The Plight of the Captive Auditor

We are powerless to escape the assault of mind-numbing music. "A man can no longer fall back to the last wall of keeping his mouth shut and calling his mind his own. The sound, too loud and insistent to be ignored, now exacts, as a price of living a normal life in society, submission to the daily entry of whatever slick operators think he requires."


Forced listening attacks the mind’s integrity with a new directness, pushing more deeply, though no more painfully, into the minds of the unwilling than was possible with our ancestors’ homely ways of censorship and suppression.
I tremble for the sanity of a society that talks of the precious integrity of the individual mind while forcing it to spend a good part of every day under bombardment with whatever some crowd of promoters want to throw it it.

Music creates dependency and makes us forget who we are

Good music takes us away from ourselves, from our daily sorrows, pettiness and anxieties, it makes us forget; or it gives us strength to face life, it inspires, invigorates and pacifies us. It becomes a necessity in either case, whether as a means of forgetting ourselves or as a source of inspiration. Dependence on beauty and avoidance of the ugly is an escape which becomes a torturing issue when our escape is cut off.”

Rock and rap are impoverished by comparison with swing or jazz

“Rock and rap are utterly impoverished by comparison with swing or jazz or any pre-World War II music, impoverished emotionally, aesthetically, and intellectually. Rap is simply unable to express tenderness, gentleness, or love.”
“So far, one low point has been followed by another even lower. It is hardly surprising that rock was followed by such delightful art forms as punk rock, heavy metal, speed metal, death metal, rap, gangsta rap, and grunge.” Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah

The music industry has reduced our best achievement to grunts and snarls

The music industry “has somehow reduced humanity’s greatest achievement – a near-universal language of pure transcendence – into a sub-pidgin of grunts and snarls, capable of fully expressing only the more pointless forms of violence and the more brutal forms of sex.”

Commercial music is used to get people to buy

Playing music at high volume over-stimulates people leading to “sensory overload which weakens self-control”, and this in turn makes them more likely to buy things says the Journal of Business Research. That’s why the sound is too loud in most stores. “People might be more likely to be lured by brand names, fooled by discounts on items they might not really want, and susceptible to other influences” explains the University of Minnesota’s Kathleen Vohs, an associate professor of marketing.