Music and violence

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20551940.2020.1746545

Accounts of human trafficking suggest music’s uniquely insidious role for victims forcibly trafficked into strip club-based sex work, wherein music is ubiquitous. In sociological fieldwork, sex workers and trafficking victims testify to various effects of musical sound: against their will, the onset of music commands bodies to perform erotic dance, and songs’ formal and rhythmic features compel forms of movement. In situations of strip club-based trafficking, events of musicalsound therefore amount to coercion – itself defined as a form of sexual violence by the World Health Organization. Comprehending structures of trafficking victims’ abjection requires communicative,semiotic understandings of coercion’s mechanisms, and must resist conflating violence andphysical materiality. Building on J. L. Austin’s theorization of how verbal utterances perform certain kinds of semiotic actions, I argue that musical sound can behave like certain assaultive and coercive speech acts: acts of signaling that command sexual performances from trafficking victims within gross power asymmetries. A discourse analysis of the public forum online “The Ultimate Strip Club List” (TUSCL), which hosts discussions amongst both sex workers and patrons of strip clubs, suggests situations where the entanglement of sound and materiality loses explanatory and emancipatory power to critique music’s injurious capacities.

During the Northern Ireland conflict (1968-1998), paramilitary groups were supported and sustained by a sociocultural apparatus that helped legitimise their position within the community and disseminate their political message. From the use of flags and murals, to loyalist and republican parades, working-class vernacular culture revealed who was in control of various districts within the Province. For many working-class Protestants, loyalist songs were a key component of this culture, connecting the past and the present. Unlike the better-known marching band scene, which is a huge public spectacle, the loyalist song scene is much more private. Performed in a closed setting, within local bars and clubs, loyalist songs are reproduced for internal consumption rather than outward expression. Yet, in addition to celebrating a particular loyalist culture, such songs also serve an important function in authenticating and legitimising paramilitary groups, connecting them to older organisations, whose legacy they draw upon. This paper focuses on one such song, exploring how 'The Ballad of Billy McFadzean' is used to connect the Ulster Volunteer Force of the 1960s onwards, with the 1913 organisation of the same name. In so doing, the paper attempts to illustrate the political utility of song and how songs can be used to launder and legitimise conflict, as well as those engaged in political violence.

In response to the rise in the number of MP3 players in use, and anecdotal evidence of their annoyance value, this paper examines the link between passive MP3 player listening and violence. In examining the link, it first presents the concept of a “passive listener,” then looks at the issue of control and choice, and the different levels to which these are present in controlled and passive listening. It then examines the unique elements of passive listening which make it different from many other acts of musical violence, before summarizing the effect on the passive listener. Finally, the paper suggests strategies to minimize the effects of passive listening as a form of violence, before suggesting areas for further research.

This article explores agency as an ability to act and exert power creatively when failure implies literal death. It draws on interviews with an ex-narco and rappers who willingly accept narco-commissions in 2010s Tamaulipas, Mexico, a context where precarity and necropolitical logics prevail. It asserts that many rappers exert power creatively, despite the risks. Rappers shape narco-aesthetics by determining the lyrical and sonic elements of songs; draw on experiences of narco-life to contribute to narco-ethics; and mould narco-masculinities by encouraging listeners to stay firm. It proposes that prevalent discursive Us–Them dichotomies facilitate Othering and stigmatisation of actors in the narco-world, and serve to accentuate narco-power.

The unique kinship between music and power – as originally outlined by Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment and more recently by Attali in Noise – can be observed in how the former has been put at the service of the latter throughout the history of warfare. In recent times, with her seminal 2006 study Music as Torture / Music as Weapon in the “global war on terror,” Suzanne Cusick has brought the use of music as an instrument of warfare to the attention of the musicological community and beyond. By contextualizing Cusick’s research within a broadened historical, cultural and social context, this essay explores connections between the increasing militarization of American society and the normalization of violence in its cultural production. The circular nature of this relationship is put into focus through the analysis of the song and music video “Bodies” by heavy metal band Drowning Pool, as well through the examination of such non-musical productions as the Fox TV series 24 and Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, with its controversial American debut.

The relationship between music and power, war and heavy metal is traced through the progressive democratization of music-as-weapon beginning with the introduction of high-fidelity sound systems in the late 1940s and continuing in recent times with the use of mp3 players by U.S. military personnel. Related manifestations of the growing synergy between the military and the culture industry at large may be seen in songs such as “Soldier” by Drowning Pool and “Citizen Soldier” by rock band 3 Doors Down. The process of assimilation of a lexicon of war into mainstream popular music is analyzed in the recent dance hit “Titanium” by David Guetta and Sia. Examples from TV (Stars Earn Stripes), film (Act of Valor, Zero Dark Thirty) and videogames (America’s Army) underscore the rise of a new “military-entertainment complex.”

In this article, I develop and redirect Julian Henriques’s model of sonic dominance through examination of accounts of acoustic violence and torture involving headphones. Specifically, I show how auditory experience has been weaponized as an intracorporeal phenomenon, with headphones effecting a sense of sounds invading the interior phenomenological space of the head. By analysing reported cases of sonic violence and torture involving headphones through a composite theoretical lens drawn from the fields of music, sound and body studies, I argue that in saturating the head’s perceived interior with sound, perpetrators of violence perform sonic dominance across two interrelated levels: the subjugation of interiorized auditory space via the notion of flooding, in which attention is directed towards the experience of the body as a vessel for sound; and the resulting manipulation of phenomenological head–mind linkages, with emphasis on the head as a ‘space’ for both sound and thought.

Le 22 juin 2019, des hommes en armes menés par un opposant politique font irruption dans la salle de conseil du gouvernement régional Amhara de la République fédérale éthiopienne, tuant plusieurs personnes au cours de ce qui est vite désigné comme un «coup d’Etat manqué». En toile de fond de cet attentat résonnent deux genres musicaux-poétiques, qärärto et fukära. Réduits depuis le début des années 1990 à la sphère des vendettas et conflits villageois, ces genres sont de retour depuis quelques années sur le devant de la scène. Cheminant entre villes et campagnes sous forme audio, vidéo et écrite, ils accompagnent les soulèvements dans les territoires contestés et la construction d’un sentiment d’appartenance ethnique. Cet article pose la question de leur efficacité et des logiques de leur circulation, qui s’ancre dans la longue histoire des luttes de pouvoir régionales. Le récit des semaines qui suivent cet attentat « fratricide » (Amhara contre Amhara) laisse entrevoir les enjeux décisifs de cette circulation: pourquoi agir et avec qui? Comment se décide-t-on en guerre? Et quelle version en donner pour l’histoire?

Extraits audio/vidéo consultables ici : http://www.adem.ch/ce33

The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies traces the growth of an important interdisciplinary field, its foundations, key debates and core concerns, as well as highlighting current and emerging issues and approaches and pointing to new directions for enquiry. With a focus on the perpetrators of mass killings, political violence and genocide, the handbook is concerned with a range of issues relating to the figure of the perpetrator, from questions of definition, typology, and conceptual analysis, to the study of motivations and group dynamics to questions of guilt and responsibility, as well as representation and memory politics. Offering an overview of the field, its essential concepts and approaches, this foundational volume presents contemporary perspectives on longstanding debates and recent contributions to the field that significantly expand the theoretical, temporal, political, and geographical discussion of perpetrators and their representation through literature, film, and art. It points to emerging areas and future trends in the field, thus providing scholars with ideas or encouragement for future research activity. As such, It will appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, criminology, philosophy, memory studies, psychology, political science, literary studies, film studies, law, cultural studies and visual art.