I saw a lecture on Thursday at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for the Arts and Society by Moustafa Bayoumi. Bayoumi is a writer for the Nation who wrote a piece last year entitled Disco Inferno, written about fourteen months ago. The article covers the US Military and CIA’s use of music and noise as part of “torture lite” (noise becomes just one of the “Five Techniques” — the others are wall standing, hooding, sleep deprivation, and withholding of food). Since the article the US has passed a new law, the “Military Commissions Act”, that was supposed to end such “cruel and degrading treatment” (the law was prompted by John McCain, a formerly tortured POW and US Senator, and the Supreme Court). It was the feeling of Bayoumi that we have not and that aspects of “Torture Lite,” continue.
I have been taking a class recently on Popular Music and so I have been thinking a lot about the importance of studying music in the 21st century. What exactly is the importance of studying sound, the culture industry, or “traditional” forms of music around the world? What are the main questions, methods and debates within this scholarship? What possible interventions are there for the would-be ethnomusicologist? One possible answer is to link up questions about popular music up with contemporary concerns about power and aesthetics. In this vein, just this month the Society for Ethnomusicology came out against the use of music as a weapon in torture.
But what struck me most in the lecture was being reminded of the naivete of a writer on the internet who had said some pretty ambiguous things about techno and rave music a few years back and had not really pushed the limits of his thinking — he had not thought about the possibility of music being used as a weapon.
I walked up the back stairs of the Ramada, through the narrow dark bar and into the main room of one of Detroit’s oldest institutions, the City Club. There, momentarily, with only a crystal ball illuminating the 1920s-cum-goth ballroom’s dance floor and vaulted ceilings, I experienced an abyss opening up in my brain and chest from the walls of bass. In the time it took me to catch my breath, a time in which I seemingly re-established my bodily existence to myself while racking my brain for precedent, I was changed. No lyrics. Nothing to stare at except the hundreds milling and dancing around me. Only sound and rhythm, volume and culture, layers deep, impressing themselves into my being. On this night that would last more than 10 hours, Richie Hawtin and his crew seemed to be telling all who walked through the old doors: “This is what techno can do.†They were also hinting strongly at a corollary question: “What else can do this?â€
That last line is haunting given Bayoumi’s lecture.
The excuse for the author, if there is one, is that the piece was written the week of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The war and America’s renewed interest in torture was not yet common public discussion. Perhaps it is unfair to the writer to enact this kind of hindsight… perhaps… but I think it reminds us the importance of thinking and ideas… and that they do have effects.
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