violence in music essay

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When Music Is Violence

In December, 1989, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was expelled from power by American forces. To escape capture, he took refuge in the Papal Nunciatura in Panama City. When an American general arrived to confer with the papal nuncio, the U.S. Army blared music from loudspeakers to prevent journalists from eavesdropping. Members of a psychological-operations unit then decided that non-stop music might aggravate Noriega into surrendering. They made requests for songs on the local armed-forces radio station, and directed the din at Noriega’s window. The dictator was thought to prefer opera, and so hard rock dominated the playlist. The songs conveyed threatening, sometimes mocking messages: Alice Cooper’s “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.”

Although the media delighted in the spectacle, President George H. W. Bush and General Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took a dim view of it. Bush called the campaign “irritating and petty,” and Powell had it stopped. Noriega, who had received psy­ops training at Fort Bragg in the nineteen-sixties, is said to have slept soundly through the clamor. Nonetheless, military and law-enforcement officials became convinced that they had stumbled on a valuable tactic. “Since the Noriega incident, you’ve been seeing an increased use of loudspeakers,” a psyops spokesman declared. During the siege of the Branch Davidian compound, in Waco, Texas, in 1993, the F.B.I. blasted music and noise day and night. When Palestinian militants occupied the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, in 2002, Israeli forces reportedly tried to eject them with heavy metal. And during the occupation of Iraq the C.I.A. added music to the torture regime known as “enhanced interrogation.” At Guantánamo, detainees were stripped to their underwear, shackled to chairs, and blinded by strobe lights as heavy metal, rap, and children’s tunes assaulted their ears. Music has accompanied acts of war since trumpets sounded at the walls of Jericho, but in recent decades it has been weaponized as never before—outfitted for the unreal landscape of modern battle.

The intersection of music and violence has inspired a spate of academic studies. On my desk is a bleak stack of books examining torture and harassment, the playlists of Iraq War soldiers and interrogators, musical tactics in American crime-prevention efforts, sonic cruelties inflicted in the Holocaust and other genocides, the musical preferences of Al Qaeda militants and neo-Nazi skinheads. There is also a new translation, by Matthew Amos and Fredrick Rönnbäck, of Pascal Quignard’s 1996 book, “The Hatred of Music” (Yale), which explores age-old associations between music and barbarity.

When music is applied to warlike ends, we tend to believe that it has been turned against its innocent nature. To quote the standard platitudes, it has charms to soothe a savage breast; it is the food of love; it brings us together and sets us free. We resist evidence suggesting that music can cloud reason, stir rage, cause pain, even kill. Footnoted treatises on the dark side of music are unlikely to sell as well as the cheery pop-science books that tout music’s ability to make us smarter, happier, and more productive. Yet they probably bring us closer to the true function of music in the evolution of human civilization.

A striking passage in J. Martin Daughtry’s “Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq” (Oxford) evokes the sound of the battlefield in the most recent Iraq war:

The growl of the Humvee engine. The thump-thump-thump of the approaching helicopter. The drone of the generator. Human voices shouting, crying, asking questions in a foreign tongue. “ Allahu akbar! ”: the call to prayer. “ Down on the ground! ”: the shouted command. The dadadadadada of automatic weapon fire. The shhhhhhhhhhhhh of the rocket in flight. The fffft of the bullet displacing air. The sharp k-k-k-k-r-boom of the mortar. The rolling BOOM of the I.E.D.

Daughtry underscores something crucial about the nature of sound and, by extension, of music: we listen not only with our ears but also with our body. We flinch against loud sounds before the conscious brain begins to try to understand them. It is therefore a mistake to place “music” and “violence” in separate categories; as Daugh­try writes, sound itself can be a form of violence. Detonating shells set off supersonic blast waves that slow down and become sound waves; such waves have been linked to traumatic brain injury, once known as shell shock. Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are often triggered by sonic signals; New York residents experienced this after September 11th, when a popped tire would make everyone jump.

Sound is all the more potent because it is inescapable: it saturates a space and can pass through walls. Quignard—a novelist and essayist of an oblique, aphoristic bent—writes:

All sound is the invisible in the form of a piercer of envelopes. Whether it be bodies, rooms, apartments, castles, fortified cities. Immaterial, it breaks all barriers. . . . Hearing is not like seeing. What is seen can be abolished by the eyelids, can be stopped by partitions or curtains, can be rendered immediately inaccessible by walls. What is heard knows neither eyelids, nor partitions, neither curtains, nor walls. . . . Sound rushes in. It violates.

The fact that ears have no lids—earplugs notwithstanding—explains why reactions to undesirable sounds can be extreme. We are confronting faceless intruders; we are being touched by invisible hands.

Technological advances, especially in loudspeaker design, have increased sound’s invasive powers. Juliette Volcler, in “Extremely Loud: Sound As a Weapon” (New Press), details attempts to manufacture sonic devices that might debilitate enemy forces or disperse crowds. Long-range acoustic devices, nicknamed “sound cannons,” send out shrill, pulsating tones of up to a hundred and forty-nine decibels—enough to cause permanent hearing damage. Police units unleashed these devices at an Occupy Wall Street rally in 2011 and in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, among other settings. A commercial device called the Mosquito discourages young people from loitering; it emits sounds in the 17.5-to-18.5-kilohertz range, which, in general, only those under the age of twenty-five can hear. Further Army research into low- and high-frequency weapons, which developers hoped would “liquefy the bowels,” apparently failed to yield results, although conspiracy theories proliferate on the Internet.

Humans react with particular revulsion to musical signals that are not of their choice or to their liking. Many neuroscientific theories about how music acts on the brain—such as Steven Pinker’s notion that music is “auditory cheesecake,” a biologically useless pleasure—ignore how personal tastes affect our processing of musical information. A genre that enrages one person may have a placebo effect on another. A 2006 study by the psychologist Laura Mitchell, testing how music-therapy sessions can alleviate pain, found that a suffering person was better served by his or her “preferred music” than by a piece that was assumed to have innately calming qualities. In other words, music therapy for a heavy-metal fan should involve heavy metal, not Enya.

