New York (AFP) - Many music reporters pass their days immersed in the phenomenon that is Taylor Swift, but one US news outlet said Tuesday it's hiring a journalist dedicated solely to the pop titan. Gannett's career site now includes a job post seeking a "Taylor Swift reporter" for the Tennessean and USA Today outlets. "The successful candidate is a driven, creative and energetic journalist able to capture the excitement around Swift's ongoing tour and upcoming album release, while also providing thoughtful analysis of her music and career," the post said. "We are looking for a journalist with...
New York (AFP) - As a teenager Grandmaster Flash began pioneering the turntable-as-instrument, playing the now iconic Bronx block parties that gave birth to hip-hop and revolutionized music. On Friday, he was back home, commemorating 50 years of the genre with a performance that had New Yorkers born in the mid-20th century reliving their youth -- and hip-hop's. "This is not a concert -- this is a jam!" Flash, now in his 60s, shouted from the stage, as hundreds of fans roared in applause in the South Bronx's Crotona Park. The audience swayed with their hands in the air as Flash threw it back to...
SAN DIEGO — The Spring Valley Inn has never been mentioned in the same breath as The Troubadour in Los Angeles or The Marquee in London as a key musical incubator for young bands that went on to earn recording contracts and tour the world. But in 1983, the Spring Valley Inn was the launching pad for the Beat Farmers, one of the finest and most rollicking rock bands to come out of San Diego in any decade, before or since. The beloved dive bar's official capacity back then was all of 49, although the Beat Farmers' weekly weekend gigs there drew wall-to-wall, triple-digit crowds. One of those gig...
It only needs one word: “Tina.” The new documentary about the hardscrabble life of one of music’s most vaunted superstars — Tina Turner — is a blazing dive into the seesawing success and horrors of her life with the abusive Ike Turner, her unlikely — yet spectacular — return as a middle-aged rock strutter in the ’80s and her current state of retirement in Europe with longtime love Erwin Bach. Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin, the Oscar-winning directors behind “Undefeated” and “LA 92,” teamed again to showcase Turner’s extraordinary life in the film, which debuts Saturday on HBO Max. Even fans famili...
SEATTLE — He’s not onstage, but Jabrille “Jimmy James” Williams is busting out the deep cuts. It doesn’t take much prodding to get one of Seattle’s premier guitar players — a certified Jimi Hendrix aficionado — on a roll, recounting with love tales of lost jam sessions and other Hendrixian legends that burn as brightly as a flaming Stratocaster.Even his stage name, a pseudonym Hendrix himself once used, is partly an homage to the Seattle-reared music icon. “Jimi Hendrix represented everything that has to do with the word ‘freedom,’” James says in a phone interview. “People want to put him in a...
When Sly and the Family Stone released “Everyday People” at the end of 1968, it was a rallying cry after a tumultuous year of assassinations, civil unrest and a seemingly interminable war.
“We got to live together,” he sang, “I am no better and neither are you.”
Throughout history, artists and songwriters have expressed a longing for equality and justice through their music.
Before the Civil War, African-American slaves gave voice to their oppression through protest songs camouflaged as Biblical spirituals. In the 1930s, jazz singer Billie Holiday railed against the practice of lynching in “Strange Fruit.” Woody Guthrie’s folk ballads from the 1930s and 1940s often commented on the plight of the working class.
But perhaps in no other time in American history did popular music more clearly reflect the political and cultural moment than the soundtrack of the 1960s – one that exemplified a new and overt social consciousness.
That decade, a palpable energy slowly burned and intensified through a succession of events: the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.
By the mid-1960s, frustration about the slow pace of change began to percolate with riots in multiple cities. Then, in 1968, two awful events occurred within months of each other: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy.
At the same time, virtually everyone in the African-American community was directly connected in some way or another to the civil rights movement.
Every year, I revisit this era in an undergraduate class I teach on music, civil rights and the Supreme Court. With this perspective as a backdrop, here are five songs, followed by a playlist that I share with my students.
