Why Does Music Make People so Cross?
[Editors note: The article presented here is republished from the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 13(1) 2004, 64-69, with the kind permission from the publisher and the author. Following the article Nordic Journal of Music Therapy also published responses and Friths reply to the responses. It is all available in NJMT 13(1), 2004]
Killing Me Softly
In January 2002 the journal Popular Music published an article by Martin Cloonan and Bruce Johnson entitled "Killing Me Softly With His Song: An Initial Investigation in the Use of Popular Music as a Tool of Oppression" (Cloonan & Johnsen, 2002). The article was a sweeping survey of how music had been used as a weapon – whether to drive General Noriega from the Vatican Embassy (when American forces played loud rock music) or to drive bored teenagers off railway stations by playing classical music through the tannoy (a tactic in the battle against vandalism used with some success in both Britain and Australia). "Metallica is latest interrogation tactic," reported the Guardian on May 20, 2003.
US military interrogators are using unorthodox musical techniques to extract information about weapons of mass destruction of fugitive Ba’athist leaders from their detainees – a fearsome mix of Metallica and Barney the Dinosaur. ... It is reported that the combination of high-voltage rock and happy-smiley children’s songs can break the will of the hardest terrorist or rogue element. "Trust me, it works," a US "operative" told Newsweek magazine. "These people haven’t heard heavy metal before. They can’t take it. If you play it for 24 hours, your brain and body functions start to slide, your train of thought slows down and your will is broken. That’s when we come in and talk to them." (Berger, 2003)
The Cloonan/Johnson article struck a chord with me for a number of reasons. First, it challenges the assumption with which I, like most of my colleagues in popular music studies, operate: that music is a good thing. And this is not just an academic assumption. I recently read an undergraduate dissertation on the culture of young teenage boys in Scotland. Its most striking finding for me was the casual way in which the boys studied agreed that unlike watching TV or playing computer games "music betters you." As Iain Witheyman concludes:
The curiosity lies in the fact that many parents would worry about music having a negative effect on their child, whereas the boys report music as having a positive effect. Whereas the boys actually report television as having a negative effect on their lives despite the fact that it is one of the few activities they participate in frequently with their families. (Witheyman, 2003, p. 39)
For popular music scholars the belief in music as a good thing has meant the celebration of the public use of ghetto blasters, an unswerving critique of any form of music censorship, and even, by and large, a positive spin on the impact of rock on local music around the world in the name of hybridity and modernity. The problem here, as Cloonan and Johnson point out, is that the very things for which popular music is valued may also be the source of its use for oppression. If music empowers people, if it is a means of articulating physical and cultural and ideological identity by occupying sonic territory, then it can only do so at the expense of other people’s use of that territory, other people’s sense of identity. Musical empowerment for one group of people—teenagers, say—may mean musical disempowerment for another group, grown-ups (something which rock scholars have traditionally been sanguine about).
Cloonan and Johnson’s argument resonated with work I was already doing on music and everyday life. My starting point here was a bill brought before the House of Commons in March 2000 to "prohibit the broadcasting of recorded music in certain public places." (Frith, 2003). The bill was a response to the activities of a pressure group, Pipedown, The Campaign for Freedom from Piped Music, which had itself formed on the back of the anger felt by many people (not least musicians) at being compelled to listen to music in so many public spaces.[1] But for me the question raised by Pipedown was a broader one: we now live so much of our lives to music – it dominates private as much as public space – that this must be having an effect on our understanding of music itself, or, more precisely, on our attitudes to silence and noise.
I won’t rerun my published arguments here but just note that once one starts examining music in everyday life it becomes apparent how often music does make people very cross indeed. Pipedown is an example of this, so are rows between neighbours about parties and people practising their instruments, end-of-their-tether parental rage at the music spilling out of their children’s bedrooms, sightseers’ fury at the music blasting from car radios. For all the families I know, negotiating the music to be played on a long car trip is one of the more emotionally fraught occasions of domestic life, even in the age of the personal CD player.
My work in this context on music in everyday life related to a longer term research interest in musical value judgements, in how people assess and talk about ‘good’ and ‘bad music’ (Frith, 1996). Having considered this institutionally (the musical judgements made by record companies, broadcasters, critics, etc), I was now interested in how such judgements worked in everyday life (Frith, 2004). Again, I don’t want to reiterate published work here but focus on one question: under what circumstances does a musical judgement become emotionally charged, become angry, and why?
