BY IAN SVENONIUS, ILLUSTRATION BY NICHOLAS GAZIN

Music in modernity has heretofore been seen not just as an instrument for pleasure but also as a tool for achieving greater social justice (see Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” or Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”). Due to these dual and all-encompassing cultural roles, and because of cunning technology that allows its effortless transport, music is now truly ubiquitous in a way that it never has been before in human history.

If the world, at this juncture in time, is characterized by one thing, it is music. Music is being blasted from cars and into ears through earbuds, piped into shopping malls, in public parks, on TV—everywhere. But is this a good thing?

There have been murmurs recently from small, unpopular, and controversial factions that perhaps music’s paradigmatic status should be reconsidered and even overturned. The reasons?

1. MUSIC IS BAD FOR YOU

Let’s consider the evidence: Elvis died before his time. So did Marc Bolan. And Sid Vicious. Coltrane. Marley. Even Mozart. With half of the Ramones having passed away (Marky, Tommy, and CJ still roam among us, thankfully), most of the New York Dolls and the MC5 deceased, and the Velvets down to a fraction of their once-teeming Underground, the question is being asked: “Is music—like smoking—dangerous to one’s health?” And, if so, “shouldn’t it be banned from public establishments?”

Such an idea, and the subsequent argument against the proliferation of music, seems quite persuasive. Music has an intoxicating effect on people. Is there any intoxicant that hasn’t been proved to have adverse qualities? For all of methamphetamine’s amorous inducements, for example, crank leads to bags under the eyes and bad breath. Cocaine is considered a wonderful high, but it results in tedious monologues and poor decision-making. Marijuana was extolled by none other than bathrobed sex guru Hugh Hefner himself, but it ends up inducing grumpiness and underarm odor.

Meanwhile, music apparently leads to DEATH. And not a lush, orgasmic death as with a morphine overdose, but a horrible death like drowning in a swimming pool, choking on vomit, or turning blue while bent around a bedpost or a toilet in a fleabag motel.

Perhaps the effect people get when they feel music is not so much an emotional or aesthetic one, as they might assume, but in fact a simple physiological sensation of sound vibrations crashing into one’s body and creeping into one’s ear holes. Maybe the decibels and the pummeling force of music, especially at extreme volumes and when used regularly, are a toxic force. Maybe music is destructive to one’s liver or brain or kidneys or heart—or all of the above!

Certainly instrument amplification, especially at stadium levels, is not “natural.” Nowhere in nature, except in the case of a volcanic eruption or an earthquake, or perhaps if one were to stand in the middle of a tornado, is anything as loud as a rock band or a sound system at a dance club.

Of course there is the often-cited issue of musicians’ lifestyles: that the music is not harmful in and of itself so much as the circumstances of the music industry are. And the “biz,” of course, is a junior branch of the alcohol industry, and much of its labor force works at night in bands at bars and in scummy venues, around freaks and scoundrels. All of this, it is claimed by music-industry apologists, leads to alcoholism, drug ingestion, heavy partying, stabbing one’s girlfriend, suicide, and so on. It is claimed that these factors—and not noise or music—are the culprits for the astonishing mortality rate among musicians.

But are we really to believe that musicians party harder than factory workers? Or taxi drivers? Or professional ball players? Or members of the armed forces? Or actors? Or drug dealers? Or the president of the United States?

And while musicians’ deaths are so commonplace that news of one invokes yawning, these other “normal” hard-partying people don’t just fall down dead every day. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that our chief executives party in a way that would make the notoriously degenerate Dee Dee Ramone blush like an amateur, yet the last president of the United States who died before he was 93 years old (except for Nixon, the exception to all rules) was John F. Kennedy, and he had help.

In fact, the average president’s globetrotting social calendar and Bohemian Club soirees makes the Grateful Dead’s exhausting 40-year tour itinerary seem quite quaint. And yes, Pigpen and Jerry Garcia lie a-mouldering in the grave while Clinton and Bush Sr. traipse through the world’s most exclusive brothels, beseeching their inhabitants, through PowerPoint presentations, to embrace “globalism.” And so I ask you: Who are the real lightweights?

Other high-profile partiers such as William Burroughs and Boris Yeltsin lived to respectable venerability, as opposed to Mama Cass or Skip Spence, proving conclusively that music is more dangerous to your health than alcohol or drugs.