While they offer a window into the awakening and reckoning of the times, the tracks have assumed a renewed relevance and resonance today.
First made a hit by the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, the song signaled a new consciousness and became the most covered of all Dylan songs.
The song asks a series of questions that appeal to the listener’s moral compass, while the timeless imagery of the lyrics – cannonballs, doves, death, the sky – evoke a longing for peace and freedom that spoke to the era.
“There are songs that are more written by their times than by any individual in that time, a song that the times seem to call for, a song that is just gonna be a perfect strike rolled right down the middle of the lane, and the lane has already been grooved for the strike.”
This song – along with others such as “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Chimes of Freedom” – are among the reasons Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
During a 1963 tour in the South, Cooke and his band were refused lodging at a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana.
African Americans routinely faced segregation and prejudice in the Jim Crow South, but this particular experience shook Cooke.
So he put pen to paper and tackled a subject that represented a departure for Cooke, a crossover artist who made his name with a series of Top 40 hits.
The lyrics reflect the anguish of being an extraordinary pop headliner who nonetheless needs to go through a side door.
Singer Sam Cooke stands next to a huge reproduction of his head on the roof of a Manhattan building.AP Photo
Showcasing Cooke’s gospel roots, it’s a song that painfully and beautifully captures the edge between hope and despair.
“It’s been a long, a long time coming,” he croons. “But I know a change is gonna come.”
Sam Cooke, in composing “A Change is Gonna Come,” was also inspired by Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”: According to Cooke’s biographer, upon hearing Dylan’s song, Cooke “was almost ashamed to have not written something like that himself.”
The Supremes were the Motown act with arguably the broadest appeal, and they paved the way for other black artists to enjoy creative success as mainstream acts.
Through their 20 top-10 hits and 17 appearances from 1964 to 1969 on CBS’ popular weekly live program “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the group had a regular presence in the living rooms of black and white families across the country.
James Brown – the self-proclaimed “hardest working man in show business” – built his reputation as an entertainer par excellence with brilliant dance moves, meticulous staging and a cape routine.
But with “Say it Loud – I’m Black And I’m Proud,” Brown seemed to be consciously delivering a starkly political statement about being black in America.
The track’s straightforward, unadorned lyrics allowed it to quickly become a black pride anthem that promised “we won’t quit movin’ until we get what we deserve.”
If I could choose only one song to represent the era it would be “Respect.”
It’s a cover of a track previously written and recorded by Otis Redding. But Franklin makes it wholly her own. From the opening lines, the Queen of Soul doesn’t ask for respect; she demands it.
The song became an anthem for the black power and women’s movements.
“It was the need of a nation, the need of the average man and woman in the street, the businessman, the mother, the fireman, the teacher – everyone wanted respect. It was also one of the battle cries of the civil rights movement. The song took on monumental significance.”
Of course, these five songs can’t possibly do the decade’s music justice.
Roger Waters, the 75-year-old British rocker who co-founded Pink Floyd back in 1965 and performed on classic albums like Wish You Were Here, Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, hasn’t been shy about discussing political topics. And this month, during a tour of Brazil, Waters has spoken out about Brazil’s presidential election—urging his Brazilian fans to vote against Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right candidate infamous for his racist, anti-gay and authoritarian views. Unfortunately, Bolsonaro (who is running with the Social Liberal Party against Workers Party candidate and former São Paolo Mayor Fernando Haddad) stands a very good chance of winning.
A poll published in the daily newspaper, Estado de São Paulo (which means the State of São Paulo in Portuguese) on October 15 found that 59% of Brazilian voters favored Bolsonaro compared to only 41% favoring Haddad. And given his extremist views, it isn’t hard to understand why Waters doesn’t want him to win.
Latin American publications have dubbed Bolsonaro “the Trump of the Tropics” because he has run a pseudo-populist campaign with a white nationalist theme and frequent attacks on blacks and feminists. But Bolsonaro is much more overtly anti-gay than Trump. In a 2011 interview with Playboy, Bolsonaro asserted that he would be “incapable of loving a homosexual son” and “would prefer my son to die in an accident” than be gay.
