gentle.

The evolution of culture through the systemic capture of collective discourse no longer takes place through an accumulation of meaning, but through the management of perceptions. Values are no longer built; reactions are optimised. Language is no longer an instrument of clarification; it has been refined into a form of symbolic anesthesia, while culture—once a space of fertile tension—turns into a protocol of emotional conformity. Within this framework, art—and music—are tolerated only if they are harmless. Anything that unsettles is labeled elitist, outdated, or irrelevant. Critical discourse is diluted until it becomes background noise, and the difference between thinking and opinion is deliberately erased. What we are witnessing is not accidental degradation, but a strategic redistribution of meaning—just enough to function, never enough to matter.

Thus, culture no longer evolves; it merely spins sterily around its own simulacra. It consumes itself, mimicking diversity and proclaiming freedom precisely at the moment when invisible limits become total. The real danger is not the absence of culture, but its false abundance—this inflation of discourse that makes any form of discernment impossible.

At this point, the only form of resistance left is the refusal to participate in confusion. Clarity becomes a subversive act, and the assumption of rigor a political gesture in the deepest sense of the word. To continue thinking articulately, to name things precisely, and to uphold meaning against the flow may be the last way culture can still evolve without dissolving itself.

The contemporary confusion between music and entertainment is not merely a semantic error; it is a strategy of neutralization. Entertainment soothes; authentic music unsettles. Entertainment confirms fragile identities; music calls them into question.

If music is a life, then it is certainly a harsh, selective, and profoundly unfair one. It does not comfort, it does not explain, and it promises nothing. It demands everything and guarantees nothing. That is precisely why it cannot be confused with entertainment, which puts you to sleep, while music wakes you up. One confirms fragile egos; the other crushes them.

The confusion between musicians and celebrities is not a mistake, but a capitulation. When success replaces meaning and visibility replaces truth, music ceases to be life and becomes useful noise. But real music is not useful. It is uncomfortable, destabilising, and impossible to monetise in the long term without falsifying it.

So I would turn the question around, to provoke another line of reflection: what kind of life is music?