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's there's a subtext that I have since realized--certainly post-9/11--that music can exist on its own and you could use it for your own personal reasons, and not necessarily as a soundtrack for TV news coverage with the sound off. In fact, a lot of Islamic countries don't use music at all so it's not something that we could actually use collectively.

As much as I'd like music to be a part of peace negotiation, it's not something that's going to matter much. I doubt that music, or any kind of a culture was front and center in Gaza. When you're an oppressed people the music that might emerge from that would be more urgent--it wouldn't be glossy music production as we have known it--although I haven't followed what might be coming from there since the 2000s. It would be more effectively used for you personally (as poetry would be used) or in a circle of people in the community as a tradition.

It's also interesting to think about the music of other oppressed countries, especially in Africa. It's often a joyful dance music that stands in ironic context with political upheavals. It's music that can be enjoyed as music and does not have any connection with a coup or civil war that might be happening. When I saw the Drummers Of Burundi in 1993 I wasn't following breaking news from Africa on my smartphone. The WTC attack was 6 months in the past at that point and wasn't memorialized on YouTube. The issue now is that we have too much access to context. We've become context machines.

When you think about music being anodyne it doesn't work as it used to. In the days after 9/11 I had my "playlists" which might have been more of a "mixtape" then--or just loading the CD changer. On the morning of 10/7 I was working on a string arrangement and played a dissonant bass motif. I reacted--or felt I had to react. I felt the same way on 10/7/2001 while watching coverage of the US attack in Afghanistan as its first reprisal—or reaction.

Back in the 80s, I noticed music (and art) becoming "mirror" art, reflecting a pessimistic culture unraveling, as opposed to "window" art that looked out optimistically into the future. I saw world music as having the latter function in the early 90s, but has since become a hall of mirrors. When will "window" art re-emerge?

It wasn't until the end of the century that we used the term fin de siecle, but it still feels that way and has moved on to fin du monde. But you could also interpret it as "to the ends of the world" which in retrospect is what I felt when I was doing the world music catalog.