Cascadia Calling, 2025.06.09

"and when the revolution comes I'm first out to loot"

N.B: I’ve renamed the column. I may well do so again in the future if the spirit so moves me.

I’m interested in what music ends up being considered dangerous. This is related to my ongoing fascination with good vs bad protest music, but it’s not the same. I’ve been thinking of this more lately since the froth and lather over the alleged actions of Mo Chara of Kneecap in a concert in the UK got me to listen to their music for the first time.

Dangerous music and protest music sometimes overlap, but a lot less often than you might expect. Protest music is an intentional, if rangey, artistic genre. Music becomes “dangerous” when it falls prey to a moral panic or offends the social sensibilities of people, whether or not it attacked the system directly. Sometimes, as in the case of Kneecap, an artist becomes considered dangerous not because of their music at all, but because of their associated beliefs. (Despite much of Kneecap’s music containing radical political elements, none of those seem to have warranted much concern for social minders or the police.)

The fact that it arises from a moral panic is central to the phenomenon of dangerous music. The accusation is never that it’s dangerous to political structures or power structures, but that it's dangerous to the fabric of society. In fact, the power structures often benefit from the backlash against dangerous music.

After all, there was never any serious risk that "God Save the Queen" was going to actually topple the monarchy. (As evidenced by the fact that it's still alive and well and God Save the Queen is now completely unproblematic.) It was threatening because it offended the sensibilities of a conservative, royalist middle class who were concerned that it spoke to and resonated with a youth who might then go on to live different lives and make radically different decisions about the structure of social relations.

Of course, that didn’t happen and now Johnny Lydon is a dull, reactionary dipshit. So there's still a kind of co-option that occurs with dangerous music, but it's not really about co-option as we normally see it with music. "God Save the Queen" isn't being used to sell sneakers on prime time TV, so far as I know, but it's been neutralized. No one is scared of it anymore. If capitalist co-option is the "tungsten carbide stomach of capitalism," maybe the dangerous music more panic is something like the immune system. Attacking and eventually neutralizing the dangerous music and, in so doing, immunizing the culture to future exposure to that particular strain.

I think it’s important to analyze what factors incline a song (and it’s usually just a song, only rarely a longer work or oeuvre) to become “dangerous”. For one thing, dangerous music doesn’t have to be brilliant, but it does have to be good enough. Which is to say, it has to speak to people, both aesthetically and emotionally, even if there’s nothing revolutionary about it either form or content. Bad music that might be dangerous is instead edge lord bullshit that no one really pays attention to.

Quality is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Usually, dangerous music speaks to an underclass about the actual struggles and oppression they experience in their daily lives. It gives them powerful new art to rally around. The panic around this kind of dangerous music isn’t really about the music. It’s about what happens if those people rise up, start fighting back, get in the streets, or otherwise demand things change. Dangerous music is dangerous in the eyes of a scared middle class who are worried about what happens when the people at the bottom start punching upwards.

Another factor of dangerous music is that one can’t really set out to create it. It’s not impossible (see the Porno Para Ricardo track below), but something about trying to intentionally create dangerous music seems to rob it of the threat. On the other hand, when Richard Barry wrote “Louie Louie” in 1957, he didn’t intend anything dangerous in it. When the Kingsman recorded their version of it in 1963, they didn’t think they were doing anything subversive.

In fact, it was the the middle class fear of hidden subversion and obscenity that did the work of making “Louie Louie” so dangerous that the FBI had to investigate. So really, the “dangerousness” of music is a little bit like the beauty of a stranger: it’s a fact about the observer’s mind, not about the object of intention.

Artists do not create dangerous music, middle class reactionaries do.

I want to return the idea of “dangerous music” (scare quotes feel more appropriate now with a solid social diagnosis) as akin to a cultural immune reaction. It arises from the inflamed sensibilities of a diverse network of pearl clutchers, but they are only the initial signal. This inflammatory signal then kicks into gear a number of social responses meant to neutralize the perceived threat. The media bans it and runs panic stories. Politicians hold hearings and give speeches so as to be seen to “Do Something”. All of these are ways of mustering a response to something that threatens to sicken the social power structures.

In the end, just as with a successful fever, the inflammatory response serves to protect the system from the perceived pathogen. It is invariably neutralized and further exposure not only doesn’t serious risk structures of power, but doesn’t elicit the same response a second time. Songs that cause congressional hearings end up performed in international music festivals. Ballets that caused riots are performed for tuxedo-clad crowds of well-heeled sophisticates.

One last note in favor of the immunological model of dangerous music: dangerous music is always only dangerous to a single nation or culture. Even beyond language borders, I have a hard time imagining “El Comandante” sparking much panic if an English-language version were performed to American audiences. Music is never universally dangerous, it is only afflicts a particular culture and elicits a particularized response.