Although Bolsonaro is Catholic, he is popular among far-right Protestant evangelicals in Brazil because of his anti-gay and anti-feminist views as well his strong opposition to abortion—which is illegal in Brazil. However, back-alley abortions are common in South America’s largest country, and Brazilian feminists have been calling for making abortion legal. Bolsonaro has made it clear that on his watch, abortion will not be legalized.
Bolsonaro (a congressman, military veteran and admirer of President Donald Trump) has praised the repressive military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964-1984, although he has criticized it for not killing more people. In a 2016 interview, Bolsonaro complained, “The dictatorship’s mistake was to torture but not kill.” And in a 1998 interview with Veja Magazine, Bolsonaro praised Chilean fascist Augusto Pinochet but argued that he “should have killed more people.”
Major Brazilian cities like Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, Bahia have painfully high crime rates, and Bolsonaro has campaigned on an anti-crime platform—vowing to bring restore the death penalty if reelected. He has also addressed Brazil’s recessionary woes, and when a country is plagued by both violent crime and a tough recession, authoritarians can easily play on voters’ fears.
Roger Waters isn’t the only one who dreads the thought of Bolsonaro becoming president of Brazil. Author James N. Green, who has written extensively about Brazil’s military regime of the past, is fearful of how repressive Brazil could become again if Bolsonaro wins.
Green asserted, “We are at a moment in which a conservative, right-wing pro-fascist-type person is possibly going to be the president….. I don’t even want to imagine what that is going to be like.” And judging from recent polls, there is a strong possibility that he will.
Fifty years ago – in September 1968 – the legendary rock band Led Zeppelin first performed together, kicking off a Scandinavian tour billed as the New Yardbirds.
The new, better name would come later that fall, while drummer John Bonham’s death in 1980 effectively ended their decade-defining reign. But to this day, the band retains the same iconic status it held back in the 1970s: It ranks as one of the best-selling music acts of all time and continues to shape the sounds of new and emerging groups young enough to be the band members’ grandchildren.
Yet, even after all this time – when every note, riff and growl of Zeppelin’s nine-album catalog has been pored over by fans, cover artists and musicologists – a dark paradox still lurks at the heart of its mystique. How can a band so slavishly derivative – and sometimes downright plagiaristic – be simultaneously considered so innovative and influential?
How, in other words, did it get to have its custard pie and eat it, too?
For anyone who quests after the holy grail of creative success, Led Zeppelin has achieved something mythical in stature: a place in the musical firmament, on its own terms, outside of the rules and without compromise.
When Led Zeppelin debuted its eponymous first album in 1969, there’s no question that it sounded new and exciting. My father, a baby boomer and dedicated Beatles fan, remembers his chagrin that year when his middle school math students threw over the Fab Four for Zeppelin, seemingly overnight. Even the stodgy New York Times, which decried the band’s “plastic sexual superficiality,” felt compelled, in the same article, to acknowledge its “enormously successful … electronically intense blending” of musical styles.
Yet, from the very beginning, the band was also dogged with accusations of musical pilfering, plagiarism and copyright infringement – often justifiably.
The band’s first album, “Led Zeppelin,” contained several songs that drew from earlier compositions, arrangements and recordings, sometimes with attribution and often without. It included two Willie Dixon songs, and the band credited both to the influential Chicago blues composer. But it didn’t credit Anne Bredon when it covered her song “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.”
The hit “Dazed and Confused,” also from that first album, was originally attributed to Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. However in 2010, songwriter Jake Holmes filed a lawsuit claiming that he’d written and recorded it in 1967. After the lawsuit was settled out of court, the song is now credited in the liner notes of re-releases as “inspired by” Holmes.
‘Dazed and Confused’ by Jake Holmes.
The band’s second album, “Led Zeppelin II,” picked up where the first left off. Following a series of lawsuits, the band agreed to list Dixon as a previously uncredited author on two of the tracks, including its first hit single, “Whole Lotta Love.” An additional lawsuit established that blues legend Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett was a previously uncredited author on another track called “The Lemon Song.”
