Chapter 4

David Toop’s fourth chapter of his book Ocean of Sound titled ‘burial rites’ offers a new perspective on music and death, conflict and darkness. Toop shows how these themes and sounds have been heavily linked since as early as Ancient Rome through descriptions of Emperor Nero ‘using five thousand noise makers’ to dictate public opinion. However, Toop also uses examples from more recent history to show how the modern world and its inventions create an even stronger bond between death and darkness and sound and music.

Early on in the chapter Toop writes of a description from a man named Geoffrey Christian who sees ‘a ceremony of the Bororo Indians of Central Brazil.’ After the death of a chief, individuals who personify the parabára spirit move around the grave of the last dead chief. When the leader of the ritual arrives, the bamboos are rattled. Whilst nowadays in the modern western world we do not live in “tribes” with these same rituals, I would argue that these subgenres of music played live create a kind of ritualistic atmosphere. From an article titled Electronic Dance Music Culture and Religion: An Overview,’ Beatrice Aaronson writes that ‘these dance floors have become a secular ritualistic locus of emancipation and liberation from society’s ever-growing stranglehold.’ 

This idea reflects many parallels to the ceremony of the Bororo Indians of Central Brazil and that of modern music. You could argue that the Chief is now just the band or performer and the individuals are the crowd who still personify a spirit of enthusiasm. There is also a deeper and more sinister example of sound and mass control which is presented later in the chapter. On page 70, Toop takes a line from Jacques Attali’s ‘survey of the political economy of music’, in which Hitler is quoted saying ‘Without the loudspeaker, we would never have conquered Germany.’ The louder speaker Hitler is referring to is known in German as the Volksempfänger or people’s radio. It was a low cost created at the request of Joseph Goebbles. This ‘loudspeaker’ represents the importance of sound that could pass long distances for the purpose of manipulating the masses for a cause. 

Whilst sound can be used to manipulate the masses it also holds an important place in revolution. At the bottom of page 68, Toop offers us a brief story from Norman Cohn’s book The Pursuit of the Millennium. The story is about a man named Hans Böhm, a shepherd who made a name for himself as the ‘Drummer of Niklashausen’ who started a minor revolution in his south German village against the bishops who he thought to be lacking in piety. In the twentieth and twenty first century 

Bibliohraphy:

Aaronson, B. (2007) ‘Dancing our way out of class through funk, techno or rave’, t and f online, 4 December. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10402659908426258f (Accessed: 22 November 2023).