Read The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature Online

Authors: Daniel J. Levitin

The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (9 page)

BOOK: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
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An important aspect of group cohesion as induced by music-dance is that with larger and larger human living groups, smaller subgroups may form of individuals who feel that their interests are not aligned with those of the larger, dominant group. They may feel as though they lack the power or resources to break out on their own, but that the larger group is not serving their needs. At the dawn of human culture, such a group may have been the elderly, who felt that the social alliances of the young were displacing their own; or a small group of individuals who did not like the current leader and felt mistreated by him. Music has historically been one of the strongest forces binding together the disenfranchised, the alienated.
The high school smokers mentioned at the beginning of this chapter are just one of many such assemblies. In high schools across America there are cliques of “in” students and of “out” students—students who feel marginalized, taunted, or tormented by the stronger, richer, or more popular kids. A common musical interest can provide solidarity for these smaller splinter groups, just as “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” does for the smokers. Gay students may turn to gay anthems such as Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” The “we” that music binds together can refer to liberals (Nine Inch Nails’ “March of the Pigs”), conservatives (Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”), the young (the Who’s “My Generation”), the average guy (Primus’s “Poetry and Prose”), or the working man (Springsteen’s “Working on the Highway”). The free love and sex philosophy of the late sixties and early seventies was celebrated in songs such as Stephen Stills’s “Love the One You’re With,” and those who rejected such notions might have turned to Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line,” and today might be galvanized by Whitney Houston (“Saving All My Love for You”) or Jill Scott (“Celibacy Blues”). Cherish the Ladies are a group whose musical mission is to preserve traditional Irish jig music, reels, and airs and provide solidarity for people of Irish descent, especially those far from home; the fact that they all are women positions them as role models for young female musicians.
My mathematics professor at M.I.T., Gian-Carlo Rota, also taught the graduate course in existentialism there in the 1970s and 1980s, and he used to give out buttons that read “Decadence Is Cozy.” The message is intriguing: People who do something together that is antisocial or somewhat off-center enjoy a bond. We hear it in the proto-punk classic “Dirty Water” by the Standells. “I’ll be down by the river Charles,” they sing, along with “lovers, buggers and thieves.” What they are saying is “They’re actually good people, these river-dwellers, people like us.” Much of heavy metal music speaks to people on the fringes of society, the disaffected. Heavy metal lyrics are often a call of togetherness: we (heavy metal fans) are all misfits, but we are bound together in that. A generation was inspired to take drugs, or at least if they were already taking them to feel good about it, by songs such as “White Rabbit” by the Jefferson Airplane, with its call to “feed your head.” (Non-drug-users found solace in Paul Revere & the Raiders’ “Kicks” or John Lennon’s “Cold Turkey.”)
The sociologist Tricia Rose points out the role that black women rappers play in binding together other young black women, to give a voice to a segment of society that often correctly feels that their unique concerns are not being addressed. The rappers, Rose writes, “interpret and articulate the fears, pleasures, and promises of young black women whose voices have been relegated to the margins of public discourse.”
Patriotic songs—such as the fictional Kazakhstan national anthem that promises the best potassium supply—are a natural extension of the power that music has to define the
we.
This is
our
country,
our
region,
our
group,
our
common interest
, our
football team, even
our
potassium. Although religious leaders have harnessed the power of music to bolster feelings of group solidarity and unity within their sects, their use of music should not be confused with the use of music for ceremonial openings to games and other public events, which is wholly different. Football fight songs and national anthems are essentially songs of social bonding; religion songs have their own character that may
include
social bonding, but this is not their primary characteristic.
Another effective use of social bonding songs is in the political sphere. As I said above, music was used by some early humans to ease social tensions within the group—political schmoozing—and it was also used to allow subgroups, particularly the disenfranchised, to cohere. Protest songs use social bonding powerfully. Whether it’s Bob Marley singing “Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!” or Phil Ochs singing “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” Moses Rabbeinu singing “Let My People Go,” or Pete Seeger singing “We Shall Overcome,” protest songs have an ability to inspire, motivate, bind, focus, and move people to action.
Countless musicians have sung protest songs, and if rock music has a single recurring theme, it is rebellion. One band, the Plastic People of the Universe (PPU), started with no political agenda but is widely regarded as having spurred a revolution in Czechoslovakia. The band started in 1968, the same year that Prague was invaded by Soviet tanks to shut down the liberalization known as the Prague Spring. The new Communist government suppressed free speech, imprisoning many musicians. The PPU were forbidden by the government on several occasions to play, not because of any inflammatory lyric content, but because of their long hair and emulation of capitalist bands like the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa. (The band took their name from a Zappa song.) In 1970, the government revoked the PPU’s musician licenses, which made it impossible for them to get equipment or gigs; they had to play underground concerts to avoid government detection and arrest.
“We were workers,” Ivan Bierhanzl, their bassist, says. “For us it was important just to play and listen to our music, and absolutely not to be some heroes.” In 1974, the government raided one of their concerts; fans were chased by police with clubs, and some students were expelled, forever ending their academic careers. In 1976, twenty-seven people were arrested at a PPU concert simply for being there. The saxophonist and the lyricist were both imprisoned. Other band members were beaten. A Czech human rights movement emerged, culminating in the nonviolent “Velvet Revolution” ending Communist control of Czechoslovakia. (Tom Stoppard wrote a play about it, which premiered in 2007.)
The unusual thing about the PPU is that they themselves were apolitical and never considered themselves activists, protestors, or revolutionaries with respect to government policy—all they wanted to do was to play their music. But the Communists’ actions created a strong support group of activists around the band.
What has been far more common in our lifetime is that protest songs have directly, through their lyrics, addressed slavery, human rights, desegregation, economic injustice, legal injustice (“Hurricane,” Dylan’s ballad of Rubin Carter), and other social ills. In the past forty years, a particularly large number of protest songs have been antiwar songs, to such a degree that to many people, the phrase “protest song” is synonymous with antiwar songs. And for those of us who grew up in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, disagreements about war created a fissure that seemed sure to drive the country apart. For some people, the moral certainty of peace seemed innate, and protest music gave these people the courage to hold onto their convictions while others around them derided them.
I already had developed antiwar feelings when I was seven years old. I understood World War II—my grandfather had fought in that, and although the war was terrible, the reason for it was clear. A tyrant was trying to kill all the Jews; we were Jewish, and some countries came to our aid. That war made sense. But in 1965 the Vietnam War did not make sense. By October, the United States had sent nearly two hundred thousand marines to Vietnam. The leaves were starting to change color and we did a crafts project with them during art hour at school. Right after recess the teacher had shown us some news reports—young American boys dead on the battlefield. As soon as I got home, I told my mother that we needed to call the President of the United States on the phone and tell him to stop the war. “We can’t call the President,” my mother said, “he’s probably very busy. You know, like when your father is busy at work and we don’t call him there unless it is very, very important.”
“But this is important,” I insisted. “There is no reason that the killing should go on anymore, it can stop today!”
My mother picked up the receiver and called directory assistance to get the number, and then she called the White House. She spoke firmly but matter-of-factly to the receptionist, like calling the President was something she did every day. “My seven-year-old son wants to talk to the President,” my mother said, “about the war.” She was transferred several times. We got all the way up to the President’s chief of staff, W. Marvin Watson. My mother held the receiver against her shoulder. “He said that the President can’t talk to you now, he’s in a meeting. But he said that he’ll pass on the message if you tell it to him.” She handed me the phone. He introduced himself, then asked my name and where I lived, and what I knew about the war.
“That the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese are killing each other and we went over to help, and now they’re killing us. We heard in school about teenagers that went there with the army, and they came back dead. Please—tell the President that he has to talk to them. He has to tell them to stop killing each other. They’ll listen to him.”
He sighed and I remember hearing that eerie noise of long-distance connections in those days, the clicking and crackling static on the line. He took a deep breath. “We’ve tried that,” he said, his voice cracking. “They won’t listen to us. We don’t know what to do.”
“But tell them,” I said, “that we’re all just like brothers and sisters. We have to stop fighting!”
“I’ll tell the President,” he said. “I’ll tell him just what you said.”
That night I went to bed and heard my parents fighting after I had fallen asleep.
 