Lily Hirsch’s “Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment” (Michigan) explores how divergences in taste can be exploited for purposes of social control. In 1985, the managers of a number of 7-Eleven stores in British Columbia began playing classical and easy-listening music in their parking lots to drive away loitering teen-agers. The idea was that young people would find such a soundtrack insufferably uncool. The 7-Eleven company then applied this practice across North America, and it soon spread to other commercial spaces. To the chagrin of many classical-music fans, especially the lonely younger ones, it seems to work. This is an inversion of the concept of Muzak, which was invented to give a pleasant sonic veneer to public settings. Here instrumental music becomes a repellent.

To Hirsch, it’s no coincidence that 7-Eleven perfected its technique of musical cleansing while American forces were experimenting with musical harassment. Both reflect a strategy of “deterrence through music,” capitalizing on rage against the unwanted. The spread of portable digital technology, from CDs to the iPod and on to smartphones, means that it is easier than ever to impose music on a space and turn the psychological screws. The logical next step might be a Spot­ify algorithm that can discover what combination of songs is most likely to drive a given subject insane.

When Primo Levi arrived in Ausch­witz, in 1944, he struggled to make sense not only of what he saw but of what he heard. As prisoners returned to the camp from a day of hard labor, they marched to bouncy popular music: in particular, the polka “Rosamunde,” which was an international hit at the time. (In America, it was called the “Beer Barrel Polka”; the Andrews Sisters, among others, sang it.) Levi’s first reaction was to laugh. He thought that he was witnessing a “colossal farce in Teutonic taste.” He later grasped that the grotesque juxtaposition of light music and horror was designed to destroy the spirit as surely as the crematoriums destroyed the body. The merry strains of “Rosamunde,” which also emanated from loudspeakers during mass shootings of Jews at Majdanek, mocked the suffering that the camps inflicted.

The Nazis were pioneers of musical sadism, although loudspeakers were apparently deployed more to drown out the screams of victims than to torture them. Jonathan Pieslak, in his 2009 book, “Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War,” finds a telling cinematic precedent in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film “Foreign Correspondent,” where Nazi spies torment a diplomat with bright lights and swing music. To some extent, sonically enhanced interrogation may have been a Hollywood fantasy that migrated into reality—just as other aspects of the American torture regime took inspiration from TV shows like “24.” Similarly, in the 2004 battle of Fallujah, speakers mounted on Humvees bombarded the Iraqis with Metallica and AC/DC, mimicking the Wagner scene in “Apocalypse Now,” in which a helicopter squadron blasts “The Ride of the Valkyries” as it lays waste to a Vietnamese village.

Jane Mayer, a staff writer at this maga­zine, and other journalists have shown that the idea of punishing someone with music also emerged from Cold War-era research into the concept of “no-touch torture”—leaving no marks on victims’ bodies. Researchers of the period demonstrated that sensory deprivation and manipulation, including extended bouts of noise, could bring about the disintegration of a subject’s personality. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, programs that trained American soldiers and intelligence operatives to withstand torture had a musical component; at one point, the playlist reportedly included the industrial band Throbbing Gristle and the avant-garde vocalist Diamanda Galás. The concept spread to military and police units in other countries, where it was applied not to trainees but to prisoners. In Israel, Palestinian detainees were tied to kindergarten chairs, cuffed, hooded, and immersed in modernist classical music. In Pinochet’s Chile, interrogators employed, among other selections, the soundtrack to “A Clockwork Orange,” whose notorious aversion-therapy sequence, scored to Beethoven, may have encouraged similar real-life experiments.

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In America, musical torture received authorization in a September, 2003, memo by General Ricardo Sanchez. “Yelling, Loud Music, and Light Control” could be used “to create fear, disorient detainee and prolong capture shock,” provided that volume was “controlled to prevent injury.” Such practices had already been publicly exposed in a short article in Newsweek that May. The item noted that interrogations often featured the cloying theme of “Barney & Friends,” in which a purple dinosaur sings, “I love you / You love me / We’re a happy family.” The article’s author, Adam Piore, later recalled that his editors couched the item in joking terms, adding a sardonic kicker: “In search of comment from Barney’s people, Hit Entertainment, Newsweek endured five minutes of Barney while on hold. Yes, it broke us, too.” Repeating a pattern from the Noriega and Waco incidents, the media made a game of proposing ideal torture songs.

The hilarity subsided when the public learned more of what was going on at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Mosul, and Guantánamo. Here are some entries from the interrogation log of Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged “twentieth hijacker,” who was refused admittance to the United States in August, 2001:

1315: Corpsman checked vitals—O.K. Christina Aguilera music played. Interrogators ridiculed detainee by developing creative stories to fill in gaps in detainee’s cover story. 0400: Detainee was told to stand and loud music was played to keep detainee awake. Was told he can go to sleep when he tells the truth.

1115: Interrogation team entered the booth. Loud music was played that included songs in Arabic. Detainee complained that it was a violation of Islam to listen to Arabic music.

0345: Detainee offered food and water—refused. Detainee asked for music to be turned off. Detainee was asked if he can find the verse in the Koran that prohibits music.

1800: A variety of musical selections was played to agitate the detainee.

Aguilera seems to have been chosen because female singers were thought to offend Islamist detainees. Interrogation playlists also leaned on heavy-metal and rap numbers, which, as in the Noriega case, delivered messages of intimidation and destruction. Songs in regular rotation included Eminem’s “Kim” (“Sit down, bitch / If you move again I’ll beat the shit out of you”) and Drowning Pool’s “Bodies” (“Let the bodies hit the floor”).

