As anyone who has spent any degree of time with a child who has recently discovered the song ‘Baby Shark’ can tell you, the annoyance of music can certainly be stretched to torturous levels. The repeated refrain of the song quickly becomes a sort of sonic Chinese water torture and has you clawing the walls for the sanity of silence once more.
While the above has a pithy toddler undertone to it, the realities of musical torture are a far darker affair. As the brilliant Jon Ronson revealed in his book The Men Who Stare at Goats, the CIA are far from afraid of deploying a radical tactic and sometimes these are far from comical film fodder and stretch into a realm of nettlesome morality.
One technique that the CIA deployed is termed ‘Sound Disorentation’ whereby essentially prisoners are blasted with loud music for sustained 24-hour periods. As reports state, “detainees were kept in complete darkness and constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste”. The aim of this was to “create fear, disorient” and “prolong capture shock”. In some ways, this is almost a dark extension of cultural hegemony.
Cultural hegemony is the exportation of iconography as a subtle means of control. In other words, it refers to impoverished locals sitting around in some war-ravaged village in a subjugated country suddenly saying to their friends, ‘America can’t be too bad. I mean have you ever had a Coca Cola and listened to Elvis? I think it’s pretty clear from the shit we’re eating, drinking and listening to that we’re the baddies here.’
This is why the music choice for the CIA’s torture methods are so specific. As the British detainee of Guantanamo Bay, Moazzam Begg explained, “In a sense the music didn’t bother me. I’d grown up in Britain, I knew what it was. But Afghan villagers, Yemenis, these guys were dazed, dazzled and confused, bewildered, completely out of it.”
As Sergeant Mark Hadsell explained: “These people haven’t heard heavy metal. They can’t take it. If you play it for 24 hours, your brain and body functions start to slide, your train of thought slows down and your will is broken. That’s when we come in and talk to them.” Furthermore, blasting the music loudly also induces sleep deprivation and all the horrors that come along with that.
One such song used by the CIA for this torture is Eminem’s ‘Kim’. Undoubtedly one of Em’s most brutal set of verses, the rapper daydreams about the murder and mutilation of his then-wife. The track was written while Em tripped on Ecstasy, “Ecstasy amplifies whatever mood you’re in – love or hatred,” he told Q magazine. “I’ve wanted to kill people on Ecstasy. And then I’ve had times when I’ve been telling people I don’t know, ‘I love you man!'”
The graphic imagery and violent tendencies of the song have made it one that the CIA have on their tape deck at all times while they go to their work of torturing suspects.
