On the relationship between music and violence
For the past few days I've been thinking about a possible link between music and violence. Observing people I know and remembering people I knew and their idiosyncrasies, mannerisms, personalities, etc, I've noticed something that interests me very much. I hope I don't disappoint anyone who might read this: this isn't about any correlations between rap&violence, punk&violence, sexism, gansta rap, etc etc. None of that in this post, so if you were hoping for it, you might as well stop reading now.
Starting from a cursory reflection about my own likes and dislikes, I'm tempted to make a few claims:
- Music cuts through all the "white noise" which exists in our daily lives;
- Musical affinity makes other types of understanding easier and quicker, like between two people who speak a foreign language that isn't their first one (i.e. a Spanish speaker and an Arabic speaker meet and must find a 3rd language in common if neither speaks the other's language);
- People with acute sensibility to music have less patience for the mundane and those who take pleasure in mundane activities. If my opinion on this is at all well-founded, this is the most important part of the argument, because it informs one's reactions to the world;
- Once music is on (and here the necessary presupposition is music which pleases the individual) one has no choice but to experience whatever feeling that piece of music will bring the listener.
I think this is what lies behind that hitherto incomprehesible (to me) practice authoritarian/totalitarian regimes had/have (esp USSR) of sending composers and musicians to camps or banning pieces of music without lyrics (!)---
These censors realized how music cuts through all the white noise, so to speak, how certain pieces have the power to awaken in some a most powerful, usually subconscious understanding of how so much that goes on around us is utterly meaningless.
Bureaucracy is the enemy of sublimation and beauty; music as art, therefore, can act as a metaphysical experience, which removes us from our immediate physical "reality" -- and here I put reality in inverted commas precisely to highlight how it isn't an absolute but a temporary, physical reality, and not the essential reality of one's own intimate thoughts, feelings, and experiences, or even the reality of one's imagination and hopes for the future, which are necessarily of a better quality than one's present. The clear inference is the present isn't good enough.
Claims about how "a certain type of music" alienates and "distracts" from The (insert your favorite one here) Struggle, then, begin to make sense to me, when viewed through this prism.
The violence with which the musical experience invades our being, that is, leaving absolutely no choice to the listener as to whether s/he wants to feel it or not, is seldom matched by other experiences, because it isn't painful as such. It can be the vehicle or agent which brings other painful experiences to the foreground of one's immediate present, but it is done with sublimated violence; indeed, pleasurable violence. Its effects are the opposite of those achieved with vulgar violence in that the "victim" is happier, more complete, more himself after having suffered music's brutality.
This sublimation is precisely what's lacking in the mundane, where objects/experiences are more similar to a billboard when compared to music, that's to say, in spite of their tangible aspect, they lack the depth and the power to transmit the v special feeling the idea of infinity gives us. One looks at a billboard and knows, even if it is an expertly crafted one like trompe l'oeil can be, that there is nothing behind it, no depth, no 3rd dimension, much less a 4th one to be imagined or momentarily inhabited.
So the very fact music is intangible makes it MORE three- or four-dimensional than any physical manifestation of the imagination and any interpretation of the real. I'm willing to claim this quality is present in music and religious experiences, nowhere else. Nothing else can produce this ambiguity between suffering and ecstasy, not even sex-- it lacks the sublime quality music and religion share.
Hence: music & religion are totalitarians' favorite bêtes noires.
Hilariously, I understand now how music can be more threatening to any power structure than a novel, than words. Naturally I'm talking about music here, not lyrics; indeed, I am only talking about music without lyrics.
The violence contained in how music injects itself into a person is infinitely higher and more powerful than any other type of violence, because there is no resistance possible. External, physical violence is the weapon of the impotent.
