Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence

Bruce Johnson, Martin Cloonan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351570152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Written against the academically dominant but simplistic romanticization of popular music as a positive force, this book focuses on the 'dark side' of the subject. It is a pioneering examination of the ways in which popular music has been deployed in association with violence, ranging from what appears to be an incidental relationship, to one in which music is explicitly applied as an instrument of violence. A preliminary overview of the physiological and cognitive foundations of sounding/hearing which are distinctive within the sensorium, discloses in particular their potential for organic and psychic violence. The study then elaborates working definitions of key terms (including the vexed idea of the 'popular') for the purposes of this investigation, and provides a historical survey of examples of the nexus between music and violence, from (pre)Biblical times to the late nineteenth century. The second half of the book concentrates on the modern era, marked in this case by the emergence of technologies by which music can be electronically augmented, generated, and disseminated, beginning with the advent of sound recording from the 1870s, and proceeding to audio-internet and other contemporary audio-technologies. Johnson and Cloonan argue that these technologies have transformed the potential of music to mediate cultural confrontations from the local to the global, particularly through violence. The authors present a taxonomy of case histories in the connection between popular music and violence, through increasingly intense forms of that relationship, culminating in the topical examples of music and torture, including those in Bosnia, Darfur, and by US forces in Iraq and Guant mo Bay. This, however, is not simply a succession of data, but an argumentative synthesis. Thus, the final section debates the implications of this nexus both for popular music studies itself, and also in cultural policy and regulation, the ethics of citizenship, and arguments about human

Chapter 1

Context: The Sound of Music

Bruce Johnson

Much is made in popular music studies of the decisive and differentiating role of mediations.¹ Yet almost nothing is made of the most fundamental set of differentiating mediations, without which there can be no cultural transaction at all: the sensorium. As a broad introductory simplification, it may be said that in traditional musicology, music is generally categorized as an ‘artform’, the bearer of aesthetics. In popular music studies, the emphasis is on music as a ‘culture’, the bearer of meanings. Initially we wish to situate music in terms of its sensory materiality: music as sound. To do so recognizes the material and biological foundations of culture, and joins with recent emerging research fields such as the anthropology of the senses. As long ago as 1749, Diderot observed that the ‘state of our organs and of our senses has a great influence on our metaphysics and our ethics, and our most purely intellectual ideas, if I may express it thus, are very much dependent on the structure of our body’.² In 1891 pioneer radio wave researcher Heinrich Hertz, who, appropriately in this context, would give his name to the frequency in cycles per second of sound, spoke of the ‘narrow borderland of the senses’ between consciousness and the ‘world of actual things’. He declared that for a ‘proper understanding of ourselves and of the world it is of the highest importance that this borderland should be thoroughly explored’.³ The connection was largely overlooked in twentieth-century cultural theory. Studies of gendered identity and power relations, for example, have been marked by ‘a preference for encountering embodiment via social, representational, or symbolic analysis at the expense of biological data’.⁴ Emerging work in such fields as the anthropology of the senses, however, is gradually repositioning physiology into the study of culture.⁵

To locate music a priori in the sensorium in this way opens the door to the distinctive phenomenology and physiology of sounding and hearing. Before a musical experience can be analysed as either an aesthetic or cultural transaction, it must be, by this categorization, a sensory episode experienced primarily through the ear. Of course a rich repertoire of reception and interpretation is also deployed. Music is also a tactile phenomenon experienced through vibration. It is usually accompanied also by visual impressions which might be a supplementary mediation of the acoustic event, as in the sight of a band performing or the view from a car or from a sofa as one listens to radio or recordings. And there are also gustatory and olfactory sensations that form part of the totality, as in the obvious example of dining and drinking in a restaurant with live or piped music. The experience is also entangled with memory, emotion, dynamics of identity and taste, relations of power or conflict. But all this is activated by a sound entering the ear. It is the special properties of sound in itself which invest music with certain forms of power that ally it to noise in a way that is not the case with other non-acoustic expressive forms like painting.