Does such coerced listening qualify as torture? The N.Y.U.-based musicologist Suzanne Cusick, one of the first scholars to think deeply about music in the Iraq War, addressed the question in a 2008 paper for The Journal of the Society for American Music. During the Bush Administration, the U.S. government held that techniques inducing psychological rather than physical pain did not amount to torture, as international conventions have defined it. Cusick, however, makes clear that the loud-music tactic displays a chilling degree of casual sadism: the choice of songs seems designed to amuse the captors as much as to nauseate the captives. Few detainees probably understood the English lyrics aimed at them.

No official policy dictated the prison playlists; interrogators improvised them on-site, making use of whatever music they had on hand. Pieslak, who interviewed a number of Iraq veterans, observes that soldiers played many of the same songs for their own benefit, particularly when they were psyching themselves up for a dangerous mission. They, too, favored the most anarchic corners of heavy metal and gangsta rap. Thus, certain songs served both to whip soldiers into a lethal frenzy and to annihilate the spirit of “enemy combatants.” You couldn’t ask for a clearer demonstration of the non-universality of music, of its capacity to sow discord.

The soldiers told Pieslak that they used music to strip themselves of empathy. One said that he and his comrades sought out a “predator kind of music.” Another, after admitting with some embarrassment that Eminem’s “Go to Sleep” (“Die, motherfucker, die”) was a “theme song” for his unit, said, “You’ve got to become inhuman to do inhuman things.” The most unsettling choice was Slayer’s “Angel of Death,” which imagines the inner world of Josef Mengele: “Auschwitz, the meaning of pain / The way that I want you to die.” Such songs are far removed from uplifting wartime propaganda like “Over There,” the patriotic 1917 tune by George M. Cohan. The image of soldiers prepping for a mission by listening to Metallica’s “One”—“Landmine has taken my sight . . . Left me with life in hell”—suggests the degree to which they, too, felt trapped in a malevolent machine.

As Hirsch and other scholars point out, the idea of music as inherently good took hold only in the past few centuries. Philosophers of prior eras tended to view the art as an ambiguous, unreliable entity that had to be properly managed and channelled. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates scoffs at the idea that “music and poetry were only play and did no harm at all.” He distinguishes between musical modes that “suitably imitate the tone and rhythm of a courageous person who is active in battle” and those which strike him as soft, effeminate, lecherous, or melancholy. The Chinese “Book of Rites” differentiated between the joyous sound of a well-ruled state and the resentful sound of a confused one. John Calvin believed that music “has an insidious and well-nigh incredible power to move us whither it will.” He went on, “We must be all the more diligent to control music in such a way that it will serve us for good and in no way harm us.”

German thinkers in the idealist and Romantic tradition—Hegel, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Schopenhauer, among others—sparked a drastic revaluation of music’s significance. It became the doorway to the infinitude of the soul, and expressed humanity’s collective longing for freedom and brotherhood. With the canonization of Beethoven, music became the vehicle of genius. Sublime as Beethoven is, the claim of universality blended all too easily with a German bid for supremacy. The musicologist Richard Taruskin, whose rigorously unsentimental view of Western music history anchors much recent work in the field, likes to quote a phrase ironically articulated by the historian Stanley Hoffman, who died last year: “There are universal values, and they happen to be mine.”

Despite the cultural catastrophe of Nazi Germany, the Romantic idealization of music persists. Pop music in the American tradition is now held to be the all-encompassing, world-redeeming force. Many consumers prefer to see only the positive side of pop: they cherish it as a culturally and spiritually liberating influence, somehow free of the rapacity of capitalism even as it overwhelms the marketplace. Whenever it is suggested that music might arouse or incite violence—Eminem’s graphic fantasies of abuse and murder, or, more recently, the whiff of rape culture in Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”—fans suddenly devalue music’s potency, portraying it as a vehicle for harmless play that cannot propel bodies into action. When Eminem proclaims that he is “just clownin’, dogg,” he is taken at his word.

Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan expose this inconsistency in “Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence” (2008). They are not reactionaries in the Tipper Gore mode, trying to whip up a moral panic. Pioneers of pop-music studies, they address their subject with deep respect. Nonetheless, if music can shape “our sense of the possible,” as they say, it must also be able to act destructively. Either music affects the world around it or it does not. Johnson and Cloonan avoid claims of direct causality, but they refuse to rule out links between violence in music—in terms both of lyrical content and of raw decibel impact—and violence in society. Furthermore, musical brutality need not involve a brutal act, for a “song of vilification is in itself an act of social violence.”

The pattern of sonic aggression that runs from the Noriega siege to the Iraq War poses these issues in the starkest terms. There was a nasty undertow of cultural triumphalism in the hard-hitting, hypermasculine music used to humiliate foreign prisoners. “The detainee’s subjectivity was to be lost in a flood of American sounds,” Johnson and Cloonan write. On a symbolic level, the rituals at Guantánamo present an extreme image of how American culture forces itself on an often unwilling world.

Although music has a tremendous ability to create communal feeling, no community can form without excluding outsiders. The sense of oneness that a song fosters in a human herd can seem either a beautiful or a repulsive thing—usually depending on whether you love or hate the song in question. Loudness heightens the tension: blaring music is a hegemonic move, a declaration of disdain for anyone who thinks differently. Whether we are marching or dancing or sitting silently in chairs, we are being molded into a single mass by sound. As Quignard notes in “The Hatred of Music,” the Latin word obaudire , to obey, contains audire , to hear. Music “hypnotizes and causes man to abandon the expressible,” he writes. “In hearing, man is held captive.”

