Retograde innovations...

LRB on acoustic torture...

Cusick calls them ‘acoustic weapons’, and one way or another they’ve been in use for a long time. The Greeks and Romans used brass and percussion to send messages, and to rattle their opponents’ nerves; Joshua’s trumpets probably helped to wear down Jericho’s Canaanite defenders. In Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (Indiana, £16.99), Jonathan Pieslak argues that music has played an increasing role in psy ops ever since the 1989 US invasion of Panama, when Manuel Noriega, an opera connoisseur, was driven from the Vatican Embassy, where he had taken refuge, under a deafening barrage of Led Zeppelin and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas (‘nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide’). Just before the siege of Fallujah in 2004, Pieslak writes, hard rock ‘was played so relentlessly. . . that the Marines renamed the city “LalaFallujah”’; Iraqi mullahs attempted to resist the sonic blitz by blasting Koranic chants on their own loudspeakers. What made it possible for the 361st Psy Ops company to bombard Fallujah with AC/DC’s ‘Shoot to Thrill’ was the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), designed by the American Technology Company and sold to the US army and marines, the coast guard and a number of US police departments. Attached to an MP3 player, the LRAD can project a ‘strip of sound’ that can be heard – and can’t be ignored – for 500 to 1,000 metres. Why is the American military using music this way? After all, it could as easily use white noise, or ‘sonic booms’, Israel’s weapon of choice whenever it has wanted to frighten Lebanon without going to war. Moustafa Bayoumi, in an article in the Nation in 2005, suggested that music is used to project ‘American culture as an offensive weapon’. But if the use of American music is a blunt assertion of imperial power, why are metal and gangsta rap the genres favoured by interrogators at Gitmo? One reason, Pieslak suggests, is that metal is uniquely harsh, with its ‘multiple, high-frequency harmonics in the guitar distortion’, and vocals that alternate between ‘pitched screaming’ and ‘guttural, unpitched yelling’. ‘If I listened to a death metal band for 12 hours in a row, I’d go insane, too,’ James Hetfield of Metallica says. ‘I’d tell you anything you’d want to know.’ (One interrogator told Pieslak that he tried Michael Jackson on Iraqi detainees, but ‘it doesn’t do anything for them.’)