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 earworm hooks. 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: The Music Meritocracy Myth is a powerful exploration of the challenges facing art, music, and media in the digital era. With his fifth book, producer, activist, and author Ian Brennan delves deep into his personal story to address the inequity of distribution in the arts globally. Brennan challenges music industry tycoons by skillfully demonstrating that there are millions of talented people around the world far more gifted than the superstars for whom billions of dollars are spent to promote the delusion that they have been blessed with unique genius.

We are invited to accompany the author on his travels, finding and recording music from some of the world’s most marginalized peoples. In the breathtaking range of this book, our preconceived notions of art are challenged by musicians from South Sudan to Kosovo, as Brennan lucidly details his experiences recording music by the Tanzania Albinism Collective, the Zomba Prison Project, a “witch camp” in Ghana, the Vietnamese war veterans of Hanoi Masters, the Malawi Mouse Boys, the Canary Island whistlers, genocide survivors in both Cambodia and Rwanda, and more.

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: PM Press
• Release date: Sep 16, 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.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

I try to never forget that there are more places around the world than not where I am the wrong color.

White supremacy, no matter how unintentional, positions whiteness as the norm. But statistically, it is the deviation.

As a teenager, I worked night shifts cleaning up human shit—a minimum-wage job for which numberless hospitals nonetheless refused me due to my long hesher hair, youth, and gender. When one convalescent facility finally dared to hire me for this oh-so-very-glamorous position, my first night’s hazing was viewing the death of an elderly woman—a patient whose diaper I’d just changed hours before.

The rare times my family ever ate out, my mother would grab all the extras that she could get—emptying the takeaway condiments containers while we kept watch, shoving them into a purse already overstuffed with ketchup packets, paper napkins, and salt. It was a free-for-all, an attempt in one sweep to make up for all the times she’d been cheated.

Most anyone who is reasonably empathic gravitates towards wherever there is injustice. As an obese and cripplingly shy kid with a developmentally delayed sister and mentally ill mother, I felt little choice but to act protectively. Witnessing my sister’s recurring social dejection, I grew up tensed and at the ready.

In San Francisco, a female jazz trumpeter once refused to play with me after she showed up at a gig and discovered that I wasn’t black. For some reason, she’d mistaken my voice as African-American on the phone (an assumption that speaks volumes) because my register was low. That she was a blonde WASP only made the irony all the richer.

None of this discounts my multipronged advantages, though.

I am painfully aware that on paper I am among the worst people to provide platforms to lesser-heard regions and populations—Caucasian, middle-class, straight, and male. By the same token, my wife, Marilena Delli—who does all of the photos and videos for these projects—may rival the best: raised in a factory (where her family squatted for an entire year without heat or electricity after the mill closed, the jobs having been outsourced to China), mixed-race from the most racist part of fascistic north Italy, and with a mom that survived two genocides in Rwanda that cumulatively claimed every one of her immediate family members.

But what works on paper often remains there—flat.

For any endeavor to take air and soar, it must actually be lived in real time. This is why supergroups that merge dream teams of stars almost always fail. What is too good to be true often is too much of a good thing—one ingredient canceling rather than enhancing another. Similarly, technology often fails at human scale since not everything is quantifiable, even that which remains unmistakable nonetheless.

Magic cannot be fully accounted for. It is the product of too many coinciding forces.

Synopsis of Critical Challenges

If you toss a dart at a map of the world, you are most likely to hit a country that is underrepresented or entirely unrepresented in international media.

a) And if they are represented at all, it is often by stereotype.

Essentializing entire countries or habitats by spotlighting lone artists is almost more damaging than ignoring the regions altogether.

a) Even most hardcore music lovers cannot name a single musical artist residing outside of those foreign countries that have been sanctioned as special and über-musical like Brazil, Cuba, and Mali.

b) And even from these few ( relatively ) privileged nations, usually only a sole artist is known (e.g., Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan representing nearly two hundred million people in Pakistan; Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa, telescoped to just Fela Kuti). This restrictiveness comes even from the rare people who care at all about international music in the first place and thus ostensibly should know better.

PROLOGUE

Don’t Call Me Baby:

I wrote you a love song on an air-sickness bag

It was at 3:13 a.m. when I realized that my fate wasn’t to go deaf from the decades I’d played with loud rock bands, but instead due to a single screaming baby during the wee hours of morning.

And just as suddenly I feared that her first word would not be Dada or Mama but Fuck!!!

For months prior, my wife and I had been receiving the ultrasound readings as if transmissions from a space landing in peril on the moon.

Why do babies love white noise so much?

It must be the static sounds of the womb.

Every baby is born a prizefighter. Having survived their own arrival, they suffer PTSD from the delivery experience itself. And almost every child is conceived from parents that have made it to at least twelve years of age, so we are all forged from survival. More than evolution or progressing, mankind stumbles clumsily forward.

Even the most mundane moments fill my daughter with the wonder of a new universe. And that remains the challenge: to remain receptive, no matter how long any one of us endures.

Babies are better singers than we will ever be—little arias and operas punctuate their daily needs. It is only in order to conform to culture that they are forced to restrict their vocalization to prescribed sounds, with a resulting loss of musicality due to this sacrifice. Similarly, bilingual inflections—as lovely as they can be—are scars, consequences of all the sounds a person has been denied by their mother tongue.

Drunk with breast milk, babies find repetitive sounds tiresome and turn towards the novel, that perfect hit-song balance between variation and familiarity. And few things soothe a baby more than rhythm.

So it is that I became a human jukebox spouting made-up ditties.

Infants are among the most savage critics in the world—feet shot straight up in the air like an applause meter. Contrastingly, they cry and sigh, looking away bored—almost ashamed—for jams that just don’t pass muster. They are microregional hits, known in my house alone.

Uncannily like some sort of sci-fi scene, I am forced via my daughter to travel backwards in time and care for a miniature me. Nonetheless, somewhat paradoxically, this act is best done selflessly.

It is unsettling to know that some of the deepest memories that I will ever form are experiences that my daughter is neurologically destined to have no recollection of.

When I hold her, I see a composite of almost everyone I’ve ever loved and those who’ve loved me, as well as those that have loved the people who loved me. Many of those, I did not ever even meet or do not remember having met. It is through this largely anonymous chain of equanimity that every new life manages to survive.

The only place you should want your baby born is in your arms. Instead, the rich today often curate hand-selected birthplaces, traveling across the Atlantic for the claim that their child was born in Florence. As the child earns no rights of citizenship for the wear and tear, the location is all superficial, only symbolic.

I harbor no secret ambitions for my child. Only for her to be herself, whoever that may be. A child shouldn’t be held as captive audience to deposit the parent’s unfulfilled ambitions. The only expectation I have is that she not deliberately harm anyone else, nor allow another to actively injure her. For to tolerate such an assault ultimately damages the assailant as