Quignard’s slender, unnerving volume is quite different in tone from the sober academic books on the theme of music and violence. It hovers in a peculiarly French space between philosophy and fiction, and goes on mysterious lyrical flights, animating scenes from history and myth. One astonishing sequence evokes St. Peter’s denial of Jesus before the third crowing of the cock. Quignard imagines that, ever after, Peter was traumatized by any high-pitched noise, and that he soundproofed his home to escape the cacophony of the street: “The palace was shrouded in silence, the windows blinded with drapes.”

For years, Quignard was active on the French music scene, organizing concerts and working with the Catalan viol player Jordi Savall. Quignard co-wrote the screenplay for the music-drenched 1991 film “Tous les Matins du Monde.” Soon afterward, he retreated from such projects and wrote “The Hatred of Music” as a cri de cœur. Although he does not explain this change of heart, he gestures toward the meaningless ubiquity of music in contemporary life—Mozart in the 7-Eleven. Quignard gives this familiar lament a savage edge. In a chapter on the infernal Muzak of Auschwitz, he quotes Tolstoy: “Where one wants to have slaves, one must have as much music as possible.”

The book’s most disquieting passages suggest that music has always had a violent heart—that it may be rooted in the urge to dominate and kill. He speculates that some of the earliest music was made by hunters luring their prey, and devotes a chapter to the myth of the Sirens, who, in his reading, beguiled men with song just as men once beguiled animals with music. Quignard muses that some early weapons doubled as instruments: a string stretched across a bow could be resonantly plucked or it could send an arrow through the air. Music relied conspicuously on the slaughter of animals: horsehair bows drawn over catgut, horns torn from the heads of big game.

What to do with these dire ruminations? Renouncing music is not an option—not even Quignard can bring himself to do that. Rather, we can renounce the fiction of music’s innocence. To discard that illusion is not to diminish music’s importance; rather, it lets us register the uncanny power of the medium. To admit that music can become an instrument of evil is to take it seriously as a form of hu­man expression. ♦

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The Impact of Violent Music Lyrics on Kids

Words by Joseph Pratt

Published on

MAY 07, 2024

Warning: Reader Discretion Advised

The following content may disturb readers as it contains graphic material that describes domestic violence, murder, violence against children, and suicide.

Picture this: a child with headphones on, lost in the world of aggressive beats and contentious lyrics. Are they destined for delinquency, or just vibing to the beat?

Society has long debated the impact of violent music on young minds.  

Researchers have suggested that exposure to violent music lyrics has been linked to emotional and behavioral problems , including aggression, substance abuse, risky sexual behaviors, and suicide.

One study found a relationship between violent song lyrics and an increase in aggressive thoughts and feelings of hostility.

The 2024 dispute between high-profile artists Drake and Kendrick Lamar provides a great example. What started as two rappers exchanging diss tracks full of violent, threatening lyrics spilled into “real world” violence with a drive-by shooting at Drake’s home just days after Lamar used a photo of the lavish mansion as album art, effectively doxxing the home address.

Parents of teens have good reason to be interested in this discussion. They want to know what they can do to encourage their children to make healthy music choices . 

Here is what the research says about the impact of violent music on youth.

Murder, Violence, and Suicide—Common Themes

Consider these disturbing lyrics in the hit “Kim,” penned over 20 years ago by rapper Eminem and still popular today. 

Murder of a spouse, violence in front of a child, revenge, and suicide are the prevailing themes.  Rolling Stone describes it as “Eminem screaming at his ex in an insane stream-of-consciousness hate spew” and characterizes it and the entire album as “loud, wild, dangerous, out of control, grotesque, unsettling”

Though this is just one example, it illustrates how graphic violence in music can be.

Other popular songs depict violence in just as much striking detail. This content normalizes these antisocial, violent behaviors, especially in the developing minds of children. 

Such destructive messages impact the listener’s worldview , attitudes, and tolerance for violence and misogyny. These lyrics discourage the growth of empathy, whereas prosocial lyrics seem to be the “key factor” influenced by music with prosocial lyrics.

Who Enjoys Listening to Violent Music?

Personality, self-view, and cognitive abilities influence what kind of music people enjoy. 

For instance, those who score lower for agreeableness and conscientiousness are more likely to be fans of violent music genres , such as death metal or gangster rap.When a child within our influence struggles in these ways, decreasing access to violent music and increasing exposure to positive music , regardless of the genre, is a best practice.

Engagement with violent [music content] has been linked with emotional and behavioral problems, including aggressive behaviors and drug and alcohol use. —Dr. William Forde Thompson, Department of Psychology, Macquarie University

How Does Violent Music Affect Youth?

Most research suggests violent lyrics both increase anger and aggressiveness and decrease positive emotions.

Some studies propose the inverse is true—that prosocial lyrics increase empathy and positive mood .

Even so, it is plausible that long-term, regular exposure to violent music desensitizes listeners to violence. 

Evidence from other violent media forms supports this explanation.

Many of us adults have jammed out to a song from our younger days, only to realize the innocent lyrics we remember are actually inappropriate. That’s because adults have the development and experience to sift through messaging that a child cannot yet process.

Violent video games have been linked to “increased aggressive behaviors and decreased empathy.”

Music Choice, Friend Groups, and Friends’ Behavior as Warning Signs

A National Center for Biotechnology Information study shows the influence of music choice and friend groups on adolescent misbehavior.

Friend groups are often formed and maintained by a shared preference in music.

This is not a call to ban any specific genre of music; to categorize any genre as responsible for childhood maladies and societal decline oversimplifies the issue. As parents we can create a family culture of sharing playlists and talking with kids about their music choices as a way to identify warning signs.

If we notice a change in mood, behavior, and family connection and a teen seeks friends who engage in damaging behavior, there is cause for concern.

Does Violent Music Cause Violent Behavior?

In short, the answer is maybe . 

Exposure to violent content certainly normalizes deviant and illegal acts perpetrated by violent offenders. 

