I listen to the kind of music that tends to not get too much attention. It's shadowed by the "popular" forms of music such as rap, country, hip hop, and pop. Punk music stole my heart when I was barely a teenager and as I'm now starting my senior year of college I can say that my love for the genre has only increased as I've gotten older. But what I want to talk about isn't the kind of music that I like, it's music in general.

Music does crazy things to people.

My favorite thing about going to concerts is the sense of unity I feel with the strangers in the crowd around me. I've never met any of these people, and I'll probably never see them again, but we all came for the same reason: the love of the band in front of us. Nothing can produce goosebumps on my arms like the moment the singer of the band becomes silent and the venue is filled with the sound of everyone in the crowd singing along to the words of a song we all know and love. I can only imagine how amazing it would feel to be that band, knowing how hard you worked to get to where you are and now everyone knows the lyrics you poured your soul into.

And music brings people together in other settings as well. When I went to the Blink 182 concert recently, there was a lot of traffic getting out. My friends and I sat in our car in the parking lot for a long time, and we decided that blasting some music we love would help combat our boredom. So we rolled down the windows and cranked up the stereo and it seemed that a lot of people around us appreciated it. People would walk past and we could see them mouthing the words as they went, adding a little dance to their shuffle on the way to their own cars.

Eventually we got out of the parking lot and into bumper-to-bumper three-lane traffic. Still blasting our music, we saw many heads in the cars around us bobbing to the beat we were unleashing. At one point, "Ocean Avenue" by Yellowcard came on (of course a song that nearly everyone knows) and a guy in the car next to us leaned half his body out of his window to scream the words and point at us, an action which I appreciated so much that I did the same. I will probably never see this person again in my life, but the connection we made in those moments made it seem like we'd known him forever. Sometimes I think humans are predestined to hate each other, but music is the one thing that will always be able to pull people together.

I've made friends solely based on music taste on numerous occasions. When you're interested in a genre that not many people are familiar with, it feels like a special present when you find someone else who shares the same interest. Basically, music is beautiful, and it makes people beautiful too.