Download: Ben Watson, 'Music, Violence, Truth'

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This piece was proposed to Rob Young at The Wire in the aftermath of the Twin Towers suicide attack on 11 September 2001. Unfortunately, it did not fit with other contributions to a special issue (no 213, November 2001): it was too long, and all the rest were on-the-spot responses by local New Yorkers. In the next issue, Young voiced the opinion that the toppling of the Taliban seemed to have created "a happier Afghanistan ... music and song are returning to that devastated land" (Editorial, The Wire, no 214). I concluded that the anti-imperialist thrust of the essay would never find favour, and so published it at militantesthetix.com. In May 2002, Andy Wilson and Ian Land found it there and offered to issue it in pamphlet form. When the launch of Music, Violence, Truth (at the Dolphin pub in Mare Street, Hackney, on Tuesday 25 June 2002) was posted to The Wire discussion board on Yahoo, Young e-mailed me to point out that, far from censoring left viewpoints, he'd made his own anti-Bush remarks in his editorial for January 2002 - an anti-imperialist stand for which he took "a hell of a lot of personal abuse from American readers".

Ben Watson, 2002 


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