It also can poison the emerging worldview of a child and impact their relationships with others. 

Over time, this seems to have the potential to harm temperament. 

Whether this results in violent behavior depends on individual personality, life circumstances, and predisposition.

Steering children toward upbeat, positive songs is the safest route.

Continued conversations about the music in your home and on your family’s devices will provide a chance for connection. 

Though we can’t know everything our kids listen to, we do have control over what types of music they can access through devices we provide. 

Streaming platforms offer kids almost unlimited access to popular music—much of it with explicit lyrics and adult themes. Most of these services don’t offer parent controls or rely on inadequate filters .

For these reasons, a safe streaming app is a smart choice for protecting children.

Parents don’t have to worry because songs with profanity, violence, and sexual innuendo aren’t just filtered out, they simply are not included in an app’s library.

For many families, a clean streaming service is the perfect answer. Kids are protected from destructive messages, at least on their personal devices.

Conversations about music choices are still the best way to set boundaries and teach kids about how the content we consume affects us.

Music streaming services today are built for adults, with kids as an afterthought. Gabb Music is different. Completely safe from the start, kids and parents alike can listen freely.

Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments!

Joseph Pratt

Joseph Pratt joined Gabb as a writer and researcher because he finds immense fulfillment in helping parents empower their children. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in English from Brigham Young University. Learn More

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Mom of teens on Nov 05, 2023 03:42 PM

This is so true!! As a parent. I really appreciate your approach on this. I wish there was a way to do this on school Chromebooks as well...!!

• elements are the same like in depth-1 level -->

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This blog post has left us feeling grateful and inspired

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Many thanks for the information.

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Violent song lyrics may lead to violent behavior

July/August 2003, Vol 34, No. 7

Print version: page 15

Violent song lyrics increase negative emotions and thoughts that can lead to aggression, according to a study published in the May issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 84, No. 5).

The study challenges the ancient Greek "catharsis hypothesis" that claims that expressing aggressive emotion will later decrease aggressive behavior. Instead, researchers from Iowa State University and the Texas Department of Human Services found that aggressive music lyrics increase aggressive thoughts and feelings, which might perpetuate aggressive behavior and have long-term effects, such as influencing listeners' perceptions of society and contributing to the development of aggressive personalities.

"This [study] provides the first clean demonstration of violent lyric effects," says lead author Craig Anderson, PhD, of Iowa State University.

In five experiments, Anderson and his colleagues asked more than 500 college students to listen to such violent songs as "Shoot 'Em Up" by Cypress Hill and "Hit 'Em Hard" by Run DMC, and such nonviolent songs as "Finger Lickin' Good" by the Beastie Boys and "Love vs. Loneliness" by the Suicidal Tendencies. Researchers also included the lyrics of humorous violent and nonviolent songs like "A Boy Named Sue" by Johnny Cash and "Hello Mudduh, Hello Fadduh" by Allan Sherman.

After listening to the songs, the students performed various word-association tasks to test whether they linked more non-aggressive words with aggressive words or filled incomplete words with vowels to make aggressive words. They also reported their feelings of hostility as measured by the State Hostility Scale, ranking sentences based on their emotions after hearing the songs.

The results indicate a relationship between violent song lyrics and increased aggressive thoughts and feelings of hostility. Humorous violent songs also increased aggression levels, relative to humorous nonviolent songs, according to Anderson. The findings held even after the researchers controlled for the listeners' gender and personality differences, as well as their reactions to the different performing artists and musical styles.

While more research on effects of violent lyrics must be done, says Anderson, yet another type of entertainment media, when referring to violence, "now has been demonstrated to have some negative effects."

--A. PALMER

Letters to the Editor

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• Jonathan P. J. Stock Department of Music, University College Cork

The article provides a critical review of a wide cross-section of ethnomusicological research into violence, conflict, and music, leading to proposal of a new model for field researchers. The article begins with a contextualization of selected analytical positions, as offered by theorists of violence and conflict. The main body of the essay then assesses notable contributions from the already substantive ethnomusicological literature on music and violence. Music is not inherently peaceful: instead, it frames and commemorates conflict, making its impacts resound. Music is put to contrasting, and even conflicting, usages by those in, or recovering from, situations of hurt, hostility, or overt conflict. The article provides examples from research carried out in many parts of the world and in the shadow of numerous types of violence, from the re-imagining of a heroic individual to the systemic antagonisms of colonization or poverty, and from the recruitment of extremists to the selfregulation of inmates. Finally, a new model for applied ethnomusicological involvement in the area is briefly presented. Its component parts – naming, witnessing, intervention, and survival – are briefly explained and discussed, showing how an ethnomusicologically trained researcher can contribute to peacebuilding via musical research, listening, and participation.

Author Biography

Jonathan p. j. stock, department of music, university college cork.

Jonathan P.J. Stock is Professor of Music at University College Cork, Ireland. An ethnomusicologist whose work focuses mainly on the transformation of musical traditions in the modern era in China and Taiwan, he has also written articles on music analysis, biography, bromance, English folk music, and on one of the founders of comparative musicology, Alexander Ellis. He is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of the Music of China and the Chinese Diaspora and has recently completed a book on everyday musical life among the indigenous Bunun of Taiwan. Email: [email protected].

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Violence in Music

the role music plays in society, music used as a means for violence or against. Music used to de-sensitise violence

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Aleksey Nikolsky

The purpose of this investigation is to resolve an almost half a century old debate about the ethics in music and the extent of freedom of artistic expression. This debate originates in a few thousand year-old discourse which held the interests of a social group higher than the music preference of an individual, which has now completely reversed. The arguments for censorship of emotional expression in music that prevailed during Antiquity and Christianity, up until the 19th century, became ideologically tainted by what was perceived as communist propaganda, and was therefore downplayed in the middle of the 20th century. Today, the argument for individual freedom in music preference for production and consumption, has evolved into the status quo of Western music industry. However, unrestrained usage of music is found to lead to substantial increase in aggressive content in music which today constitutes about a fifth of the music products consumed in the U.S. This paper implements a number of approaches to draw a perspective view on the connection between violence in music and violence in society. It provides an insight into the causes for why violent music is cultivated, as well as the causes for persistent denial of ties between violent music and violent behavior that characterizes public consensus and opinion of music scholars.

