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AIDS
Rage: Paranoia and Anger in Music about AIDS
Paul
G. Attinello
School
of Arts & Cultures
International
Centre for Music Studies (ICMuS)
University
of Newcastle upon Tyne
United
Kingdom
Music has been written about aspects of the
AIDS crisis in a variety of genres since 1983. Although musical and
cultural constructions within each genre are often remarkably consistent,
among all the genres are recurrent and comparable threads, of which the
most common are mourning, fear and loneliness. However, a rarer but
culturally important strand is that of anger, aimed from "inside"
(that is, from points of view or by creators inside the community of
people with AIDS) towards an "outside" of government, religion,
health care or a "general public". Most of these pieces are
exceptionally marginal in point of view and musical construction, even in
the context of art about AIDS, where marginality is a common trope.
Quasi-paranoid narratives and defensive
hostility, built around ideas that the virus was artificially generated or
distributed, appear as early as the first known piece of music about AIDS,
Zappa¹s prologue to his satiric musical Thing-Fish (1983). Similar
constructions of anger that include some paranoid elements, though they
may sidestep a complete paranoid narrative, appear in performance art
music by Diamanda Galás and David Wojnarowicz, as well as in classical
music (notably several references in the original volume of The AIDS Song
Quilt as well as individual chamber works) and songs by popular groups
such as The JAMS and Concrete Blonde. Musical tropes in these genres could
be generally identified as "expressionistic", imitating a
variety of harmonic, rhythmic and processive patterns familiar from
avant-garde and popular models. It is also clear that most are constructed
around notably public spaces groups rather than soloists, stage rather
than concert which suggests that anger might more typically be expressed
in a public rather than a (virtually) private sphere. In all these works,
whether such rage and paranoia is a central aspect of the work or a
peripheral one, it is given a clearly marked position in the dramatic or
musical construction such that, for example, the few angry songs in The
AIDS Song Quilt are positioned at climactic and transitional points in the
song cycle. This suggests that the expression of rage/paranoia is crucial
to the entire body of music about AIDS that, despite its relative rarity,
it is a key to the whole.
Finally, the paper will attempt to close
the circle between paranoia and anger: if they seem to have a common
emotional source and musical expression, they might be linked also in
terms of their ultimate meanings. In an important article on paranoia,
Sedgwick recently quoted AIDS theorist Cindy Patton as asking whether it
would really matter if the virus had been synthesized, if that would
change our understanding of the forces involved. Perhaps, twenty-five
years on in this crisis, we can reconsider: does it really matter, and to
whom?
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