Musical copyright infringement is notoriously challenging to establish in court, hence the settlements. But there’s no question the band engaged in what musicologists typically call “borrowing.” Any blues fan, for instance, would have recognized the lyrics of Dixon’s “You Need Love” – as recorded by Muddy Waters – on a first listen of “Whole Lotta Love.”
Dipping into the commons or appropriation?
Should the band be condemned for taking other people’s songs and fusing them into its own style?
Or should this actually be a point of celebration?
The answer is a matter of perspective. In Zeppelin’s defense, the band is hardly alone in the practice. The 1960s folk music revival movement, which was central to the careers of Baez, Holmes, Bredon, Dixon and Burnett, was rooted in an ethic that typically treated musical material as a “commons” – a wellspring of shared culture from which all may draw, and to which all may contribute.
Most performers in the era routinely covered “authorless” traditional and blues songs, and the movement’s shining star, Bob Dylan, used lyrical and musical pastiche as a badge of pride and display of erudition – “Look how many old songs I can cram into this new song!” – rather than as a guilty, secret crutch to hold up his own compositions.
Why shouldn’t Zeppelin be able to do the same?
On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the racial dynamics inherent in Led Zeppelin’s borrowing. Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf were African-Americans, members of a subjugated minority who were – especially back then – excluded from reaping their fair share of the enormous profits they generated for music labels, publishers and other artists.
Like their English countrymen Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones, Zeppelin’s attitude toward black culture seems eerily reminiscent of Lord Elgin’s approach to the marble statues of the Parthenon and Queen Victoria’s policy on the Koh-i-Noor diamond: Take what you can and don’t ask permission; if you get caught, apologize without ceding ownership.
Led Zeppelin was also accused of lifting from white artists such as Bredon and the band Spirit, the aggrieved party in a recent lawsuit over the rights to Zeppelin’s signature song “Stairway to Heaven.” Even in these cases, the power dynamics were iffy.
Bredon and Spirit are lesser-known composers with lower profiles and shallower pockets. Neither has benefited from the glow of Zeppelin’s glory, which has only grown over the decades despite the accusations and lawsuits leveled against them.
A matter of motives
So how did the band pull it off, when so many of its contemporaries have been forgotten or diminished? How did it find and keep the holy grail? What makes Led Zeppelin so special?
I could speculate about its cultural status as an avatar of trans-Atlantic, post-hippie self-indulgence and “me generation” rebellion. I could wax poetic about its musical fusion of pre-Baroque and non-Western harmonies with blues rhythms and Celtic timbres. I could even accuse it, as many have over the years, of cutting a deal with the devil.
Instead, I’ll simply relate a personal anecdote from almost 20 years ago. I actually met frontman Robert Plant. I was waiting in line at a lower Manhattan bodega around 2 a.m. and suddenly realized Plant was waiting in front of me. A classic Chuck Berry song was playing on the overhead speakers. Plant turned to look at me and mused, “I wonder what he’s up to now?” We chatted about Berry for a few moments, then paid and went our separate ways.
Brief and banal though it was, I think this little interlude – more than the reams of music scholarship and journalism I’ve read and written – might hold the key to solving the paradox.
Maybe Led Zeppelin is worthy because, like Sir Galahad, the knight who finally gets the holy grail, its members’ hearts were pure.
During our brief exchange, it was clear Plant didn’t want to be adulated – he didn’t need his ego stroked by a fawning fan. Furthermore, he and his bandmates were never even in it for the money. In fact, for decades, Zeppelin refused to license its songs for television commercials. In Plant’s own words, “I only wanted to have some fun.”
Maybe the band retained its fame because it lived, loved and embodied rock and roll so absolutely and totally – to the degree that Plant would start a conversation with a total stranger in the middle of the night just to chat about one of his heroes.
This love, this purity of focus, comes out in its music, and for this, we can forgive Led Zeppelin’s many trespasses.