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Craig Robertson

NGOs and other benefactors have long used musical activity as part of a peacebuilding or development strategy, believing that music brings people together, heals traumas and promotes peace, yet there is scant empirical evidence to support this notion. At the very least, musical activity is usually considered to be a nonviolent endeavour yet there is evidence that contradicts even this. Drawing on a synthesis of sociological, musicological and conflict theory, this paper attempts to explain how the same physical phenomenon can produce such wildly different results, beliefs and behaviours through the musical interaction with personal and social belief systems, identities, memories and emotions. Keywords: Music Sociology, Conflict, South East Asia, Peacebuilding

Jonathan Stock

The article provides a critical review of a wide cross-section of ethnomusicological research into violence, conflict, and music, leading to proposal of a new model for field researchers. The article begins with a contextualization of selected analytical positions, as offered by theorists of violence and conflict. The main body of the essay then assesses notable contributions from the already substantive ethnomusicological literature on music and violence. Music is not inherently peaceful: instead, it frames and commemorates conflict, making its impacts resound. Music is put to contrasting, and even conflicting, usages by those in, or recovering from, situations of hurt, hostility, or overt conflict. The article provides examples from research carried out in many parts of the world and in the shadow of numerous types of violence, from the re-imagining of a heroic individual to the systemic antagonisms of colonization or poverty, and from the recruitment of extremists to the selfregu...

Ethnomusicology Forum

Fiorella Montero-Diaz

Morag Josephine Grant

Pedro J S Vieira de Oliveira

In this course we will investigate together different articulations of sound and violence, from historical to speculative perspectives. Starting from assessing the effects of sound in the body, to diverse definitions and discussions on forms of violence, we will together develop and engage with a body of knowledge — both in reading and listening — that articulates how sound can be either a direct vector of or an excuse for different forms of oppression. The readings encompass but are not limited to the use of sound as direct inflicted violence, but also inquires the use of rhythm, noise, pitch, and timbre in colonial/modern accounts of violence, historical and contemporary forms of sonic surveillance, and the possible articulations of sonic violence in representations of the future.

In this course we will investigate together different articulations of sound and violence, from historical to speculative perspectives. Starting from assessing the effects of sound in the body, to diverse definitions and discussions on forms of violence, we will together develop and engage with a body of knowledge-both in reading and listening-that articulates how sound can be either a direct vector of or an excuse for different forms of oppression. The readings encompass but are not limited to the use of sound as direct inflicted violence, but also inquires the use of rhythm, noise, pitch, and timbre in colonial/modern accounts of violence, historical and contemporary forms of sonic surveillance, and the possible articulations of sonic violence in representations of the future.

Music and Arts in Action 6(2)

‘Violence.’ Music and Arts in Action 6/2 (2018), 91-104: Special Issue: Keywords for Music in Peacebuilding; http://www.musicandartsinaction.net/index.php/maia/article/view/188; 7,515 words. The article provides a critical review of a wide cross-section of ethnomusicological research into violence, conflict, and music, leading to proposal of a new model for field researchers. The article begins with a contextualization of selected analytical positions, as offered by theorists of violence and conflict. The main body of the essay then assesses notable contributions from the already substantive ethnomusicological literature on music and violence. Music is not inherently peaceful: instead, it frames and commemorates conflict, making its impacts resound. Music is put to contrasting, and even conflicting, usages by those in, or recovering from, situations of hurt, hostility, or overt conflict. The article provides examples from research carried out in many parts of the world and in the shadow of numerous types of violence, from the re-imagining of a heroic individual to the systemic antagonisms of colonization or poverty, and from the recruitment of extremists to the self-regulation of inmates. Finally, a new model for applied ethnomusicological involvement in the area is briefly presented. Its component parts – naming, witnessing, intervention, and survival – are briefly explained and discussed, showing how an ethnomusicologically trained researcher can contribute to peacebuilding via musical research, listening, and participation. Keywords: Music; peacebuilding; ethnomusicology; conflict; sound

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Review | Music, Politics, and Violence - edited by Susan Fast and Kip Pegley Yona Stamatis

Music, Politics, and Violence. Susan Fast and Kip Pegley, eds. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012. [viii, 3208 p. ISBN 9780819573384. $35.00.] Bibliography, index.

{2} Music, Politics, and Violence (2012), a series of essays compiled by Susan Fast and Kip Pegley, is another important work for the advancement of general ethnomusicology theory about music and conflict. Its focused attention on a cross-cultural examination of music and violence within a political context is long overdue. Interestingly, in the introduction to the book, the editors position the volume as simultaneously a part of, but separate from, the growing tradition of music and conflict studies. “[Our] choice of the term violence in this volume, over the more commonly used conflict , is a deliberate departure from existing literature” (2). It is curious that the editors offer little explanation as to how the study of music and violence strays from the tradition of conflict studies.

{3} Perhaps the most important contribution of the book to ethnomusicology is its positioning of music securely within the broader theoretical discussion about violence and the nation state. In the extensive introduction as well as in the short essays that introduce each chapter, Fast and Pegley engage numerous important theoretical studies about violence including Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1921), Frantz Fanon’s Concerning Violence” (1963) and Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970). The editors propose that nation states are inherently violent as they “cut or divide up the world – through borders, passports, citizenship papers, counting and managing its populations through the science of the state itself (statistics)” (3). They conclude that since music is fundamentally intertwined in the nation state, it is riddled with violence and conflict.

