TV killed the radio star, but it created the radio star first. “Rock Around the Clock” was a megahit, the song that helped launch the rock and roll genre, but upon its initial release in 1954 it was a commercial failure. Only after it found its way into the credits of the Blackboard Jungle did it climb the charts. A lesson was learned: if you want a hit, get it in a movie.

Music benefits from a visual component, then, now, and always. Start pulling the threads that start with the ceremonial dancing of the Bhimbetka (documented thirty thousand years ago on a cave wall) and you can follow it through to the Greek tragedies, Japanese kabuki theater, the first “talkies”, Michael Jackson’s music videos, the tacky 8-bit LSD visualisations of mp3 players, and so forth. A photogenic element lets music work from another, more literal dimension – for example, taking the implied “scariness” of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor and making it explicit with horror visuals.

The visuals of a movie likewise benefit from sound, in a way that isn’t immediately obvious. We walk around with our experiences clouded by some emotional content, good or bad, and you never experience anything its own. When you eat a pastry you’re also eating the argument you had five minutes ago: you will enjoy the pastry less because you’re angry. When you spend money you’re only as happy or unhappy as the thought of how much is left in the balance. But most of this is gone in a movie – you’re watching a recorded slice of fake reality that you have no intrinsic attachment to. A soundtrack helps recolour all of the moments that have been bleached of their emotions by celluloid. The music acts as a little cue. “Feel sad here. Feel happy here.” That’s why scoring and foley is such an important part of film, even if it’s unmemorable on its own. Films are fake reality, and sound of all kinds is another graft of flesh over the mechanism.

But it must be depressing for a songwriter, knowing that your work will receive much of its impact from a visual component (which you had nothing to do with). It’s as bad works of literature getting culturally steamrolled by their film adaptations. Speaking of which I want to knock on Fitzgerald’s coffin and inform him that people will forevermore visualise Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay when they read The Great Gatsby. I am a bad man.

But that can’t be helped. Like Barthes said, authors are corpses who haven’t got the memo. Millions think “Born in the USA” is a patriotic anthem. That’s a valid reading, and there’s nothing the Boss or anyone else can do.

But I’ve never liked obvious soundtrack biscuits. If movies are cyborgs and music is artificial flesh, soundtrack songs are like plastic doll skin. You’re watching a movie, and then the narrative is interrupted by a cringingly obvious wannabe music video sequence. You can almost see the MTV logo appear.

In the 90s, there was a trend of songs from Disney movies becoming crossover mainstream hits. “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid won a Grammy. “A Whole New World” from Aladdin was a number one hit. From then on, every animated film needed that song. The worst was that shitty song Phil Collins put in Tarzan. You know the one. Where he doesn’t even reference the movie at all but just blandly rhapsodizes about finding yourself, et cetera.

Music and film have a troubled relationship, but they’re never far apart. Although it might seem like songs get swallowed whole by movies, subsumed until they’re just another part of the great machinery, they sometimes outlast the films they’re in. “Rock Around the Clock” achieved fame through the Blackboard Jungle, but who remembers that movie now? Bill Haley had the last laugh.

Sometimes the most insignificant things are the most enduring. Dwarves might stand on the shoulders of giants when walking through a field, but history isn’t a field, it’s quicksand. When the dwarf and the giant hit a but when the ensemble hits some soft quicksand, the giant sinks into obscurity first.

I didn’t believe in evolution once. There were a few reasons why, but one of them was that there didn’t seem to be enough transitional fossils. I’d heard various biologists and paleontologists say the same thing: the chain had missing links.

Now I realise that evolution, on a long enough timescale, often stops looking like a gradual slope, and starts looking like a series of steps.

Evolution often work in fits and jerks. There’s periods of rapid change (when there’s strong selective pressure), coupled with long pit stops where not much happens (the pressure relaxes). This conceit is found in several theories. Ernst Mayr’s “genetic revolutions.” Stephen Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium”.

Sometimes, this is dictated by outside pressures – climate change, or the introduction of a new competitor. Sometimes it’s dictated by the form itself. As WD Hamilton pointed out, you’d expect a complete flying creature to be more successful than a semi-evolved creature with half-grown wings. Once selection starts working, the creature rapidly moves through morphological space until it reaches the new optimum.

The fossil record can be likened to a ship traversing an ocean, while a satellite in space takes a photograph of it every day. Imagine the voyage takes 10 days – would you expect the 10 photos of the ship to be at perfect 10% intervals along the journey? Not hardly. There might be doldrums. There might have a strong tailwind. It might have to carefully navigate around some rocks. But this isn’t disproof of the mechanism of sail, and it’s not proof that the ship is magically teleporting from place to place. Evolution isn’t just a question of “where are we going”, it’s a question of “how quickly will we get there?”

This sort of adaptationist thinking isn’t trendy, but even an evolution driven by drift isn’t going to operate at a constant rate throughout history. The generation of mutations is modulated by a host of environmental factors (radiation, UV light), and their spread is capped by social factors. Maybe all kinds of interesting mutations developed in the humans living the New World. So what? Until 1948, none of that affected the gene pool of the humans living in Europe at all. There was a big natural barrier in the way: the Atlantic ocean.

Another thing: does something looking superficially unchanged mean it’s not evolving? The horseshoe crabs are a famous example of “living fossils”, nearly unchanged after hundreds of millions of years. But it seems they did actually change a little bit – fossilized horseshoe crabs have legs that split into two ends, while the modern kind have no split. (Perhaps there’s better examples of living fossils. Cladoselache is a Devonian fish that looks very much like a modern shark. Trigonotarbida is 400mYa old yet easily recognisable as a spider – some fossils even have spinerettes.)

I guess you always want more fossils. But when I die, the fossil record will likely keep no record of me, so who am I do to deny transitional fossils a hypothetical existence?

Music is a form of art, and although there are many ways to define art, one definition is “intentional specialness”. We live in a universe ruled by randomness and chaos, and things that aren’t chaotic (meaning they have elements of planning, intention, predictability, uniqueness, etc underpinning them) register in our minds as interesting.

Put another way: the universe is a random series of numbers (1, 4, 2, 7, 9, 3, 6, 4, 1, 2) while art is a non-random series (1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4).

Art is a man-made island of reason in an ocean of stochastic chaos. Even works of art that seem chaotic (like a Jackson Pollock painting) have “intentionality” behind them. Pollock wants his paintings to look that way. It’s not an accident.

Listen to the sounds around you. Bird chirps. The humming of an air conditioner. A passing car. All of it’s just a boring canvas of random noise. But then, consider music: a series of frequencies carefully arranged in time by a composer. A steady beat. A steady rhythm. An E superimposed over a C# to create a sad minor third. A submediant (VI) resolving back to the tonic (I). All of it planned, all of it deliberate.

The power of music isn’t that it sounds pleasant (noise rock, death metal, etc). It’s that it’s special!

So why does music sound empty to you?

Assuming your brain is neurologically undamaged, my guess is that you’ve listened to so much of it that the “specialness” has gone away. That it’s been a part of your life for so long that your brain has totally habituated to it and you no longer perceive it as distinct or different to the rest of the background noise in the world.

William S Burroughs said that the new addicts shoot smack to feel good, while old addicts shoot smack to feel normal. And eventually you stop feeling anything at all.

We rely on specialness to give our lives meaning, but it’s short lived and easily destroyed. The first act of sexual intercourse on a movie screen was a transgressive, outrageous statement. The 2,436,734th act of sexual intercourse was just lazy button-pushing.

But people still keep trying. Much of our lives are spent shuffling around in the dark, trying to recapture the ghost of specialness that was exorcised long ago.