2. PEOPLE DON’T REALLY LIKE MUSIC

For people involved in music, especially disc jockeys, it is increasingly apparent that, counter to modern assumptions, music is not for everyone. In fact, it’s actually a niche taste more akin to needlework or kite flying than it is to something like food or sex. It is only in the past 50 years in the first world that the populace has been convinced that music is somehow central to one’s identity and a necessary feature of every single interaction and activity.

People are raised to believe that they must enjoy music and that there is something deficient in them if they don’t have strongly held beliefs about what they like, why they like it, and what it means. Similar to spirituality in a religious society, liking music is de rigueur, deviance is not tolerated, and deviants are despised and cast out.

Of course, most of those who don’t especially care for music don’t think of themselves in such a way. They like to hear “Brown Eyed Girl” or whatever Lil Wayne song has been bashing out their brain in heavy rotation for the past six months. But this doesn’t betray a latent appreciation of music. This is just a longing for the familiar. Wanting to hear 50 Cent when one is standing in a nightclub means one feels antsy or uncomfortable and wants reassurance that everything will be all right. It has nothing to do with liking music.

The same formula that created a hunger for food from McDonald’s is the key to “hit” success for entertainers. Instead of Ray Kroc’s mantra regarding “location,” however, music is about bandwidth and repetition. If something is played enough times, it will be a hit. Creating the sensation of familiarity and security is far and away the most vital component in a song’s chart success.

Music, meanwhile, is a thing for hobbyists who will almost never achieve any “success” of the sort that is respected in our society (wealth, numbers, chart position). Which isn’t to say it’s not worth pursuing as long as one has realistic goals.

Those hapless individuals who couldn’t give a toss about music are a silent, long-suffering majority who must endure iPod commercials, rock concerts, chats about the Beatles among their friends, and the incessant squall of encroaching radios and hi-fis, all of which insinuate that there is something wrong with them for not loving a good tune. They are like Jews or communists who’ve gone undercover in Nazi Germany, unable to reveal themselves, smiling and nodding with secret resentment at the smug and blithe self-satisfaction of the prevailing music enthusiasts.

3. MUSIC IS TIME CONSUMING

As opposed to other art forms (excepting cinema), music is a time-based medium. Therefore, to enjoy or consume or appreciate music one must devote a considerable amount of time to listening to it. And who has this kind of time now? We are not children anymore. There are languages to learn, bridges to build, lost arcana, such as cooking and magick, to master, factories to occupy, and DNA strands to dissect.

4. MUSIC IS UNPLEASANT FOR ANIMALS

Do we really suppose that birds, mammals, insect life, and microorganisms want to hear Gary Puckett sing “Young girl, get out of my mind” again? The least we could do for these critters—with which we share the planet—is to turn it down.

5. MUSIC IS MISUSED

A slave to the forces of evil, music is beaten, worked, misused, and serially abused. Once, music was a way for humans to engage with one another.

Music came from a human and was projected as a way to speak to and entertain other humans (or dolphins, if your name was Fred Neil). After the Industrial Revolution, however, when music was pressed onto a less temporal format called “records,” humans lost control of it. The record rang out the first stunning prophecy of our total enslavement by robots.

When one hears the shriek of James Brown on a record, it is not a joyful reminder of that man’s genius for performance and emoting: It is the ghost of an artist imprisoned by technology, a man who can never rest, whose art is being utilized day and night in multiple locations simultaneously to pound people into absolute submission.

One cannot escape the benighted rhythms of rock ’n’ roll no matter how far one strolls, chickens, mashed-potatoes, hully-gullies, and twists away from “where the action is.” And if one finally escapes its insidious snare, one has backed oneself into another sound system’s death zone to endure its own equally cynical mechanized cacophony.

As for the misuse of music? Every song that is any good was invented through the use of joy. This joy, however, has been inverted through the most despicable black magic imaginable. Music is utilized as a pacifier for potential customers in marketplaces. It’s used to hypnotize watchers of advertisements and the programs designed to showcase advertisements. It’s used as white noise in elevators, at parties, and in waiting rooms. It’s even blasted outside to groove the patrons using the gas pumps at filling stations. While the Christians once hated music and banned it, music is now enforced in the same way as sexual perversion and idiocy are in our society.

Maybe LA punk band the Weirdos were right when they beseeched us to DESTROY ALL MUSIC. Let’s start today!