Blast the boom box

National Review, June 28, 2004 by Theodore Dalrymple

EXTRAORDINARY how potent cheap music is: and nowadays, one might add, how ubiquitous and inescapable, like the political propaganda of totalitarian regimes. You find it even in some bookstores, where you might have supposed that a contemplative silence was absolutely necessary and desirable.

When Noel Coward turned his bon mot, of course, the cheap music to which he referred evoked slushy sentimentality in the otherwise unemotional, but the emotions and psychological states that the new cheap, industrial, and supremely loud rock music evoke are very different, and far from romantic. I suspect that a great deal of the aggressive agitation of modern life is attributable to the unsettling and nerve-jangling nature of pop music, both when it is listened to (or rather heard) voluntarily, from headsets and ghetto-blasters, and when it is piped into the environment like poisonous gas.

In some circumstances, of course, loud music must be a cynical ploy to encourage customers to part with their money faster than they would otherwise do. In the bookstore, for example, the bookworm is discouraged from browsing lengthily before deciding against a purchase. He flees the noise as quickly as he can, clutching a book that he might not have bought if he had been able to read the first ten pages in peace. In clubs and bars, the sheer volume of the noise discourages people from talking, and therefore encourages them to drink more. One day, there is going to be an epidemic of noise-induced deafness as a result of the loudness of bars--which means, of course, that the volume everywhere will have to be turned up even further.

The effect, and in some cases the function, of compulsory or inescapable pop music is to render judgment difficult or impossible. The loud, fast, insistent rhythm induces a trance-like state in which consecutive, constructive, or analytic thought is obliterated. The person in this state is both calm and excited at the same time, and feels a sense of invulnerability. You can see this in the conduct of drivers who play rock music so loudly in their cars that the first you know of their approach is through the vibrations in the ground under your feet. Completely enclosed in a world of their own, they drive as if they were immortal (no one else exists, for them, of course) and a crash were impossible. They are not courting danger, because they do not think that they are at risk. They do not think at all. Their music is a drug of abuse, taken for much the same reasons.

It is possible, of course, that the relationship between recklessness and aggression on one hand, and rock music on the other, is the reverse of what I have suggested: that it is recklessness and aggression that induce people to play rock music loudly, rather than rock music that induces people to become reckless and aggressive. In fact, this question could easily be answered experimentally, for example by observing the effects of loud rock music on subjects in simulated-driving machines. I suspect the effects on performance would be as bad as those of alcohol.

In fact, anecdotal experience suggests that rock music causes aggression, at least in the susceptible. In the prison in which I work there is an officer of Jamaican origin, who would not be culturally predisposed (to put it mildly) to dislike loud rock music, who has discovered by experience that if he plays Baroque music on his prison landing, the behavior of the prisoners improves and the mood is generally calm; if, on the other hand, he plays rock music, the prisoners become agitated and an atmosphere of tension results.

This observation was confirmed by a police sergeant to whom I spoke one night when I was asked to see a patient in police custody. To my surprise, I found the sergeant playing classical music in the police cells, and he told me precisely the same story. If he allowed rock music in the cells, he could expect to be insulted, spat upon, and shouted at. If he played Mozart, all was calm.

I have suggested that Gregorian chant be relayed through the prison, to encourage an atmosphere of contemplation. My suggestion is treated as a joke: Human rights require that each prisoner be allowed his own ghetto-blaster, each played louder than the last in order to obliterate the other's sound, so that progress down a prison corridor is an inferno of discordant noise that induces trembling, anxiety, and agitation. Needless to say, the official solution--on the grounds of human rights--to this problem is the prescription of addictive tranquilizing drugs.

Ironically, I meet in prison men charged with murder or attempted murder who have killed or tried to kill their neighbor because of the loudness and persistence of his music--always rock music, of course. (When a young person tells me that he is interested in music, I have given up asking what kind of music, for the question is by now redundant.) So saturated is our environment with this music--out in my garden the other sunny day, I felt the bass rhythm from a distant, equally bourgeois household coming up through the lawn--that a person who plays it cannot conceive that someone else might not wish to hear it, let alone have a right to silence. Indeed, so closely identified are such people with their rock music that any request that they turn the volume down is experienced as a personal insult, an attack on the very innermost core of their being.