{4} A central theoretical springboard for the book is Slavoj Žižek’s important theoretical examination of violence, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2009). The fundamental premise of this book is that subjective violence with a clearly identifiable source is actually the result of systemic violence inherent in less obvious economic and political systems. Žižek urges his readers to explore these hidden systemic causes of violence as a means of understanding the corruption of basic organizational structures such as contemporary versions of democracy. In Music, Politics, and Violence ,Fast and Pegley engage thoroughly with this notion of systemic violence though they maintain a more neutral political stance: they examine music as “a particularly rich medium for perpetuating symbolic violence, which, in turn, often becomes part of a much larger systemic oppression” (27). Fast and Pegley do disagree with Žižek’s approach to music and violence. They are particularly keen on undoing his assumption that music maintains an inherent transcendent quality somehow expressing ideas and emotions where words fail, and that it thus somehow lies outside of the realm of everyday social context: “We cannot use music to keep our reflections on violence at some respectful distance. Indeed, we must uncover precisely how music does its cultural work, which is what the essays in this volume seek to do” (12). Music, Politics, and Violence emphasizes the social construction of musical meaning, clearly explaining why this is fundamental to understanding the connections between music and violence in a political context.

{5} The nine essays that comprise Music, Politics, and Violence examine the dialogic relationship between music and violence in diverse chronological and geographical contexts. While such a book might have been held together solely by virtue of its basic subject matter, the editors skillfully bring together the numerous case studies with an extensive introductory chapter and carefully integrated theoretical prefaces to each essay. The clear organization of the introductory chapter and of the entire book around three critical theoretical trajectories makes clear to the reader the larger framework of the text. These three theoretical trajectories examine the dialogic relationship between violence and the nation state: Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of subjective, objective and systemic violences and their surrounding discourses of action and inaction; notions of belonging and/or “otherness” within nation-states, ideas incorporated by numerous scholars of violence including Jacques Derrida, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak; and examinations of public and private memorials as tools of justification for committing violence against the dead as discussed by Judith Butler and Sharon Rosenberg.

{6} The book is divided into three parts. Part I, titled “Objective and Subjective Violences,” examines the violent use of music during wartime. Particular attention is paid to the emotional and physical harm caused by music and to the role of music in defining categories of difference and ‘Otherness.’ The four chapters in Part I cover a broad range of conflicts including World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars and the invasion of Iraq. In Chapter One, “‘A Healing Draft for a Sick People’: War in the Pages of the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik , 1914–1918,” Nicholas Attfield examines one of the best known and longest running German-language music journals Neue Zeitschrift für Musik .The focus of the chapter is how political ideology played a surprisingly major role in guiding the journal contents and how the journal reflected subsequently the nation’s war effort. In Chapter Two, “The Afterlife of Neda Ukraden: Negotiating Space and Memory through Popular Music after the Fall of Yugoslavia, 1990–2008,” Catherine Baker discusses the case of Yugoslavian singer Neda Ukraden to demonstrate how musical biographies “become subject to recontextualization and reworking in conditions of ethno-political conflict” (60). Baker examines the erasure of multiple identities in what she characterizes as a violent process to create meaningful identities for newly-formed nation states. In Chapter Three, “Between the Lines: ‘Lili Marlene,’ Sexuality, and the Desert War,” Christina Baade examines the way in which the song “Lili Marlene” was enjoyed across enemy lines during World War II. Also, the author focuses upon three key wartime performers of the song, Lale Andersen, Anne Shelton and Marlene Dietrich, examining how they negotiated the ambivalent sexuality and sentiment of the song in live performance for soldiers and for other audiences. James Deaville traces the history and development of music integrated into televised American news broadcasts of war in Chapter Four, titled “The Changing Sounds of War: Television News Music and Armed Conflicts from Vietnam to Iraq.” He emphasizes a profound transformation in the sound and function of this music during the years between the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War, complicating the ways in which “music served as a primary agent for the transformation of the American living room into the site for war’s ‘virtual reality’” (106).  

{7} Part II, “Violence and Reconciliation,” is divided into three chapters that examine the diverse roles of music in processes of reconciliation during and after violent conflict. In Chapter Five, “Revivals and New Arrivals: Protest Song in the Al-Aqsa Intifada,” David A. McDonald writes about Palestinian expressive culture since the escalation of the al-Aqsa intifada in 2002. With special attention to various types of protest song, McDonald engages ethnographic analysis of individual performances and events to discover how Palestinian ideational strategies are embodied and performed from within various politico-nationalist frames.  In Chapter Six, “Pax Mevlana: Mevlevi Sufi Music and the Reconciliation of Islam and the West,” Victor A. Vicente explores the role of Sufi poetry, music and ritual in countering the “increasing ‘rift’ between the Muslim world and the West” (150). With a particular focus on the music of followers of Mevlana Rumi, Vicente examines moments of musical reconciliation as well as moments of increased tensions found in state-sponsored sema whirling shows, private zikr ceremonies, and popular music performances that incorporate Sufi themes and sounds. Chapter Seven, “Choreographing (against) Coup Culture: Reconciliation and Cross-Cultural Performance in the Fiji Islands,” explores the symbolic power of hybrid music performance in the Fiji Islands. Through an examination of two contrasting performances, one government sponsored and the other “grassroots” that incorporate the music of Indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians, ethnomusicologist Kevin C. Miller investigates music and dance as a critical site for nation making in the midst of ethnic tension and multiculturalist discourse on a local and national level.

