The Power of Music (page 2)

Just last month, in the wake of the tragedies in New York City and Washington DC, a group of musicians held a charity concert on live TV to raise money for the families of the victims. Through their music, they were able to not only raise money, but unify the entire country and raise their spirits. In a quote by musician Bonnie Raitt, "There's just something about music that heals" (Crosby, 48).

The rhetoric behind music can play an immeasurable role in shaping civic life, but only a certain type of music is actually aimed at political change. According to Robert Walser in Highbrow, Lowbrow, Voodoo Aesthetics, there is still a cultural hierarchy that separates music into a highbrow and a lowbrow in order to deny "the creative agency of those who inhabit the lower realm" (245). This distinction between the two realms is very important. The pretentious higher realm is mainly concerned with setting themselves apart from the lower brow, and contains very little drive for any social or political change. On the other hand, much of the music in the lower brow is contains anti-establishment ideas, and demands immediate revolutionary change.
So, if the two brows of music have opposite political agendas, and each brow is able to influence its audience, we must raise the question of where each brow gets its audience. The question I intend to answer is do people choose a type of music, whether it be highbrow or lowbrow, that is in line with their political beliefs; or do people choose a music that is accessible to them at the time, and that music in turn shapes their political views. I will attempt to prove that neither answer is inherently correct, and that the two sides of the argument share a dialectal relationship.

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