Despite being one of the best-selling albums of all time, ideology from AC/DC’s “Back in Black” album has gone unchallenged for nearly 40 years. The album’s closing track posited a testable hypothesis, asserting with rock-star confidence that “Rock ‘n’ roll ain’t noise pollution.” Opinions may vary from person to person, but little scientific evidence has been evaluated to determine if rock music is noise pollution … until now.
OK, yes, our experiment may sound silly or frivolous. But our hope is to focus a little more attention on how sounds – whether Angus Young’s guitar licks or the steady drone from a busy highway – can affect ecosystems. Our work demonstrates that the effects of noise pollution are not restricted just to the animals directly affected by the sounds, but can alter their behaviors and interactions with other animals and plants, spreading the effects throughout an ecosystem.
Most existing studies focus largely on the direct effects of noise – an animal hears the noise in its environment and is affected. But of course, animals don’t live in isolation. They’re embedded within a tangle of food web interactions with other species. So by affecting even one species, noise pollution – or any other environmental change – may generate indirect effects that spread from individual to individual, and eventually may affect entire communities.
Studying noise pollution and its cascading indirect effects is difficult, especially on large free-roaming animals. To test these interactions, myresearch group will often scale-down our experiments and use smaller model systems.
Specifically, we study lady beetles, including Harmonia axyridis, the multi-colored Asian lady beetle. Unknown to many, lady beetles are among the most important predators of agricultural pests such as soybean aphids. By voraciously consuming aphids in soybean fields, lady beetles provide natural biological control of pests and minimize the amount of pesticides needed on crops. Lady beetles provide an important ecosystem service – anything that disrupts their ability to attack aphids could be perceived as having a negative effect on society.
Firing up the hi-fi in the ecology lab
With the help of colleagues – and fellow AC/DC fans – Vince Klink and Marcus Lashley, my team of undergraduate and graduate students sought to determine if noise pollution would decrease lady beetle effectiveness at controlling aphids. Further, we suspected that reducing predation rates on aphids would allow the pest population to explode, which would in turn reduce soybean yield.
First we wanted to figure out what sounds affected lady beetle feeding rates. We placed lady beetle larvae within small enclosures with a known number of aphids to eat, and allowed them to forage either in silence or under loud conditions. We played sounds through computer speakers at maximum volume: 95-100 decibels, approximately equal to a lawn mower or outboard motor.
In addition to AC/DC, we queued up one of our favorite country music albums – “Wanted! The Outlaws” featuring Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and others. We DJ’d a mix of rock music, including Lynyrd Skynyrd, Guns ‘n’ Roses, The Supersuckers, the British folk band Warblefly, and a mix of city sounds such as jackhammers, car horns, and so on.
Our results were good news for country and folk fans – lady beetles agreed that those songs were not noise pollution and continued to attack aphids with the same vigor when serenaded by these genres as they did in silence. However, lady beetles were not fans of AC/DC, the rock mix or city noises, even when played at the same volume as the country and folk treatments. In fact, listening to the “Back in Black” album cut the amount of aphids being eaten during a 16 to 18 hour period almost in half.
At least according to lady beetles, it seemed that rock ‘n’ roll was noise pollution and indirectly benefited agricultural pests. But could it have an effect on soybean plants?
Many researchers have investigated how music affects plant growth with mixed results. However, when we blasted soybean plants with two weeks of nonstop “Back in Black,” we didn’t see any effect on growth. Similarly, we found no effect of continuous AC/DC on pest abundance when we grew aphids on plants without their predators.
But we were interested in whether there was an interactive effect of rock music and predators on pest and plants. So for two weeks, we watched lady beetles attack aphids, while aphids reproduced and plants grew.
When the plants were grown without music, the predators reduced aphid density to nearly zero. As a consequence, the plants grew strong and healthy in the absence of their pest. In contrast, when plants were grown with “Back in Black” blaring, the lady beetles did not control aphids and the pests’ population size was more than 40 times larger than in the silent condition – from an average of about 4 aphids per plant to more than 180. As a consequences of high pest abundance, the plants in music treatments were 25 percent smaller.
