Music to My Ears
When you think about it, facing the music sounds like a nice thing. Why wouldn’t you want to face the music? It depends, of course, on the type of music you’re facing. If you’re a metalhead you wouldn’t want to be facing a symphony concert, and if you like EDM, you wouldn’t want to face a bunch of musicians playing Indian folk music, but you get the drift. All of this is sadly nonsense because when you face the music, there isn’t any music at all: you’re just confronted with the consequences of something bad you’ve done.
No one knows exactly where this expression came from. There is one assumption that it came from the miliary and the tradition of disgraced officers being ‘drummed out’ of their regiment. It also might have been theater actors who had to get over their stage fright and literally “face the music” by facing the orchestra pit, when standing on stage. If anyone knows of a better explanation, we’d really like to hear about it.