Car Drivers Torment a City with Celine Dion Songs
An update on dangerous music
“When the music changes, the walls of the city shake.”
Plato
Music is a lot more dangerous than you think.
Protest songs are everywhere—except on TV or radio. But as soon as you turn off your playlists and look at the real world, you find dangerous music. In every region of the world, songs are feared by authorities, and linked to disruption and violence.
Every few months, I provide an update on music as a force of unrest and subversion in the world. (You can read previous accounts here and here.)
Below is my latest overview of transgressive music.
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Rival motorists in New Zealand battle over who can play Celine Dion songs the loudest.
According to Barron’s:
The beloved Canadian singer's melodies lose their charm when blared at high volume as late as 2 am, say the sleepless residents of Porirua, north of Wellington and home to 60,000 people.
“It's a headache,” Porirua Mayor Anita Baker told AFP on Thursday.
Siren battles have erupted in parts of New Zealand for at least seven years.
Local media have reported on contestants—often people with family links to Pacific Island nations—using large siren-type speakers on cars and even bicycles to drown each other out with their powerful systems.
Patrons at a Moscow bar are threatened with electric shock devices and forced to sing pro-Kremlin songs.
According to The Moscow Times:
Up to 50 people—including staff and patrons of the bars—were detained and questioned by the Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives. A video posted by the state Moskva news agency showed Underdog visitors being forced to sing patriotic songs. Other reports said they were threatened with electric shock devices.
Activists in the Netherlands are told by police not to bring musical instruments to their protest—so they mime parts and sing the music instead.
Classic FM reports that an group of musicians
performed Mozart without their instruments this weekend, as part of an Extinction Rebellion protest in the Netherlands.
Footage shows them playing invisible instruments and singing their parts in a performance of a movement from the composer’s final work, his Requiem.
Protests are taking place on the A12 motorway in The Netherlands, blocking a major highway which connects to The Hague, the seat of the Dutch government. The protesters are demanding an end to fossil fuel subsidies in the country.
High school band leader in Alabama is tasered three times and arrested for playing music after a game.
AL.com reports that a Birmingham Police Department sergeant
was among the officers who attempted to get the band director to stop his band from performing.
During the officers’ interaction with Mims, the decision was made to place him in custody.
Officers attempted to take Mims into custody for disorderly conduct when a physical altercation ensued between the band director, Birmingham City Schools System security personnel, and Birmingham officers.
In an unrelated incident, a Texas band member punches a heckler in the middle of a song.
The musician didn’t stop playing, and didn’t miss a beat.
China censors an AI platform that allows user to create President Xi Jinping singing.
404 Media reports that the website, Hugging Face
continues to host models doing essentially the same thing for President Joe Biden, showing a major inconsistency in the platform’s approach and raises questions around whether Hugging Face is selectively enforcing against models that are related to the Chinese President over others.
Hugging Face is one of the largest open platforms for people to upload AI and machine learning models and datasets for anyone to then download and use themselves….Hugging Face confirmed the Chinese government has blocked the AI platform in China, which the company described as “regrettable.”
A DJ drove every day to the protest lines at Netflix in order to play inspiring music for strikers.
Helen Li writes in the Los Angeles Times.
Shafran has become the de facto DJ of the Netflix picket lines. Every morning, he drives 15 miles from his apartment in Shadow Hills to Sunset Boulevard and sets up his subwoofer in front of the company’s headquarters….
The same article describes other uses of music in labor relations, including the surprising appearance of a Sousaphone:
Meanwhile, for striking hotel workers, the sounds of pots and pans as well as Sousaphones have become recognizable at rallies and pickets.
The city of Cancún prohibits concerts by artists who promote violence.
The new ban encompasses a wide range of genres, including metal, hip-hop, or the popular corridos tumbados, which are modern Mexican equivalent of British ballads about Robin Hood. “We will no longer allow people to promote violence,” said Jorge Aguilar Osorio, general secretary of the city council, when announcing the measure.
An incarcerated gang leader in Ecuador attacked the government in a music video made inside a maximum security facility.
Samantha Schmidt writes in The Washington Post:
The video, apparently filmed inside the Guayaquil prison and posted on YouTube over the weekend, pays homage to José Adolfo “Fito” Macías Villamar, a convicted murderer who has helped lead Los Choneros—a gang that reportedly partners with the Sinaloa Cartel to move cocaine to the United States.
Mariachi Bravo’s “El Corrido del León”—“The Lion’s Ballad”—taunts a government that has proved incapable of seizing control of its prisons back from the increasingly powerful gangs. With a high-production-value video recorded in part in a facility that holds Ecuador’s most dangerous convicts, the criminals are sending a clear message about who’s in charge.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban creates a bonfire of “immoral musical equipment.”
Religious authorities made a bonfire out of confiscated musical gear, most of it seized from wedding halls. Items destroyed included speakers, stringed instruments, and even a tabla.
In a possibly related move, religious leaders shut down thousands of beauty salons, complaining that customers were spending too much on unnecessary makeovers.
Hong Kong court blocks attempt to censor an online protest song.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Hong Kong’s Department of Justice last month applied to the city’s High Court for an injunction banning the broadcasting or distribution—including on the internet and any media accessible online—of the song, which has been adopted as an anthem by pro-democracy demonstrators since mass protests broke out in 2019…..
The government’s application for the court order included links to 32 videos on Google’s YouTube related to the song.
Serbian musician is prevented from entering Moldova to perform at the Guitar Music Festival because of his pro-Russian views.
Radio Free Europe reports:
Seven hours before the concert, the organizers of the festival announced on Facebook that Bregovic and his band would not be able to perform “for reasons beyond the control of festival organizers or artists.”
The organizers said the artists were stopped by border police after arriving at Chisinau’s international airport.
A shopkeeper in Pakistan tries to counter the Taliban by preserving a collection of more than 1,000 rare music cassettes from Afghanistan.
The Guardian interviews amateur music preservationist Mohammed Hasan Zamri, who keeps this rare archive in his shop in Peshawar:
“I have been threatened on Facebook from people to stop my work and they would burn down my shop and that this is against Islam. But there were some positive and appreciative comments too.”
Zamri fears someone could burn down his shop and that he is often asked why he is so fond of decades-old songs.
“They don’t understand. They either don’t have a soul, or brains to like music. Some people are addicted to smoking, some people love pets and some are fond of many other things. I am addicted to Afghan music. It is my hobby and passion,” he says.
I played bass drum in a high school marching band. It was easy to take too wide of a backswing and hit any pedestrian who encroached on our route of travel. Not wise, but easy, and what can I say, it happened.
Although a small part of the article, the section about the Netflix protests got me thinking about the long relationship between music and the labor movement. Cory Doctorow has a great new piece about the current state of unions and labor - https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table. Got me thinking about Woody Guthrie and the intersection of the early union battles and folk - the people's music (https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/online/guthrie/labor-movement). Music is one of the single most powerful tools we have as a society to unite people for a cause - good or bad. Think of the power of a song to easily convey a message that we can all understand, and/or interpret through the lens of our own lived experiences. The best songwriters (John Prine, RIP!) can communicate a world of emotion in a few short lines. And yes, I believe the right song at the right time can change the world. Thank you Ted for all the wonderful stuff!