How Music Impacts Your Brain | Imam Tom Weekly

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Imam Tom Live

How Music Impacts Your Brain | Imam Tom Weekly

What’s the deeper impact of music on the soul? Beyond the debates of halal and haram, this video explores the dark side of music—how the industry shapes identity, fuels ego, and commodifies art.

Imam Tom Facchine describes the spiritual risks of music production and consumption from an Islamic lens.

Watch on YouTube

This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.

There's a whole lot to talk about with Muslims and music, but I want to sidestep the question that most people come at right away, which is halal, haram.

I have my own opinions about that, and that's a well-known discussion within the scholarly discourse. But there's other things that you need to be aware about, other than just the cut and dry ruling that hopefully, whatever your opinion on music theoretically, that at least you will realize the dangers.

Because the scholars have talked about the dangers of music for hundreds of years. And part of the danger of music is that it creates love in you. It stirs the emotion. It creates attachments.

And you have to be very, very careful about the things that you come to love and the things that you come to feel. You're not just like this static entity that you're just the way you are, and you're always going to feel the same way.

There's a plasticity to you, that your desires, your wants, the things that you think are cool, the things that you think are acceptable, they're always in flux. And every piece of art, and music is part of art, is going to influence that.

So if you're not careful, music will have you loving things that Allah hates and hating things that Allah loves. And I'll give you an example that's a very concrete example back from, you know, here's a before-Islam story.

I knew of somebody who was going to get married. And, you know, non-Muslims. And they were talking about the songs that they want to play at their wedding. And one of the friends suggested a particular song, and the song was very, very popular at the time.

The lyrics of the song were all about cheating on your spouse. But there wasn't even a recognition that that's what the song was about, because it was such a catchy song. So sometimes you will be even caught within music. You're going to be repeating those words.

And that's actually an act of subject formation, that you are now becoming a vessel for that message. You might think that you're able to sing along, and it's just a song, and who cares, and I'm not changing. No, you're becoming a vessel for that message.

And now the message that that song contains is becoming slowly, slowly, slowly a possibility for you to act upon. Another dangerous component of music is for the performer, right?

And as someone who used to be a musician before Islam, I can tell you that to be a performer is to put yourself in a very spiritually sensitive position. That you've got people looking at you and, you know, admiring you in a certain way.

It very much leaves you susceptible to arrogance. People talk about Beyonce and stuff like that. Like she has like an alter ego for herself when she's on stage or something like this is real.

Like you have almost like an alter ego when you're on stage that you are performing for other people. And sometimes it's hard to get out of that. Sometimes you end up being swallowed by your alter ego.

That performer who you are, that sort of alienated or mediated version of yourself that's packaged for consumption. Sometimes it can overtake the real you, and it can lead you down to a very, very harmful and destructive path.

And there's other considerations when it comes to performing music or being an artist in general that need to be taken into account. In our culture, in our society, we have certain stereotypes or certain associations with artists or performers.

Such as the stereotype of the tortured genius, right?

There's an assumption in Western culture that, you know, the people who have the greatest sensitivity and thus the greatest ability to express art and to have artistic insight are also these tortured, conflicted people who are very eccentric and sometimes even prone to harm.

Harming themselves and harming others. That you can really buy into this association that's, by and large, socially constructed and that can become you. You can identify, this is how an artist is supposed to act. This is how a musician is supposed to act.

And you'll give yourself reasons and rationales and justifications to do all sorts of things that are harmful to yourself and your afterlife. Another component is the industry. And especially with some things lately going on within the music industry or the film industry, a lot more attention has been placed off this.

That the industry is very, very dirty. Now, I'll take it one step further. Not just is the industry dirty, but the industry itself. The fact that the industry exists is a consequence of capitalism.

Meaning that if you take people who do nasheed, such as Dawoud Warnsby and other people, that they've made a distinction or they've articulated a distinction between community music, which might look like a nasheed or it might look like a poem that everybody knows, right?

Versus commercial music. Now we have the executive producers and we have the studio recording and we have the marketing and we have the big execs. They're telling you what to say. They're telling you what you should look like on stage.

They're telling you, well, you're not this enough or you're not that enough or that no one's going to listen to that. Everybody wants to see this. Those are two very, very different things.

So within the idea of a commercialized, commodified music, that this is something that creates a whole new layer of liability and danger.

That now it's not even, like take this fact, like for the fans of rap out there, most gangster rappers, quote unquote, have no actual gang ties or don't have any experience in gangs.

They're really, they're gang adjacent and know enough about that life or grew up in those areas that they can speak about it in their music. But they weren't actually, unless you're like in the actual drill or grime or stuff like that, like they're not actually about that life.

But the producers package that life and sell it to you, that you think that it's authentic, that you don't know the difference. And so you're consuming that as an image.

I think you see what I'm saying here, that there's a whole other layer of danger to this, where people who are paid a lot of money are sitting in a boardroom somewhere trying to figure out what to package to you. What's going to hit on your desire?

What's going to make you move and motivate you and tantalize you and incite you so that you'll buy that and consume that and keep on coming back for more?

That's a very, very different dynamic than someone who knows a folk song and gets up and sings it in front of his relatives while they're harvesting the wheat. So the whole idea of a music industry is a very, very dangerous thing.

And we've seen with the revelations about Diddy and the revelations about this, the revelations about that, the final conclusion or the logical conclusion to a lot of this, it's a dark, dark place. It's a place that you don't want to be anywhere near.

And so some people will argue and they'll say, well, you know, music is beautiful and God is beauty or Allah is Al-Jameel and He loves beauty. But let's not get it twisted.

Allah is beautiful and He loves beauty, but not all beauty leads to God. Some beauty is simply desire. Some beauty is base. Some beauty is calling you to your worst self.

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