We do not wish to enter into the debates about the superiority or otherwise of acoustic vis-à-vis scopic modalities.⁶ Our point is simply to underscore differences between them. Sound is capable of certain effects which are not available to the other major sensory partner in our public social transactions, vision. ‘Sound has always been a privileged tool to “create an effect”, to astonish. … Sound undeniably has an immediate emotional power that has been used by every culture’.⁷ Of special relevance here is the distinctive power of sound to arouse and also to produce organic damage. Sound in and of itself can produce profound distress. Among the most powerful of sounds, and the most often deployed in social intercourse, is the human voice. It has power as an acoustic presence, prior to whatever the specific utterance might generate semiotically. In 1662, a condemned prisoner in Newgate reported that the condemned hold had ‘neither bench, stool, nor stick for any person there. They lie like swine upon the ground, one upon another, howling and roaring – it was more terrible to me than death’.⁸ This is an example of the sonic effect appropriately called ‘perdition’.⁹ The well known example of the anguished final sounds made by Hamlet in the First Folio version of the play exemplifies the enormous resonant power of this sonic effect.¹⁰

There is an enormous range of non-lexical vocal effects apart from perdition, and popular music scholars are likely to understand this better than lexicon-bound legal and literary studies. And the more the voice is inflected by musicality, by factors over and above verbal denotation, the more arresting it becomes. It has been found that six-month-old infants ‘showed more attention to their mothers’ singing episodes than to their speaking episodes’. They were ‘hypnotized’ by video of their mothers’ singing, ‘glued’ to the image ‘for extended periods. Mothers’ speaking was not as engaging as their singing’.¹¹ The scatting of a jazz singer, the pentecostal shrieks of gospel music, James Brown and Little Richard, denote nothing, yet declare everything about emancipation, abandonment, ecstasy. A non-German speaker can feel the power of Hitler’s speeches. The oratorical manipulation of rhythm, repetition, disruption, timbre and volume produces sonic effects that can transcend deficiencies in linguistic sophistication. Transcribed on the page, a Baptist sermon by, for example, the Reverend Leo Daniels looks mawkish, naïve and emotionally negligible. Heard, it can transfix even the most sophisticated audience of literature students.¹² A ghoulishly corporealized illustration of the ‘presence’ of the voice, its organic origins and its ubiquity, was the reported case of one Edmund Kemper, who killed his mother because of her nagging. He decapitated her, excised the larynx and stuffed it in the garbage disposal unit. But when he switched it on, it spewed the remains back at him: ‘Even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me. I couldn’t get her to shut up.’¹³

The grotesquerie of this report is a trope for the physically intrusive aspect of sound. Unlike vision, sound enters the body with extremely intensity, as experienced in even relatively everyday situations such as a voice whispering in your ear at a dinner party, which immediately sets up an intimate secondary level of social engagement. Human sound emerges directly from inside the body, while sight plays over the surface.¹⁴ The voice is the body, irreducible site of our social being and proclamation of life. The dead may be touched, smelled, seen and tasted – but not heard (again, a point made throughout Hamlet). It is to the characteristic of silence that we attached the word ‘deathly’. The voice is the living body projected directly into the social space, a kind of nakedness, one reason our culture is discomfited at public vocalization such as yelling and singing, and especially involuntary vocalization such as sobbing. Unlike the projection of the body through its visual aspect, vocal utterance enters the body of the receiver, and is the sound of the body of the emitter, the sound of breath over complex internal interactions between tissue, bone, muscle, nerves, mediating identity in ways that are physiologically related to the cortex very differently from the visual faculty.

Sound and the voice are also able to instantly modify the radius of their impact. By shouting, whispering, changing timbre and register, the human being can control and transform the perceived character of her/his identity to a degree, range and rapidity unavailable to any form of identity projection. It is our most versatile faculty for acceptable public negotiation. Of all our organs the larynx has the highest ratio of nerve to muscle fibre, making it capable of an immeasurable range of expressive nuances which can circumvent semantics. Standing alone, the written words, ‘I am going home’ cannot achieve a fraction of the expressive possibilities available to their spoken/sung form, which may range from irony to disgust, sadness, fear, regret, elation, disappointment, triumph. At the extremes of experience, words fail us, but sound does not. The scream, the howl, the sob and sigh, all are both unintelligible to verbal analysis, yet ultimate modes of expressiveness.