I was recently rereading my notes from the first popular music research I ever did; a questionnaire survey of teenagers carried out in 1972 (Frith, 1978). What struck me much more than it did originally was the anger in many of the answers to the question: "What do you think of Marc Bolan?" (A question designed simply to test the pop knowledge of those respondents claiming to be uninterested.)[2] I read the torrent of abuse now and wonder why these boys and girls were so cross. The rest of this paper, then, will be a meditation on music and anger. It is divided into two parts. First I want to consider angry listeners; then I will make a few remarks about angry music.
Angry Listeners
My first question is this: when does not liking a piece of music, regarding it as bad, become something emotional, a reaction of rage? There can be no doubt that this happens, famously at the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, for example. What was involved there? One source of listeners’ displeasure seems to have been a sense of sacrilege. The problem was not just that the music was difficult, that it lacked the melodic and sonic qualities the audience expected, but that it somehow ridiculed such qualities, bringing secular and ‘primitive’ elements to a highly ‘serious’ occasion. A reading of contemporary music criticism suggests that anger at a performance is still imbued with this sense that it, the performance, is somehow making a mockery of what music is supposed to be. I would classify the sources of such critical anger under three headings:
- Anger that other people are enjoying something that is not worthy of enjoyment. (This is what one might call the David Helfgott problem – critics are particularly incensed when someone they regard as musically sloppy if not meretricious is rapturously applauded for ‘sentimental’ reasons).
- Anger that performers or composers are betraying their talent. (This is often seen to be in the pursuit of crowd-pleasing, whether emotionally or commercially. The most familiar version of this argument is the rock cultural concept of ‘selling out’, but it is articulated by classical critics too, for whom the more talented or ‘promising’ the musician, the greater their anger).
- Anger that a performer or composer or record company is dishonouring music by corrupting its original integrity. (This is the language of moral rights, the source of legal injunctions against dance music producers ‘adapting’ the work of Carl Orff or ethnomusicologists’ rage at the way in which local ritual and spiritual music is sampled for Western entertainment).[3]
What is causing anger here is a perceived insult, a sense that performers lack respect, whether for composer, culture or listener. It’s the same sense of insult that makes people angry about the inappropriate use of music – as muzak, on advertisements, in TV shows. What makes people angriest (judging by anecdotal evidence) is music they particularly like (whether a Verdi aria or a Rolling Stones song) being used to soothe nerves or sell cars, being used in a way which will make it difficult for them to be able to listen to this music in their own way ever again.
In all these cases a musical performance makes people angry because of what it is not, by reference to a musical ideal, an ideal of performance and occasion and experience, an ideal which is heard being sullied or mocked. I want to note two aspects of this here. First, such a sense of sacrilege depends on a particular kind of musical knowledge and understanding; second (as I argued in Performing Rites), in music criticism aesthetic judgements are moral judgements. Music here is making people angry because of its ethical rather than technical shortcomings – which is why we can be made angry by music in which in other circumstances we delight.
I turn next to a related but I think different kind of musical anger, rooted in issues of identity. The most famous example of an angry audience in rock history (the iconic equivalent of the first Rite of Spring) was captured on tape at Bob Dylan’s concert at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1966.[4] Listen to it now and the sense of betrayal is still palpable – in the audience response to Bob Dylan playing electric rock, in Dylan’s own response to his audience’s disapproval. This is what ‘selling out’ (the source of those teenagers’ Marc Bolan anger) sounds like. For the fans involved the issue here seems to be less the dishonouring of an ideal or an original musical concept, than the betrayal of an identity, of an understanding of what an artist stood for, and how that, in turn, reflected (and reflected back on) the identity of their listeners. For Bob Dylan’s folk-club followers and Marc Bolan’s original fans, musical tastes were a key to the way they differentiated themselves from the mainstream of commercial pop/rock consumers. Dylan and Bolan going pop had something of the same emotional impact as betrayal by a lover. It was as if their trust had been abused; the new Bob Dylan, the new Marc Bolan, called their old followers’ very sense of themselves into question. The source of anger here, in short, is not so much the music itself as who is playing it.