We also showed that insects are affected by noise pollution, too. Most previous work in this area focused on large, “sexy” megafauna. But insects provide many ecosystem services that are essential for the healthy functioning of our planet. Disrupting insect behaviors such as pollination or predation can have drastic consequences.
Finally, our work empirically evaluated the AC/DC hypothesis for the first time since its inception in 1980. As fans of AC/DC and rock music, we sadly must disagree with the band and concede that rock ‘n’ roll is noise pollution, at least for lady beetles. Of course, rock music is not really a threat to ecosystems. But because loud music is similar to other real-world instances of noise pollution such as the hum of snowmobiles and the buzz of drones overhead, our results serve as a proof-of-concept that sound pollution can have pervasive effects throughout an ecosystem.
What about AC/DC’s other hypothesis, that “rock n roll ain’t gonna die?” As rock lovers, we’re happy to report there’s no evidence to contradict that one.
Funk is one of those quintessentially American genres of music that has been exported the world over. George Clinton, Parliament, the Ohio Players, Bootsy Collins, Zapp, Lakeside, Platypus, Brides of Funkenstein, Klymaxx, Slave… the list goes on. If you don’t know these artists, you have heard them. They’ve been sampled by everyone from N.W.A. to Justin Bieber; Notorious B.I.G. to Bruno Mars. James Brown is the genre’s father. Prince is perhaps its most celebrated '80s son.
And like all great American music, funk has its soul rooted firmly in a uniquely American heart: the Miami Valley of Ohio, sandwiched between the Mason Dixon line and Motown.
And it’s here, in Dayton—a place that voted definitively for Trump in 2016—where the Funk Music Hall of Fame and Exhibition Center—or just, “The Funk Center”—opened their doors this spring.
David Webb, the Funk Center’s founder and executive director, likes to muse that “Dayton is the funkiest place on Earth.”
It’s said that God planted his foot here, and sweat into the soil. The aquifer beneath sucked up God’s sweat, and when the people drank it, funk was born. There’s something, the locals will tell you, in the water.
Whether that’s true or not—and who can say for certain it isn’t?—what is true is that some of the funkiest musicians called Dayton home, from the Ohio Players to Lakeside to Slave.
These musicians, and so many more in the genre, played and performed with different funk groups on albums and in live concerts as the groove moved them, switching bands faster than athletes are traded between teams. The result is you can hear Ohio musicians at various times with Slave, P-Funk, Parliament, etc. From this Midwestern town, that funky style forever changed music history and race relations in the United States.
“Back then [in the 1960s], black people could only shop in one side of the city,” says Webb, of the early days of funk in Dayton. “Dayton was a segregated city. Funk played a big role in bringing people together. Black, white, everybody came together. Everybody enjoyed the music. It broke those racial barriers. It opened up other avenues. We gelled together. When they [blacks and whites] started listening to funk music, it opened doors. It was beautiful.”
The fledgling museum is a testament to that racial harmony, of One Nation Under a Groove, and all things treasured in funk. Walking in, visitors are greeted by “Mount Funkmore”—a giant mural, painted by Delora Buchanan, a Dayton local who also happened to design some of those outlandish costumes funk stars wore on stage.
The Funk Center displays a selection of those fabulous clothes: sequined man-rompers, fur-trimmed capes, clear plastic suits, Christmas-light strung jackets, and feathered fedoras. It’s all here: the glam, the battery-powered clothing, the silver short pants. It’s an exhibition that could be at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but instead, it’s here, in Dayton, and is just a small part of the reason to make the pilgrimage.
Also on display is everything from keyboards and guitars to sexy and explicit album covers, and rare show posters to the “money suitcase”—that treasure chest bands carried that pre-dated ATMs and easy credit.
Also memorialized at the Funk Center is Roger Troutman’s efforts to provide low-interest loans for working-class people across the Dayton area to be able to purchase their own homes at a time when redlining might have otherwise prevented it.