The springs of this expressiveness are not semantic, but somatic. What is it about sound that invests it with such unique power in social interaction? There is a further deeply ambiguous characteristic which provides a springboard to some of the answers. Sound floods the space it enters. It is an obvious enough point, but its ramifications for the power of sound qua sound are complex and far-reaching. Within the conventionally understood sensorium, only smell has the same property, but with none of the finely articulated and directed possibilities of sound. It is a property with ambiguous potential. On the one hand, sound becomes a unifying envelope, immersing all those present in more or less the same expressive flood.¹⁵ Hearing internalizes, and sound projects, a shared experience. It constructs and mobilizes collective identity. ‘The sonic effect produces a common sense because it gathers together into unified and harmonious listening what other disciplinary knowledge divides.’¹⁶

On the other hand, relative to the specular, sound is inescapable because ubiquitous. The CRESSON group (Centre de recherché sur l’espace sonore et l’environment urbain) in Grenoble, identifies the ‘ubiquity effect’, a conscious searching for the source of a sound, and at least a disorienting momentary failure to find it. ‘The uncertainty produced by a sound about its origin establishes a power relationship between an invisible emitter and the worried receptor. The ubiquity effect is an effect of power.’¹⁷ The ubiquity effect generally produces discomfort, ranging from mild anxiety, a feeling of faintness, to ‘the most uncontrollable panic’.¹⁸ ‘[N]ot to know where a sound comes from is almost to believe in the manifestation of a superior force or a transcendental power: God, the State, Nature, the Father.’¹⁹ Thus, while the semantic content of utterance may be pivotal in directing its energies on behalf of or in opposition to particular interests, in the first instance the inchoate power thus harnessed derives from the phenomenology and physiology of sonic effects.

There is evidence that auditory stimuli – and therefore music – bypass ‘conscious awareness’ in eliciting emotions, suggesting that in some cases ‘affect precedes inference’.²⁰ Furthermore, affect is involuntary, inescapable and difficult to revoke.²¹ Zajonc argues that the affective system does not process, for example, the lexical elements of a message, but something more primary. Even when the ‘content of recorded utterances is nearly completely obliterated by means of electronic masking, filtering or random splicing of the tape, subjects can still encode the emotions expressed in these utterances quite reliably’.²² That is, ‘musicality’ and intonation, rather than verbal content, have priority in the formation of emotional responses to sonic stimuli. Zajonc’s arguments have been experimentally reinforced in the work of neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, who found that the first stage of arousal is an involuntary reaction to sounds.²³ There are at least two pathways between aural stimulus and response, of different orders of complexity. The first is purely physiological; the second involves cultural processing, and is supplemented by the hippocampus, a processor that contextualizes the stimulus with memory.²⁴ For present purposes, the work of Zajonc and LeDoux suggests a ‘foundation/scaffolding’ model of sonic (and therefore musical) affect. That is, that there is a primary reaction to a threatening stimulus. It is physiological and involuntary, and creates a matrix within which a secondary and cognitively mediated response draws on cultural memory to articulate the precise nature of that threat. The implication is that certain emotional responses to sound are so-to-speak hard-wired, constrained biologically, rather in the manner of a foundation to a building that won’t determine what is constructed on it, but which limits what may be.²⁵ Sound is power, unharnessed. Specific physical characteristics of sound and its relationship to the audient can alter physiological states.

The point can be illustrated through the connection between sound localization, its source in relation to the listener, and pitch. The body employs several systems of sound localization. ‘Interaural intensity difference’ relies on the reduced level of intensity experienced in the ear farther from a laterally directed sound source, and is less effective for lower pitched sounds, because the long wavelengths – as long as 40 feet for the lowest musical notes²⁶ – are unaffected by the presence of the head. It is thus most effective in localizing high-pitched sounds with a wavelength shorter than the width of the head – above around 200 Hz. Apart from the organic damage that low register sound might produce (see below), the difficulty of identifying its source can induce profound disorientation and anxiety. A second system...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Notes and Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Musical Violence and Popular Music Studies
• 1 Context: The Sound of Music
• 2 Music and Violence in History
• 3 Technologized Sonority
• 4 Music Accompanying Violence
• 5 Music and Incitement to Violence
• 6 Music and Arousal to Violence
• 7 Music as Violence
• 8 Policy
• Select Bibliography
• Index