A FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer Nathan Smith.
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Solve Crime With This One Easy Trick!
An enterprising shopping centre in the US has almost solved petty theft with a simple tactic. It requires no bollards, zero shotguns and not a single new law. New Zealand should pay attention.
“At various locations, we have implemented a recorded music loop that plays outside of the store to help deter loitering on the premises. We take steps to ensure the music is only loud enough for the immediate area around the store and cannot be heard by residents in surrounding neighbourhoods,” said a spokesperson from Walgreens Memphis.
And what kind of music deters loiterers and potential thieves, I hear you ask?
“Businesses around the globe have been using classical music for decades to stop loitering and deter other crimes with some success. However, there is [sic] no hard data as to why it works,” the article said.
No idea why it works, huh? I’ll tell you why. The kinds of people who enjoy “artists” like Kanye West, for example, tend to fit in the Venn diagram overlap that connects with common criminals. Those who enjoy classical music don’t fit in that overlap (they may enjoy larger, more financial crimes, but the point remains). That’s about as cartoonishly simple as I can make it.
It’s not that classical music lovers are of European descent. This isn’t a race thing. Plenty of petty criminals in the US are non-black. The reason this tactic works is because consumerism is America’s official religion. Walgreens is where common people go to worship, and every holy house has its theme music. It makes perfect sense to hear Kanye West over the speakers while you’re stealing ibuprofen at Walgreens.
But it’s a juxtaposition to hear Mozart while the fluorescent lights flicker off the glass of a Vanilla Coke bottle. Mozart was composed when Europeans worshipped a different kind of god in completely a different holy house. People in Mozart’s time were categorically better in every way than any American alive today. And the Americans know they are the world’s barbarians.
Classical music is like nails on a chalkboard to the homunculus that Americans call their “soul”. It exposes something about their collective degeneracy that they’d rather not engage with. It reminds them that, despite their 245-year history, this “Greatest Nation on Earth” has failed to produce even one genius. Not a single one. New Zealanders shouldn’t get too cocky either. We don’t even call Sir Ernest Rutherford a genius. We’re in the same degenerate spiral as the Yanks.
It astounds me how often someone like Kanye West is called a genius. Not “American Genius” or “Music Genius”, just “Genius”. Kanye West isn’t a genius. He’s not even in the same league as John Coltrane or Miles Davis. He is to music what John Grisham is to literature. I wish there were a word for taking something that’s popular but not extraordinary and trying to elevate its status to art, because that’s the story of America.
Kanye West’s music will be classic in its time, but I think there’s a problem with elevating someone like him beyond what he is, which is more like a folk musician. Not “folk music” as a genre, but “folk” in the sense of music for ordinary folk. The trick is this: if mediocre West can be elevated to the status of icon, then you too might be an icon. That kind of implicit promise keeps each generation chasing the phantom of being remembered, but never doing anything worth being remembered for.
I don’t think the problem is the taste of the public. The problem is a pretension within the American elites who are often so personally untalented that they can’t make any art themselves and think that arbitrarily anointing someone like Kanye West as a genius will mean they’ve made a contribution to culture.
As talented as West may be, he’s still playing someone else’s music. The rise of the hip-hop star is little more than attempts by record companies to charge top-dollar prices for public domain music. Kanye West takes old music and slaps new packaging on it, which is a decent metaphor for America: none of it is original, all of it is copied. Pop music is arguing over which audiobook recitation of Byron is better, and then attributing the brilliance of the poem to the voice actor.
Modern people don’t appreciate classical music, nor should they. First of all, unlike a lot of elites, most ordinary folk went to public schools where music education was an afterthought at best. Their ability to discern one piece of classical music from another and to define what art really sounds like is lacking, through no fault of their own. I’d bet most people can’t even keep time to solo classical music which, lacking drums or a bassline, doesn’t have an obvious rhythm.
Those same elites pretending Kanye West’s music is art also run the media companies, whose only function is to outdo each other in the race for the lowest common denominator. These media try to elevate one hack rapper or pop diva after another to icon status. People are told that’s what art sounds like, and they believe it because they have no proper frame of reference. So it’s not really the fault of the public that they have no appreciation for classical music.
Because the truth is, not even modern elites appreciate classical music. To them, classical music is just mood music or background noise for dinner parties. They might attend Beethoven concerts, but only because that’s where they think they are supposed to be.
Kanye West’s albums cost more to buy when they come out than an entire Beethoven symphony. Most stuff that is clearly not art is usually more expensive than the stuff people assume snobs think is art. Real art also seems obscure because there are no billion-dollar corporations promoting it in every mass media outlet. But that’s your consumerism talking.
I’m not saying art must be either expensive or unpopular for it to qualify as art. But we should acknowledge that some things are not art the way other things are, and it’s not just a matter of opinion. Beethoven is art, Kanye West is not. That shouldn’t be controversial.
Classical music doesn’t fit in the context of a shopping mall because it was composed before mass transit, mass communications, mass production and mass employment and before industrialisation and the emergence of an affluent middle class. It was written as technical exercises or as church music, or in the case of 18th and 19th-century composers, for royal courts. There was a shared context and the music made sense intuitively to that audience in a way it cannot now.
Similarly, a nightclub audience in 1959 would have completely understood Miles Davis or Coltrane, even if the audience members couldn’t play a note themselves. The music sounded like their everyday life, bustling, chaotic and rough. But a nightclub audience today would not understand this vibe at all. Coltrane’s music would sound like what an old photograph looks like.
While I agree it’s crucial to listen to Kanye West’s music to understand our time, I just don’t think people 500 years from now will be listening to it. Of course, I can’t prove that, and it’s likely that some pop music will continue to be listened to. But it reminds me of that SETI experiment that showed human radio emissions would dissipate long before they reached the edge of our solar system and therefore no alien life form will ever hear us.
Contrast this with the fact that people still listen to 400-year-old works of classical music today, and even use it to deter the kinds of people who always make a mess of things.
Not all cultures are equal. What makes Greek brothels relevant? Is it that the Greeks had sex? We knew that. Or is it that they had prostitutes? We knew that too. Every culture had both. But not every culture had a Parthenon. Hmm. Why is that? Every culture has folk music, stories and art – but not all cultures can produce Beethoven, Dostoyevsky or Michelangelo.
The classical music anti-theft tactic works because all of us know, deep down, that our culture lacks any spirit. People are told every day that they live in the greatest moment of history but hear classical music and ask: what kind of society can’t produce just one legitimate genius?
They can’t answer that without looking at their own actions. So they choose to walk away instead. I’m telling you; existentialism is the best anti-theft device of all!
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