The Funk Center has such an incredible and growing collection because local family and friends kept everything from gold records to original, duct-taped-together drum kits, in basements and attics across Ohio, and they’ve generously donated them to the Funk Center.
These various components embody the spirit of the genre and are captured at the Funk Center, with a raw sense of camaraderie.
That funk legacy, says Webb, must be preserved, and is “important to our children. Our kids need to understand that.”
The meaningful expression, as played by the trained musicians of the genre, is the most important part of funk, says Larry Lang, the Funk Center’s Chief Funk Ambassador. “You can do whatever you want and be ridiculous, and it doesn’t mean anything,” he says.
In funk, that expression, Lang adds, is “the manifestation of experience.” It’s a unity that grows through and from the genre.
Here at the Funk Center, it’s easy to forget politics and venture into an analogue space, where the United States is, indeed, united. In funk.
For centuries, musicians have used drugs to enhance creativity and listeners have used drugs to heighten the pleasure created by music. And the two riff off each other, endlessly. The relationship between drugs and music is also reflected in lyrics and in the way these lyrics were composed by musicians, some of whom were undoubtedly influenced by the copious amounts of heroin, cocaine and “reefer” they consumed, as their songs sometimes reveal.
Acid rock would never have happened without LSD, and house music, with its repetitive 4/4 beats, would have remained a niche musical taste if it wasn’t for the wide availability of MDMA (ecstasy, molly) in the 1980s and 1990s.
And don’t be fooled by country music’s wholesome name. Country songs make more references to drugs than any other genre of popular music, including hip hop.
Under the influence
As every toker knows, listening to music while high can make it sound better. Recent research, however, suggests that not all types of cannabis produce the desired effect. The balance between two key compounds in cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabidiols, influence the desire for music and its pleasure. Cannabis users reported that they experienced greater pleasure from music when they used cannabis containing cannabidiols than when these compounds were absent.
Listening to music – without the influence of drugs – is rewarding, can reduce stress (depending upon the type of music listened to) and improve feelings of belonging to a social group. But research suggests that some drugs change the experience of listening to music.
Clinical studies that have administered LSD to human volunteers have found that the drug enhances music-evoked emotion, with volunteers more likely to report feelings of wonder, transcendence, power and tenderness. Brain imaging studies also suggest that taking LSD while listening to music, affects a part of the brain leading to an increase in musically inspired complex visual imagery.
Pairing music and drugs
Certain styles of music match the effects of certain drugs. Amphetamine, for example, is often matched with fast, repetitive music, as it provides stimulation, enabling people to dance quickly. MDMA’s (ecstasy) tendency to produce repetitive movement and feelings of pleasure through movement and dance is also well known.
An ecstasy user describes the experience of being at a rave:
I understood why the stage lights were bright and flashing, and why trance music is repetitive; the music and the drug perfectly complemented one another. It was as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes and I could finally see what everyone else was seeing. It was wonderful.
There is a rich representation of drugs in popular music, and although studies have shown higher levels of drug use in listeners of some genres of music, the relationship is complex. Drug representations may serve to normalise use for some listeners, but drugs and music are powerful ways of strengthening social bonds. They both provide an identity and a sense of connection between people. Music and drugs can bring together people in a political way, too, as the response to attempts to close down illegal raves showed.
People tend to form peer groups with those who share their own cultural preferences, which may be symbolised through interlinked musical and substance choices. Although there are some obvious synergies between some music and specific drugs, such as electronic dance music and ecstasy, other links have developed in less obvious ways. Drugs are one, often minor, component of a broader identity and an important means of distinguishing the group from others.
Although it is important not to assume causality and overstate the links between some musical genres and different types of drug use, information about preferences is useful in targeting and tailoring interventions, such as harm reduction initiatives, at music festivals.
What about AC/DC’s other hypothesis, that “rock n roll ain’t gonna die?” As rock lovers, we’re happy to report there’s no evidence to contradict that one.