As a college student, a great deal of the literature you may be reading is from and for people in higher-education, the stuff high-brow classics, or by fellowship-employed, prestigious award-winning writers. Prized poetry, literary fiction, artist-to-artist memoirs - you name it. There’s something indescribable about this level of work. I myself tend to over-focus on it, admittedly, but I can’t help but notice a quiet mass movement to underwrite anything more accessible. There is a belief that enjoying something popular is a furtive guilty pleasure, or something to defensive about if you're discovered.

However, there's also something valuable in the stuff that you hear every day, the go-tos: books and songs and movies that keep you moving. Maybe that song on radio is going to get you through the next 5 minutes, or that book is a way to escape into the weekend. They don’t need merit-embossed covers or an awe-factor for accolades that most people never dream of competing for. They just need to keep something inside of you alive. They just need to get you through the day.

The reality is: all the art and entertainment we consume as a society exists in the spectrum.

There’s more than one kind of music to see live. One is for the dopamine: you jump and sing in unison with a crowd of thousands, strobe lights dancing in the dark, glitter and balloons falling from the ceiling, eyes focused on a stage where anything can happen. Another asks for a unity without the noise. It is a form for which the audience is inclined to dress to the nines, to buy a ticket and sit in a dark room with a theatre-like etiquette. A hundred people to consent to creating a pure and palpable silence within which to observe. In this space, what do you hear? Years of training, composition, and theory dancing in the air. You hear the hushed breath of the audience, and will undoubtedly encounter the apologetic hop-crawl of anyone daring to leave the show early.

That’s one kind of transcendence – appreciation of a unique music and cognitive specialty, the life’s work, the incomparable.

Then there’s another kind of transcendence: singing with thousands of people, arms up and eyes closed. No greater. No less. Very different.

It’s in a casual disguise – it’s the stuff on your iPod, or the clip in the background of television commercials. The stuff that just grabs you, catapults you into emotions you weren’t accessing just a millisecond prior. The stuff that needs no introduction, no forward, no review, and no training to understand. You hit play. You watch, you listen, you open and read. Your kids sing along. Your friends dance to it. It’s what you play to process a heartbreak, or to lift you from devastation, or to offer a life-raft to get through periods of depression. It's even the hallmark of the gym, creating an illusion of pleasure in the miserable stasis of an exercise machine planted in a bleak room.

This is the spectrum. What’s your 1? What’s your 10? One is music. Another is still music. If the medium is the same species, is it the same breed? If so, can we really say one is better than the other?

There’s high, literary fiction that leaves you gasping at every line. You’ll clear out a room for the quiet, you’ll shut off the television in the name of concentration. You want to focus on it fully. You’ll name-drop its title at Book Club the same way I, a film nerd, immediately launch into a rant about the diegesis, continuity, cinematography, and mise en scène composition after seeing a movie with people I know darn well don’t know or care what I’m talking about. There’s something addictive about taking knowledge that’s valuable in certain contexts – the classroom, the paper – for clarity and precision and organization, and then shoving it in settings it does not belong (in the most non-diegetic of ways, har-har).

That’s not what we spend most of our time on, though, is it? It’s not what we’re most familiar with -- not without a conscious, focused, and studied life spellbound to specifics of taste and expectation for the literary critic, the professor, or the proud fine reader.

As quick as I am to parody them, I’m certainly one, and there’s certainly good reasons for it. There’s a reason it takes grant funding, artistry in residence, fellowships, tenured professorships, academia support, and degrees infinitum, to support the creation of certain works. There are reasons some things belong in galleries, and some do not. It is why we face strangeness in setting apples against oranges.

It’s not pure aesthetics, or passability, or “that’s good!” – there are things that most of us can’t see in any medium that isn’t our own specialty. It’s more than composition. Some people can look at a painting and see materials, process, years and years of training, a d the studio conditions it was kept in.

Some people can see music theory in the sky when they hear something, know exactly what was preformed, what was added: what’s computer, what’s instrument. Some know exactly why Sia would have an entire album of remixed tracks, and the art in each remix. Some people know why everyone talks about Little Toy Soldier and Battleship Potemkin and Citizen Kane, and the difference in talking about Orson Wells and Hitchcock and Polanski than talking about Spielberg, than talking about JJ Abrams, than talking about Weedon, than talking about Chaplin, and so on. There’s folks that look at films and see cuts, or see light, or see acting, or see directing, or see… et cetera. There’s a reason for that.

And there’s something else.

There’s the books you read when you’re falling asleep, or to make a subway commute more bearable. There’s the sound art that you hit up audio galleries for and close your eyes to analyze, and then there’s the podcasts you play in the car on your way to work every day. Something that becomes part of who you are, and a place to go.

When you study the historical and theoretical foundations of the arts at the college level, you’re put in a unique and special position of being able to identify and analyze ‘high art’ and its impact, alongside that of the mainstream. There’s gourmet delicacies crafted for the most refined palettes, and there’s Mama’s diner. One has education, quality, and community surrounding it. It’s pushing the limits of something. It’s years and years of cultivation.

The other is home. It is familiar. It’s safe. It’s consumable. You’re not committing any sins by taking it in passively. It’s probably a household name, something universal and shared by a nation or a generation, and it’s good to grab to just get through the night.

There are films that everyone sees and enjoys that are just as important as the films that are exalted at, if not squirreled away within, festivals. Sometimes, they’re both – but the crossover appeal isn’t necessarily what’s important. What’s important is that they serve different purposes. Especially in today’s compartmentalization, when they’re not always in direct competition with one another.

Sometimes, it’s what we're watching for the same reasons we're listen to music. It feels so they don’t have to. It’s Aristotlean catharsis: some of his peers believed that was more dangerous than authentic feeling. For some, it’s a structured and intentional emotional experience that is safely removed from reality. For others, it’s a dangerous, uncontrollable thing that can only manipulate audiences to galvanize feelings beyond the human experience in the most dangerous of ways. Ancient Greece, and many civilizations that followed it, both needed the theatre, and feared it.

Light. Catharsis. Transcendence. It’s always like that.

Some people need art more than others.