This week I chose the song “Torture Me” by The Red Hot Chili Peppers, not only because of its obvious link to our horrific topic of music torture but also because of the reasons for which Anthony Kiedis wrote the song. While it may not be obvious, Kiedis’s autobiography, “Scar Tissue,” allows us to see that this song is about his drug addiction to heroin and cocaine. What I find interesting is how the drugs have broken his will down to the point that he has no control over his actions or psyche, such that when he doesn’t consume the drugs for long enough he sees it as torture. This breaking down of the will in drug addiction is comparable to what detainees experience when exposed to mind-jarring repetition and decibel levels during music torture. Similar to Plato’s description of music as a “drug” that can transform the listener’s character by stirring their emotions, music torture causes the prisoner’s identity to disintegrate. They call this "torture light" because it leaves no visible marks on the body, except the swelling and bruising of the feet and legs that have been stood on for days on end in stress positions, but is not the imposition of psychological trauma, say regression to childlike behavior or the formation of PTSD or schizophrenia, permanently altering someone's physicality and ultimately their life? Western music torture and the cultural imperialism that it inherently carries with it are reprehensible, a huge breach of human rights and global civility. The US needs to reevaluate its hegemonic exemption from international human rights standards and law because inflicting this type of psychological trauma on a human being is unjust, cruel and inhuman.

“Clearly, torture music is an assault on human rights. But more broadly, what does it mean when music gets enrolled in schools of torture and culture is sent jackbooted into war? With torture music, ourculture is no longer primarily a means of individual expression or an avenue to social criticism. Instead, it is an actual weapon, one that represents and projects American military might. […]

Thus, torture lite slides right into mainstream American acceptance. It’s a frat-house prank taken one baby step further—as essentially harmless, and American, as an apple pie in the face. It’s seen as a justified means of exacting revenge on or extracting information from a terrorist—never mind that detainees in the War on Terror are mostly Muslims who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

‘Without music, life would be an error,’ writes Nietzsche, but for Muslim detainees, it’s the other way around. Mind-numbing American music is blasted at them with such ferocity that they will believe their lives are a mistake.” (Bayoumi, 176-177).

Suzanne Cusack's piece “Music Torture/Music as Weapon” included some fascinating comparisons, analysis and information. Interestingly, Cusick brings in Foucault and his thinking about Power, saying that music torture removes the ability for a prisoner to escape into his interiority and therefore exerts total, unavoidable Power over him. She brings up another interesting point about the bloggers from home who are put into a feminized position in a hyper-militarized and masculine, warrior-lauding American society; therefore, they become comfortable justifying and glorifying torture and American cultural hegemony from a homophobic, racist and misogynist position of privilege and power. I underlined quotes that I thought were especially relevant or interesting. 

" This modern system aims to combine “sensory disorientation”–isolation, standing, extremes of heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence–with self-inflicted pain, both physical and psychological, so as to cause a prisoner’s very “identity to disintegrate”. {14} Whether that disintegration takes the form of induced regression (to infantile behavior) or induced schizophrenia, “the effect is much like that which occurs if he is beaten, starved or deprived of sleep” {15} . The prisoner becomes psychologically powerless before the authority of interrogators, both dependent and unable to resist. Moreover, the experimental data showed this “modern system of torture” to be much more efficient than beatings or starvation, producing psychological disintegration in a matter of days, rather than weeks or months. And, as one CIA researcher noted, it was hard to document, for with the exception of the standing (which can cause grotesque swelling/bruising of the feet and legs) these “techniques” leave no visible marks on the fleshy surfaces of a human body. [...]

A detainee, too, must experience himself as touched without being touched, as he squats, hands shackled between his shackled ankles to an I-bolt in the floor, in a pitch-black room, unable to find any position for his body that does not cause self-inflicted pain. Surely, among many other things, the experience creates a nexus of pain, immoblility, unwanted touching (without-touch); and of being forced into self-hurting by a disembodied, invisible Power. A dark ecstasy, the experience must be neither isolation nor communion, but a relationship that mimics the effects of the chains–the relationship of being utterly at the mercy of a merciless, ubiquitous Power. I imagine it, sometime, as being plunged into it something like the post-modern, post-Foucauldian dystopia where one is unable quite to name, much less resist, the overwhelmingly diffuse Power that is outside one, but also is inside, and that operates by forcing one to comply against one’s will, against one’s interests, because there is no way–not even a retreat to interiority-- to escape the pain. What better medium than music to bring into being (as a felicitous performative) the experience of the West’s (the infidel’s) ubiquitous, irresistable Power? {23} [...]

In the last few days, thinking about this panel’s overall focus on the relationship of musical culture to the state that is the USA, I’ve been pondering the gradual institutionalization of this scene in the global imagination–through, for instance, its visual representation in the film The Road to Guantanamo. I’ve been thinking that the scene, both as drastically real for interrogators and detainees, and as virtual for filmgoers, press readers, bloggers, and me, bears thinking about as an artifact of the global war on terror, itself an artifact of the US’ newly unabashed effort to project itself as global sovereign. I’m struck, for instance, by the fact that “no touch torture” using music to dissolve others’ subjectivities has been imposed on persons picked up in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Indonesia, Iraq, Mauritania, Pakistan, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, including British and Canadian citizens. Thus, the performative scene in which music is the medium of ubiquitous, irresistable power that touches without touching has been imposed on representatives of the entire Muslim world. Music, then, is not only a component of “no touch torture” but also a component of the US’ symbolic claim to global sovereignty–but in a way that is almost the polar opposite of the Louis Armstrong “good will ambassador” tours of the 1950s.[24] . At the same time, however, the US has given the detainees thus treated over to its own soldiers as scapegoats, toward whom their choice of music linked to working-class masculinities can channel their rage at the economic and political forces that make them–like their captives–human beings that the state allows to be killed with impunity. Moreover, because media representations on the one hand and the technologies of “new media” on the other allow the scene to be widely imagined and responded to at home, the US has, perhaps inadvertently, given the same detainees over to a certain swath of the homefront, where they can be scapegoats for a different kind of rage. Believing they cannot be killed with impunity, the homefront bloggers at littegreen footballs and freerepublic do more than express their rage at the feminized position they occupy as non-warriors in an increasingly warrior-worshipping public culture. They create (and occupy) as homophobic, racist and misogynist the subject position of virtuous, justified torture–a subject position identified with, and occupied by, the global national security state that has, in its most recently passed law on the treatment of detainees, declared itself exempt from international law. All the while, the scene–at least as one can currently know it–allows certain kinds of repertoire to stand for the violence of “Western”, “infidel” conquest, leaving repertoire that is more likely to be valued by elites both innocent and intact" (Cusick, Music as torture/Music as weapon).