Music As Anodyne
Anodyne: serving to alleviate pain, not likely to offend or arouse tensions. On my walk I was thinking about world music. Back in the early 1990s, I was a fanatic for world music, and for a while, I ran a world music mail-order company called Intersect Music . It had several sections for different regions from around the world. It's now interesting to think about all that music in context with what's happened since the early 90s and through the end of the century: Rodney King, the first World Trade Center attack, Waco, the OJ trial, the Oklahoma City bombing, and so on. They were events that you watched on TV for hours and hours, all of which for me were in the background and were all unnerving--something I had never experienced before. For boomers, there was a palpable shift. What was particularly interesting to me was to think about how music can or can't be used--especially music that comes from Islamic countries. I always liked the music just for the music but there...
