Why I can’t listen to aggressive music anymore

Aggression got so pervasive as a form of entertainment that it lost its cathartic value.

I don’t know if it happens to everybody but I have few regular bursts of obsession over specific people. It can be a musician, an artist or even a random person. He or she suddenly appear in my mind (via social media or so) and I get trapped for about two or three weeks. After that, I usually move on.

My last victim? Kurt Ballou. He is mostly known as Converge’s guitar player and producer. For about three days, I’ve been spending my spare time watching countless videos about his work and his ideas.

But it doesn’t mean that I’m a Converge fan. I like many things about the band: the graphic design of the albums, the tones, the sound engineering, its DIY spirit and the positivity of the member’s ethics. But I don’t get the music anymore.

It’s not their fault, it’s mine.

Nowadays, watching the world’s increasing levels of aggression and cognitive compression (I mean: everything has to be loud, punchy and “in the face” as if many aspects of the culture were also involved in the loudness wars), I’m developing a longing for dynamics.

Nothing against loudness. Nothing particularly in favor of quietness. I’m not trying to look clever here. I’m only tired of aesthetic aggression or actual violence everywhere. Movies, streets, speeches, comedy and music. At least to me, it seems that aggression in music completely lost its cathartic value — if it truly had one in the past.

When I was a teenager, I was happy to yell the lyrics of “I don’t need society” by DRI. You could even hear me singing really violent (but slow and dreamy) Pink Floyd songs. At the time, I thought that those mental and sonic “environments” lead me to deal better with my own aggression.

But was it true? Or did it keep me in a constant state of resentment and suspiciousness? Did it deceive me, making me think that I was essentially different—better, of course—and in need to create my own little ISIS?

I can’t afford to do that kind of practice anymore (because it was a practice, I had to cultivate carefully my small world every day). There are too many levels of aggression going on. It’s too pervasive. Loud, big, fast, disruptive. That could be applied to startups, to… Donald Trump.

As a former musician, I’d be completely devastated if I knew that my songs were used to exert soldiers in the battlefield, played to put them “in the mood”. I’d prefer doing something so boring that could make them sleep, not killing.

So, is it possible to have powerful music without aggression? Is it possible to produce sounds that express power in itself and not over something or somebody? Not even against oneself — remember that part of the punk ideology was self-deprecating and quite self-destructive, a problem addressed by bands like Minor Threat, Bad Brains, and the early NYC hardcore scene.

Back to Kurt Ballou. I’m learning a lot from him. Not only about studio technics. I have to confess that I’ve being watching few of his videos as some kind of self-help or motivational talk. These days, one can transform anything into self-help — even tutorials on how to code. It’s not that bad if the person speaking is really helpful.