Music and Incitement to Violence

In any event, in recent decades juvenile playground song, as well as all traditional popular song forms, have been comprehensively overtaken as a vehicle for violent incitement by pop music genres in which it is constitutive rather than incidental. The foregoing cases exemplify the power and inclination of pop acts to incite violent conduct among audiences, and have brought people to the point where the potential consequences of doing so are recognized. They thus raise the question of causality. While objections on the grounds of unmusicality persisted, the moral emphasis has been more amplified, shifting attention more to words than to actual sonority. It is a residue of a romantic ideology by which the &s;artist&s; accepts social disempowerment as the price of apparent moral and aesthetic liberty, but which also places that artist in the hands of mediations and entrepreneurs.

Criminology · Incitement · Political science · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Music History and Culture · Psychology