By Andy Worthington
On BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight,
singer-songwriter David Gray spoke out against the use of music as torture
by the US military.
Gray’s chart-topping song Babylon,
played repeatedly at ear-piercing volume, is one of dozens of songs,
by artists including Eminem, Bruce Springsteen, Rage Against the Machine
and Britney Spears, that has been used by the US military as part of
a package of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” intended to “break”
prisoners held without charge or trial in the “War on Terror” –
in Guantánamo, in Iraq, and in secret prisons run by the CIA.
As the Guardian recently explained,
the use of Babylon first came to light “after Haj Ali, the
hooded man in the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs, told of being stripped,
handcuffed and forced to listen to a looped sample of Babylon,
at a volume so high he feared that his head would burst.”
Complaining that the only part of the
torture music story that gets noticed is its “novelty aspect” –
which he compared to “Guantánamo[“s] Greatest Hits” –
Gray delivered a powerful indictment of the misappropriation of his
and other artists” music.
“What we”re talking about here is
people in a darkened room, physically inhibited by handcuffs, bags over
their heads and music blaring at them for 24 hours a day, seven days
a week,” he told the BBC.
“That is torture. That is nothing but torture. It doesn’t matter
what the music is – it could be Tchaikovsky’s finest or it could
be Barney the Dinosaur. It really doesn’t matter, it’s going to
drive you completely nuts.” He added, “No-one wants to even think
about it or discuss the fact that we”ve gone above and beyond all
legal process and we”re torturing people.”
This is the second time that Gray has
spoken out about the use of music as torture. Two weeks ago, he explained,
“The moral niceties of whether they”re using my song or not are
totally irrelevant. We are thinking below the level of the people we”re
supposed to oppose, and it goes against our entire history and everything
we claim to represent. It’s disgusting, really. Anything that draws
attention to the scale of the horror and how low we”ve sunk is a good
thing.”
Reprieve, the legal action charity that represents over
30 prisoners at Guantánamo, recently launched an initiative, Pull the Plug on Torture Music, encouraging artists to sign up to prevent the
use of their music as part of the US military’s torture techniques,
to insert a clause in their contracts preventing the misuse of their
music, and, in general, to raise awareness of the issue by spreading
the word and playing anti-torture gigs.
Others who have signed up for Reprieve’s
initiative include Massive Attack (who recently hosted a series of Reprieve
events at their Meltdown festival at London’s Southbank Centre), Alabama
3, Elbow, the Magic Numbers, Seize the Day, and Tom Morello of Rage
Against the Machine, who told Spin magazine in 2006, “The fact
that our music has been co-opted in this barbaric way is really disgusting.
If you”re at all familiar with the ideological teachings of the band
and its support for human rights, that’s really hard to stand.”
Whether you like David Gray’s music
or not should be irrelevant. He understands what’s really going on
with the use of music as torture, and he’s been brave enough to raise
his head above the parapet, which is not something that musicians are
always prepared to do.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the
774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison
(http://www.andyworthington.co
of Michigan Press). He can be reached at http://www.andyworthington.co