Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth

By Ian Brennan and Adebimpe Tunde

Popular culture has woven itself into the social fabric of our lives, penetrating people's homes and haunting their psyches through images and earworms. Justice, at most levels, is something the average citizen may have little influence upon, leaving us feeling helpless and complacent. But pop music is a neglected arena where concrete change can occur—by exercising active and thoughtful choices to reject the low-hanging, omnipresent corporate fruit, we begin to rebalance the world, one engaged listener at a time.

Silenced by Sound is a powerful exploration of the challenges facing art, music, and media. Ian Brennan delves into his personal story to address the inequity of distribution in the arts and demonstrates that there are millions of talented people around the world more gifted than the superstars for whom billions of dollars are spent to promote the delusion that they have been blessed with unique genius.

Silenced by Sound is defined by muscular, terse, and poetic verse, and a nonlinear format rife with how-to tips and anecdotes. The narrative is driven and made corporeal via the author's ongoing field-recording chronicles, his memoir-like reveries, and the striking photographs that accompany these projects.

After reading it, you'll never hear quite the same again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Sep 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781629637679

Ian Brennan

Ian Brennan is Grammy-winning producer who has produced three Grammy-nominated albums and published seven books while also teaching violence prevention around the world since 1993 for organizations such as the Smithsonian and the National Accademia of Science (Rome). Brennan released his first album in 1987 and in the past decade has produced over forty records by international artists from five continents, which have resulted in the first widely released original music albums from nations such as Rwanda, Malawi, Kosovo, South Sudan, Romania, Comoros, and Vietnam. He has worked with artists as diverse as Fugazi, country legend Merle Haggard, Sleater-Kinney, and Green Day. His work has appeared in the New York Times, PBS television, and in an Emmy-winning segment of 60 Minutes.