Here comes my trickster function…let’s see how well I can do here.
Se generally
From what I am told, Se wants to ingest the physical world with no particular assignment in the moment in terms of meaning. This is the real world; it’s what is. A skilled Se user can bring detailed, accurate sense data to other functions to accomplish things. But Se by itself is a function that gathers the very tangible.
What Se values in music – Vibe (undefined)
If it sounds good going in the ears, it’s good! This is often described by music listeners as giving a good “feeling,” but MBTI forces me to not call it feeling. Same with “it just works”; that’s a Te sentiment. But those are the general ideas. Se doesn’t seem to be fussy musically; it just wants good music.
What it might be fussy about is whether the song sounds full – whether there’s enough sense data to sense. A song that’s too sparse (like minimalist classical stuff) could bore the Se user in the same way that an empty room would. But in terms of compositional rules or that sort of artistic approach, Se probably doesn’t care.
When Se is too dominant
Not all sensory stimuli are healthy sensory stimuli, and not every jam-packed or loud-sounding song has a lot going on. This is where you might get music that fills a dance floor but is not much more than a good beat. I like trance a lot, but I have said for years that the quality end is very good and there’s a mountain of cheaply made, very bad trance underneath it. That can be Se without much else – it will definitely make you dance or rock out, but there isn’t a lot of thought behind the song. It’s the refined sugar of the music world.
Some examples
Lyrically, it is probably unhealthy Se more than anything that becomes the subject of moral campaigns to clean up music. There’s no point in me picking one out of the pop culture hat.
I suppose that Craig David’s “Fill Me In” can be read as questions from parents as to whether the Se Craig describes was unhealthy. “We were just doing things young people in love do” according to Craig, and he “didn’t mean to break the rules,” but his date’s parents run a Si/Ti check on the stories they’ve been told:
Why can’t you keep your promises no more?
Said you’d be home by 12, come strolling in at 4
Out with the girls, but leaving with the boy next door
Can you fill me in?
The thing is, it seems they have broken the rules. But the intent was to have a normal time in the present, which by the logic of the protagonist should matter more. It’s like Se/Te is defending itself against Si/Ti.
On the music, morally neutral side of Se, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about metal and other types of hard rock for a moment, because they are plenty loud and pummeling. Depending on the lyrics, punk can get there too – just raw sense data. Anything that wants to be “in your face” might just mean your physical face, which is a major producer of sense data. (I bet you knew that.) Many publications can give you recommendations for pummeling songs in those areas; I don’t have good ones.
What I do have are a lot of off-kilter recommendations for Se songs:
“Earth: 2015” by Mark McGuire – it’s intended to portray how busy modern life is. It definitely does that. I don’t have anything to compare this song to.
“Here’s to Them” by Rawtekk – one of my two favorite songs from 2016, this one starts loud and ends loud. You can freak people out with this one if you like.
“Szerencsetlen” by the Venetian Snares – I once put this on a playlist that everybody knew going in was meant to sound extreme. Even with that warning, it was too extreme for them. (This showed up in a Louis Vuitton ad campaign very recently.)
“Thousand” by Moby – it…um…it speeds up. And then it breaks. And then it slows down and speeds up again (to 1,017 bpm). That’s all it does. But it does it memorably.
Next part: Si (Introverted Sensing)
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