Audiences may also be angered by another kind of betrayal of trust, one that does not involve identity in this way. They may get angry if they feel a musician is cheating or exploiting them. In the days when I was reviewing a lot of concerts I did occasionally see audiences get very angry indeed. This was either because they thought they had been short-changed – numbers performed perfunctorily or with mistakes and sloppiness, musicians displaying a kind of contempt. Or because they detected the use of backing tracks or drum machines or other kinds of pre-recorded assistance (in fact used by most rock bands, but usually well concealed). Here too, then, if without the sense of self involved in the more intense kinds of fandom, music was seen as a relationship in which both sides have certain obligations. (My own rages at concerts were with audience members who failed to meet their obligations as listeners – talking all through the quiet bits!)
I turn now to a third and rather different (if more familiar) kind of anger. I will summarise this as the problem of noise because, in general, it is anger expressed at music being played too loud! In fact, though, I think the problem is not volume as such (measured by decibels) but the sense that someone else’s music is invading our space, that we can’t listen to it as music, the pleasurable organisation of sound, but only as noise, an undifferentiated din. This is probably our most common experience of music making us angry, and suggests that musical disputes these days are more often arguments about noise than taste. "Turn it down!" is the eternal parental call (even when the music isn’t actually being played that loudly) and over the last few months I’ve found myself being most irritated at home by one child’s habit of playing Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits in the kitchen – too loud! – whenever he gets the chance, tracks that I’ll happily put on myself when I’m home alone!
My argument, though, is that such disputes – and such emotion – are not really about noise as such. Rather, they concern what I’ll call spatial integrity. The question is how does music work to include and exclude people from this kind of personal space (and when and why is other people’s music felt to invade it). It’s clear, to begin with, that the music itself is not the issue, just that it is not, at that moment, our music. And certainly in domestic life some records come to carry traces of battles past, to symbolise particularly charged arguments about listening rights. To put such records on for everyone to hear can be in itself an aggressive gesture.
This is, though, to raise the second set of questions I want to discuss here. Is anger-making music just a matter of such circumstance? What about the music in itself? Is there such a thing as angry music? If so, how and why do we listen to it?
Angry Music
There are two kinds of answer to this question. The first would suggest that angry music is music that sounds angry, that somehow mimics non-musical anger. Consider the sound of the two pop genres that are taken to be angry in themselves, regardless of what particular songs are actually about, punk and rap. What do these have in common?
- Noisiness, not in terms of volume but in terms of busyness, a lot of sounds crossing over each other, the use of echo and reverberation, and so forth.
- Voice, a shouting effect, to make the speaker/singer heard but also to indicate a high pitch of emotion.
- Unresolved melodic structure, an immediate agitation, the music having to move forward all the time without ever reaching a plateau or sense of harmony.
- Rhythm, a basic 4:4 beat (in rap vocals if not necessarily in rap soundtracks) generating a sense of restlessness.
Such generic anger can be compared to the large repertoire of songs in which anger is expressed on a personal level, in the context of a particular narrative setting (betrayal by a lover, the break-up of a relationship). Again we find the conventions of musical realism, the song mimicking the angry scene or emotion. Lyrics draw on ‘real’ dialogue (the use of "I"/"You," colloquial language, swear words), the voice is high pitched, the music noisy or discordant, the song structure anti-melodic. Both generically and in particular songs, then, popular musical anger seems to have three aspects.
