Writing After the Disaster

Mark Fisher, in the just released, posthumous anthology k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016) (London: Repeater Books, 2018), writes, “What Public Enemy and Underground Resistance had in common was a rejection of the idea of music as entertainment. Instead of minstrelsy, they conceived of music in the militaristic terms explored in Steve Goodman’s recent book, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear . In this model, the use of music to subdue populations — the “psychoacoustic correction” directed by the US army against the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega; “sound bombs” deployed over the Gaza Strip — is by no means unusual. All music functions either to embed or to disrupt habituated behaviour patterns. Thus, a political music could not be only about communicating a textual message; it would have to be a struggle over the means of perception, fought out in the nervous system.”

Recovered from the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine).
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