In Sunday’s (6/12) Los Angeles Times, Mark Swed writes, “Forty years ago, art and politics intersected importantly. The avant-garde flourished. And the academy disapproved. Protest songs may have been the soundtrack for ending the Vietnam War, but on days when stinging tear gas from demonstrations seeped into its building, the music department at UC Berkeley, to choose one example, insisted that politics sullied art. Shostakovich, Leonard Bernstein and John Cage were to be despised for the political content of their music. In fact, pop culture, campus-wide, was given little academic credence. … Last weekend at the Hammer Museum, UCLA presented a two-day ‘hybrid conference/performance’ titled ‘Can Art and Politics Be Thought? Practices, Possibilities, Pitfalls.’ … [Music culture theorist Steve] Goodman provided disturbing examples of sonic warfare, a subject on which he has written a terrifying book. We can thank the military for helping research the kinds of ultrahigh and ultralow frequencies that club-goers enjoy for the deep-tissue massaging bass notes and the frenzied upper registers that, at high volume, set the nervous system awhirl. These ‘ultimate bad vibrations’ mess with the mind and when deployed by the police can scatter protesters in the street.”
Posted June 14, 2011
