The Politics of Post-9/11 Music: Sound, Trauma, and the Music Industry in the Time of Terror ed. by Joseph P. Fisher and Brian Flota (review)

We have little need to invoke Hegel’s oft-sighted Owl of Minerva to recognize that the historical meaning of the events that took place in America on 11 September 2001 is likely to remain contested for some time. Indeed, it may be that there will never be a broad historical consensus, given how fraught the course of subsequent events has been. A small but growing literature on music in the post-9/11 world is one sign, however, of just how deep the impact has become (see, for instance, Jonathan Ritter and J. Martin Daughtry (eds.), Music in the Post-9/11 World (New York, 2007)). Indeed, the editors of The Politics of Post-9/11 Music: Sound, Trauma, and the Music Industry in the Time of Terror have little doubt that that 9/11 was ‘the most significant day in post millennial history’ (p. 1). But even here, above and beyond the terrible impact it had on individual lives, there is disagreement. Somewhat after the manner of Jean Baudrillard’s provocative (albeit largely misunderstood) declaration that ‘the [first] Gulf War did not take place’, the (in)famous philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has argued that 9/11 did not so much as signal a change in world affairs as present to us the world as it already was, the ‘desert of the real’ no less (Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London, 2002)). It was no coincidence, he argued, that the trauma of 9/11 had been rehearsed countless times in Hollywood cinematic fantasies of urban destruction. 9/11 should properly be considered more as a symptom than an underlying cause of the peculiar conditions of our age.

The distinction matters because if 9/11 is instead considered to be principally about a ‘war on terror’, a ‘clash of civilizations’, if indeed the collective attention of the West is largely directed towards countering the perceived new external threats it brought to the fore, we risk deferring debate about what Žižek and others would consider to be the real issues that are putting global security at risk: the nature of the global banking system, global injustice, global warming, and the like. Given that the years between 9/11 and today are bisected by the onset of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, one can’t help but thinking Žižek’s early analysis of 9/11 was, as we might say, on the money, and indeed it will be interesting to see whether we will soon see examples of not just a post-9/11, but also a post-Global Financial Crisis musicology.

As the very title of this book would suggest, the editors Joseph P. Fisher and Brian Flota make no attempt, however, to dismiss the raw historical significance of 9/11. They do nonetheless acknowledge Žižek’s point that the events on that day were ‘too real’ to be received as such, and quickly became, through the endless recycling of news footage and the like, something more akin to a spectacle or a ‘theatrical performance’ (p. 2). From this premiss they have tried to construct a book that looks at how we might think of, and critique, the reception of 9/11 as not just a visual but also an auditory experience, and how we might more broadly ‘reveal the implicit as well as explicit connections between the tragic events of that day, their geopolitical aftermath, and the myriad changes within the music industry that followed in their wake’ (p. 5). It is an ambitious task, and while the fourteen chapters that follow cannot begin to cover the field in all its complexity, they nevertheless make a lively and significant contribution.

The book separates into...