My Music, My War: The Listening Habits of U.S. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan by Lisa Gilman (review)

The study of music in everyday life rejects the formalist aesthetics of the concert hall for the experiential values of quotidian musicality, from listening to an MP3 player while exercising to attending open mike night at a café. This approach to music is neither superficial nor obvious; as philosophers such as Jennifer Gosetti Ferencei and Yuriko Saito have argued, what exactly constitutes the everyday depends a good deal on historical and cultural context (cafés with open mike nights are particular to urban areas, for instance). The variability of the everyday, in fact, is the very condition that helps to make it visible and thus foster surprise and new insight.

Lisa Gilman’s new book, My Music, My War, provides an excellent example of this kind of insight, detailing the music habits of a group of people, U.S. troops in wartime, whose ordinary lives would be considered extraordinary by most noncombatants. At first glance, soldiers deployed abroad, like civilians back home, are fully engaged in the digital era, relying on personal listening technologies in ways that have blurred the lines between the musical and nonmusical. Americans listen to music virtually everywhere—while passing the time at work, getting ready to go out, doing chores, exercising, eating, sleeping, and so on. However, for soldiers, such music listening has very different meanings in a wartime context shaped by the close quarters of military camps, the stress of perpetual danger, and episodes of intense violence. In fact, the extreme experiential conditions of war reveal functions of music that otherwise may remain hidden or less intense.

My Music, My War follows the structure of a soldier’s engagement in war, from enlistment to discharge. Gilman begins with recruits’ transitions into military culture, emphasizing the ways that listening, easily accomplished in civilian life, often became for many new soldiers an activity that required new habits and expectations, depending on the nature of living conditions and the intensity of their work. Some soldiers learned, for instance, that knowledge about different genres could be key to understanding the politics of racial/ethnic identity. Others found that control of a shared audio system could unexpectedly reveal military hierarchies. Still others developed diverse techniques of individualized listening, using the inner sonic space created by headphones, for example, to pull away from a busy barracks and create privacy not otherwise available, or purposefully making song selections to comment on the environment around them. Almost all learned to select very carefully which music they initially brought with them on MP3 players.

In the book’s middle chapters, Gilman delves more deeply into several aspects of musicking among the soldiers she interviewed. First, she surveys generally the various ways in which music, for them, is a “sound track of war,” an interesting metaphor for how soldiers used their MP3 players to add nondiegetic meanings to their activities. “Dead Bodies” by the metal band Drowning Pool, for example, ubiquitously provided emotional motivation for patrols, and many of Gilman’s interviewees reported country music as a significant source of patriotic uplift. However, individual soldiers also made quite idiosyncratic connections between diverse types of music and their own experiences and feelings, shaped by their own specific battle traumas, moral doubts, or moments of camaraderie and friendship. This linking of music with wartime experience often served to “concretize” soldiers’ feelings and memories in sound.

For Gilman, one of the most important functions of soldiers’ music listening was confronting assumptions about gender in military culture. As she writes, “The military, because it is so strongly identified as a space for men to do male stuff, even when women are active participants, is especially defined in gendered ways that promote and perpetuate the gender binary within the context of overlapping structures of patriarchal power” (81). Listening was a force, in particular, for negotiating hypermasculinity. Thus, publically shared enthusiasm of genres like hardcore...