First, anger is indicated by a kind of lack of control – as in real life, but the very fact that this is being given musical expression means that it is being performed, conventionalised, and, therefore, controlled. It follows, second, that listening to musical anger is not really the same thing as experiencing real anger. The latter experience is unsettling if not frightening. We’re not sure what someone might do: the emotion is supercharged, the physicality can become violence, the response is "calm down!" In its musical form, by contrast, anger is exhilarating and pleasurable; as listeners we clearly identify with being angry rather than being anger’s object. This doesn’t mean we become angry as we listen – though we might enact anger mentally. What we enjoy is ‘being angry,’ performing anger, without actually feeling so (a disturbing and frightening experience for the angry person in reality too). And this is true for angry genres as well as for angry songs, so that, third, however angry they may sound (and be) punk and rap don’t actually make their audiences angry but, rather, excited and buoyant. (My own experience of punk concerts in the 1970s was of being wonderfully exhilarated.) To suggest that angry music is music that makes its listeners angry is therefore wrong (though it may, of course, make involuntary listeners very angry indeed – precisely because of its noise, its restlessness, its perceived aggression).[5]
A second kind of angry music is designed to make people angry. I’m thinking here of political music, protest songs, which seek to describe a situation in such a way as to make people angry about it. Here, paradoxically, the singer is unlikely to sound angry but to seem detached from the situation being sung about. The basic tools of the protest singer are humour, irony, sarcasm. Anger here becomes a reasonable response to the reality being described, a controlled rather than uncontrolled emotion. This means that listeners must be able to hear the lyrics, to respond to the singer’s tone, to be unsettled as well as exhilarated by the musical experience. For political singers the challenge is to prevent their music from being simply entertaining and this means eschewing the usual pop signs of anger, the noisiness, etc.
What to Conclude from All of This?
First, when people get cross with music it is less because of the music itself than the social circumstances. The quality of the social experience determines the problem of the musical experience, and to understand this we have to understand what people expect from music, how they perceive its functions, what they expect to happen when they listen to it. I doubt, for example, that in a lecture on angry music (the original occasion for this paper) I could play anything that would make anyone angry.
Second, people get cross with music in the context of social relations, whether between musicians and audiences or in the way in which music itself is an aspect of social relations (in the family, between friends and neighbours, and so forth). Liking and disliking music is a social as well as individual activity and arguments about musical taste are social arguments with all the emotional baggage that involves.
Third, angry music – music expressing anger – does not on the whole make its listeners angry. Rather, it makes ‘anger’ something to be abstractly enjoyed. To make people really angry, then, songwriters have to make music that doesn’t sound angry at all!
Acknowledgement
This paper was originally presented as a keynote at m:terapi 2003, the 4th Nordic Music Therapy Conference in Bergen, Norway, May 2003.
Notes
[1]"Pipe down!" means "Be quiet!" in colloquial English.
[2]Marc Bolan fronted a duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex, which built up a cult following among what were then called "progressive rock" fans in the early 1970s, before changing its name to T. Rex and becoming commercially very successful as a teen-aimed pop band.
[3]See, for example, Feld (2000)
[4]The tape was issued as a bootleg record, misleadingly titled Bob Dylan Live at the Albert Hall. For the true story of this event, see C. P. Lee: Like the Night. Bob Dylan and the Road to the Manchester Free Trade Hall, London: Helter Skelter, 1998.
[5]In some forms of music, expressive convention (this stands for anger) is quite detached from mimicry (this sounds angry). The emotions of such songs (in opera or music theatre, for example) are explained by their dramatic situation. The Queen of the Nights aria in The Magic Flute, to take a famous case ("My heart is seething with hellish vengeance"), requires exceptional vocal control that is rarely perfectly achieved in live performance. Listening pleasure here is almost entirely in terms of technical admiration; anger doesn't come into it.
References
Berger, Julian (2003). Metallica is the Latest Interrogation Tactic. Guardian May 20, 2003.
Cloonan, Martin & Johnson , Bruce (2002). Killing Me Softly With His Song: An Initial Investigation in the Use of Popular Music as a Tool of Oppression. Popular Music 21(1) 2002.
Feld, Steven (2000). The Poetics and Politics of Pygmy Pop. In G. Born, & D. Hesmondhalgh, (Eds.), Western Music and Its Others. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Frith, Simon (1978). The Sociology of Rock. London: Constable.
Frith, Simon (1996). Performing Rites. Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Harvard University Press/Oxford University Press.
Frith, Simon (2003). Music and Everyday Life. In M. Clayton, T. Herbert, & R. Middleton, The Cultural Study of Popular Music. New York and London: Routledge.
Frith, Simon (2004). What is Bad Music? In C. Washburne and M. Darko (Ed.), Bad Music. New York and London, Routledge.
Witheyman, Iain (2003). The Culture of Scottish Boys: In Their Own Words. BA dissertation, Film and Media Studies, University of Stirling, 2003.
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