My father and his younger brother were spared both the Vietnam and the Korean wars. My grandfather had been drafted into the army medical corps at the age of thirty-nine, and was away from his sons during four years of World War II, part of that time in Okinawa, where he had engaged in hand-to-hand combat. As a doctor, he had seen the worst bodily destruction imaginable. When his own sons were old enough for military service, he confided to me when I was seven, he intervened—without their knowledge—to make sure that his physician colleagues on the selective Service Board were alerted to medical conditions that may otherwise have gone undetected, and they were classified as 4F, ineligible for service. My father had wanted to serve his country, and had even tried to enlist a year earlier, but my grandfather hadn’t let him. My father never expressed remorse or guilt over not having been able to serve, but his principal hobby as long as I’ve known him has been reading books and watching films about World War II.
During the 1960s, everyone over the age of seventeen was assigned a draft number, but most people who were in college got deferments. By the time I was eleven, though, the war had escalated. Nixon had just won the White House and the army was starting to take college students, graduate students, medical students, anyone they could get—men in their thirties were being called up. On the nightly news we saw hundreds of flag-covered caskets being unloaded from big transport planes on an airfield in Texas. Now boys in the neighborhood were coming home dead—the older brothers of people we knew. That same year we had to collect butterflies in science class, kill them, and mount them on cardboard. I couldn’t do it and my mother had to write a note asking for an alternate assignment. As Vietnam filled the TV news reports every day, my mother saw how worried I was, and at the dinner table one night she said, “Of course if you’re drafted, you can say you don’t want to go, as a conscientious objector. Or if they don’t accept that reason, you can go to Canada.”
My father threw his fork down. “He’ll do no such thing! If he’s drafted, he’ll
fight
in the war. It’s his duty as an American citizen—his obligation. No son of mine is going to be a draft dodger!”
I had always thought of my father as my protector, that if anything serious ever happened, he would be there to shield me. My mother countered with “He will
not
fight in that war.” My parents argued about this all night, long after my little sister and I were sent to bed. Unlike other nights, when we usually fought and called each other names from bedroom to bedroom, this night we spoke softly so that they wouldn’t hear us.
“What did Daddy mean? Why was he so upset?” she asked.
“You’ve seen the war on television,” I whispered.
“Yes, between North and South Vietnam,” she said. “A civil war.” She was now seven herself.
“Daddy said that I might have to go there.”
“Nooo!” she said. “You could get killed! He wouldn’t say that!”
 
During the war in Vietnam it seemed as though everybody who was in a position of power or authority in the United States was in favor of it, and those who were most against it were powerless to stop it. This was different from the Gulf War and the Iraq War, in which there was vocal opposition in Washington and very public disagreement from the beginning. To a child, and an antiwar one at that, it gave the Vietnam resistance a kind of David-versus-Goliath feel. There were so many of us against the war, millions by some estimates, but we weren’t rich, we weren’t in positions of control. The odds seemed overwhelmingly against us. Two of the most important antiwar spokespersons had been assassinated that year, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. I had seen the Kennedy assassination on live television. My grandfather also died that same year. “We” had tried to take control of the Democratic Convention in 1968, I knew, but we had been held back. Those men, outcasts, rebels at the perimeters of society had tried to get the antiwar agenda heard.
BOOK: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
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