My Music, My War: The Listening Habits of U.S. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Abstract

The study of music in everyday life rejects the formalist aesthetics of the concert hall for the experiential values of quotidian musicality, from listening to an MP3 player while exercising to attending open mike night at a café. This approach to music is neither superficial nor obvious; as philosophers such as Jennifer Gosetti Ferencei and Yuriko Saito have argued, what exactly constitutes the everyday depends a good deal on historical and cultural context (cafés with open mike nights are particular to urban areas, for instance). The variability of the everyday, in fact, is the very condition that helps to make it visible and thus foster surprise and new insight.Lisa Gilman's new book, My Music, My War, provides an excellent example of this kind of insight, detailing the music habits of a group of people, U.S. troops in wartime, whose ordinary lives would be considered extraordinary by most noncombatants. At first glance, soldiers deployed abroad, like civilians back home, are fully engaged in the digital era, relying on personal listening technologies in ways that have blurred the lines between the musical and nonmusical. Americans listen to music virtually everywhere—while passing the time at work, getting ready to go out, doing chores, exercising, eating, sleeping, and so on. However, for soldiers, such music listening has very different meanings in a wartime context shaped by the close quarters of military camps, the stress of perpetual danger, and episodes of intense violence. In fact, the extreme experiential conditions of war reveal functions of music that otherwise may remain hidden or less intense.My Music, My War follows the structure of a soldier's engagement in war, from enlistment to discharge. Gilman begins with recruits' transitions into military culture, emphasizing the ways that listening, easily accomplished in civilian life, often became for many new soldiers an activity that required new habits and expectations, depending on the nature of living conditions and the intensity of their work. Some soldiers learned, for instance, that knowledge about different genres could be key to understanding the politics of racial/ethnic identity. Others found that control of a shared audio system could unexpectedly reveal military hierarchies. Still others developed diverse techniques of individualized listening, using the inner sonic space created by headphones, for example, to pull away from a busy barracks and create privacy not otherwise available, or purposefully making song selections to comment on the environment around them. Almost all learned to select very carefully which music they initially brought with them on MP3 players.In the book's middle chapters, Gilman delves more deeply into several aspects of musicking among the soldiers she interviewed. First, she surveys generally the various ways in which music, for them, is a “sound track of war,” an interesting metaphor for how soldiers used their MP3 players to add nondiegetic meanings to their activities. “Dead Bodies” by the metal band Drowning Pool, for example, ubiquitously provided emotional motivation for patrols, and many of Gilman's interviewees reported country music as a significant source of patriotic uplift. However, individual soldiers also made quite idiosyncratic connections between diverse types of music and their own experiences and feelings, shaped by their own specific battle traumas, moral doubts, or moments of camaraderie and friendship. This linking of music with wartime experience often served to “concretize” soldiers' feelings and memories in sound.For Gilman, one of the most important functions of soldiers' music listening was confronting assumptions about gender in military culture. As she writes, “The military, because it is so strongly identified as a space for men to do male stuff, even when women are active participants, is especially defined in gendered ways that promote and perpetuate the gender binary within the context of overlapping structures of patriarchal power” (81). Listening was a force, in particular, for negotiating hypermasculinity. Thus, publically shared enthusiasm of genres like hardcore rap or metal bands could serve to affirm or contradict one's gender identity; private listening that variously resisted or played with stereotypes of gender (for instance, listening to romantic songs or “Britney Spears type stuff”) could also afford soldiers a means for maintaining a more flexible, more intentionally layered understanding of their own sense of gender and sexual orientation.Beyond identity, Gilman recognizes soldiers' broader use of MP3 players to regulate and manipulate their own emotions. As Gilman explains, “Impressed upon to be manly men or women who engage in dangerous, difficult, lonely, terrifying, and often profoundly sad activities, most rarely shed a tear…. Fortunately, many had their ever-expanding playlists and personal music players readily available” (113). Gilman's interviewees indicated a deep understanding of how they actively use different kinds of music to create “an alternate state for themselves” to erase memories of peaceful civilian life and “allow themselves to be present and to do what was required of them” (119). Alternatively, soldiers talked about using music therapeutically to calm anxiety or, more seriously, to control feelings of depression and suicide.Gilman carries this theme of music listening's therapeutic power into the last chapters, in which she describes soldiers' challenges after coming home. If soldiers used music to manage barracks politics and violent situations during deployment, at home they used it to cope with new jobs, changed relationships, traumatic memories, and grief. Veterans, with varying degrees of posttraumatic stress, particularly found that songs' sonic and semantic concretization of their wartime experiences led them to use listening to control the effects of their remembering—and re-experiencing—wartime moments. Overall, music served to treat many soldiers' psychological challenges at a level many felt was missing in base culture and in Veterans Affairs.My Music, My War joins a host of recent work on music in times of war, such as Jon Pieslak's Sound Targets (2009), which broadly analyzes music in military culture; J. Martin Daughtry's Listening to War (2015), which studies soldiers' encounters with the soundscapes of war; or Kip Pegley's current work on music therapy among Canadian veterans. Themes reoccur across these works: the prevalence of personal listening technologies in today's military; the power of music to shape social relationships and identities; music's effect on emotion, mood, and bodily states; and the role of music in constituting soldiers' perceptions and memories. However, the authors emphasize these themes differently. Unlike Pieslak's musicological analysis of music in combat or Daughtry's theoretical applications of sound studies to war, Gilman's ethnographic approach is unique in that it prioritizes the expressed experiences of soldiers. Adhering to the principles of grounded theory (and, in that way, echoing the “vernacular criticism” of My Music [1993], an early work on music in daily life suggested by Gilman's title), Gilman follows her interviewees' lead in shaping the themes of the book. Extensive interview excerpts throughout the text have the effect of constantly interweaving soldiers' voices with Gilman's, signaling their collaborative interpretation.Most importantly, My Music, My War maintains, more than other books on music and war, a focus on the act of listening. This is not simply Gilman's doing but a response to historical circumstances. In past conflicts, the musical lives of soldiers were intentionally managed by governmental agencies such as the Army/Navy Joint Committee on Welfare and Recreation or services such as the USO and generally were centered on performance. Today, musicking for soldiers stationed overseas has been radically individualized by digital technology and recentered on popular music consumption. Because of these developments, music in the military today functions less as a formal occasion of recreation or shared morale and more as a continuous personal resource for agency. In extreme conditions of war, which are either chaotic or highly regimented, making playlists, creating private sonic spaces, and building memories with musical sound give soldiers a needed sense of independent and enduring selfhood and a means to cope with pain, loss, and conflicting thoughts and emotions.Gilman does not necessarily offer new theories about contemporary uses of music and its reception, as Michael Bull, Anahid Kassabian, and others have done. Moreover, while Gilman is careful to cite these predecessors, some might wish for more theoretical engagement with, say, Tia DeNora's ideas of music as a force for bodily entrainment or specific theories of emotion and response in music psychology. But what Gilman does give us is a rich and empathetic thick description of a group of people for whom established functions of music listening are marked, allowing readers to confirm, and to understand more precisely, the means and limits of listening's significance in shaping lived experience.