{8} Part III, “Musical Memorializations of Violent Pasts,” investigates the ways in which music and musicians provide narratives of remembrance for violent histories. In Chapter Eight, “Complementary Discourses of Truth and Memory: The Peruvian Truth Commission and the Canción Social Ayacuchana,” Jonathan Ritter examines how recent violence against the state involving the Shining Path guerillas is woven into local and national historical narratives. Ritter presents a fascinating comparison between the official commemorative work of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and that of canción social ayacuchana musicians. While both served to commemorate violent histories through similar discourse, their divergences in content and style raise interesting questions about the nature and value of local and national narratives of remembrance in the public sphere. The final chapter in the book is “National Identity After National Socialism: German Receptions of the Holocaust Cantata, Jüdische Chronik (1960/1961)” by Amy Lynn Wlodarski. This chapter engages with broader questions of German memorializing of the holocaust and of how in the aftermath of the war, cultural memory was shared between the citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany and of the German Democratic Republic. Using the Holocaust Cantata Jüdische Chronik (1960/1961) as a case study, Wlodarski adeptly demonstrates how one composition can present divergent paths of remembrance and serve ulterior motives: Wlodarski posits that the cultural prominence of the Cantata in the German Democratic Republic was due less to sentiments of guilt or reconciliation and more to its use by the state as a pawn in Cold War politics.  

{9} Ethnomusicologist J. Martin Doughtry provides a thoughtful and inspiring Afterword to the book titled “From Voice to Violence and Back Again.” In this essay, Doughtry skillfully ties the nine essays of the book together through a philosophical engagement with the voice and with violence in which he challenges conventional understandings of their intersections: “[I]t is clear that we need a definition of violence that does not put it in opposition to voice, or to music” (257). Doughtry proposes that violence is not merely an activity engaged when the voice is no longer effective; it is an activity that incorporates the voice as systemically and subjectively as Fast and Pegley propose that violence and politics incorporate music.

{10} Music, Politics, and Violence makes a convincing case for the need for conflict studies framed specifically around music and violence and presents a tenable theoretical framework for doing so with cross-cultural applicability. Incorporating the work of a number of renowned scholars who examine theoretical implications of various social constructs including violence, national identity, and public and private space, editors Susan Fast and Kip Pegley successfully and organically integrate music into larger theoretical discussions about violence and the nation state. As such, they offer a fully integrated theoretical framework for examining music and violence from a cross-cultural perspective and emphasize the importance of considering the role of music in moments of systemic, subjective or objective violence. In the words of the editors, “music is never neutral, and we cannot turn a blind eye to how it is used for violent purposes in the realm of the political” (27).

Yona Stamatis is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and Associated Faculty of the Department of Sociology/Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Springfield.  

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. On Violence . New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970.

Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings , translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books, 1986 [1921].

Fanon, Frantz. “Concerning Violence.” In The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963.

Fast, Susan and Kip Pegly, eds. Music, Politics, and Violence . Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012.

O’Connell, John Morgan and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, eds. Music and Conflict . Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Pettan, Svanibor, ed. Music, Politics and War: Views from Croatia . Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 1998

Pieslak, Jonathan. Sound Targets . Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009.

Sweeney, Regina M. Singing Our Way to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music During the Great War . Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.

Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2006. 

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America Reckons With Racial Injustice

We insist: a century of black music against state violence.

Bobby Carter

Nate Chinen

Shana L. Redmond

Oliver Wang

Lil Baby performs during a Juneteenth voter registration rally on June 19, 2020 at Murphy Park Fairgrounds in Atlanta, Ga. One week earlier, he released "The Bigger Picture," a song protesting police brutality. Paras Griffin/Getty Images hide caption

Lil Baby performs during a Juneteenth voter registration rally on June 19, 2020 at Murphy Park Fairgrounds in Atlanta, Ga. One week earlier, he released "The Bigger Picture," a song protesting police brutality.

In the liner notes to John Coltrane's 1964 album Live At Birdland , Amiri Baraka (then writing as Le Roi Jones) contemplated the gift the saxophonist and his band offered with this music inspired by the horrific deaths of four Black girls in a Birmingham church bombing inspired by white supremacist hatred. "Listen," Baraka wrote. "What we're given is a slow delicate introspective sadness, almost hopelessness, except for Elvin [Jones], rising in the background like something out of nature... a fattening thunder, storm clouds or jungle war clouds. The whole is a frightening emotional portrait of some place, in these musicians' feelings." Baraka is describing the transformation in art of unfathomable pain, the human response to violence, into grace. Not transcendence or reconciliation – but grace, the honor of one presence, the ability to face injustice and remain whole and gain the energy to respond. That's what Coltrane created in his landmark piece, which you'll find in the middle of the list below, as part of a history that parallels American culture's development: the story of Black American music and its response to oppression, and particularly, state-sanctioned violence.

In recent weeks, musicians have responded to the crowning of the Black Lives Matter movement as a central force motivating social change by writing new anthems, a remarkable new chapter in protest music. Listeners have connected creative leaps like Lil Baby's "The Bigger Picture" and Terrace Martin's "Pig Feet" to the hip-hop classics that challenged police violence in the 1990s and beyond, and to singular historical works like Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit." The truth, though, is that the witnessing, coded or open warnings and encouragement and political dissent communicated through today's urgent soundtrack characterize the whole of Black American music. From the oldest shout songs that surfaced on the Georgia coast to the spirituals that were revered after Emancipation, shared choruses documented brutality and exhorted people to resist. Jazz and blues songs that, to white listeners, seemed like good fun for dancing were news reports to those who knew how to listen. The civil rights movement codified hymns of resistance, but the soul and funk that poured from radios paid mind to police harassment and other threats too, sometimes more pointedly. There was never a moment, in fact, when Black musicians put aside their commitment to telling the truth of how Black people have been wronged, and survived, and fought back.

The 50 songs discussed in this list often describe specific acts of police violence but they are not limited to that subject. Together they construct a kind of timeline of an ongoing movement within American music, stretching back more than a century. It is meant to be revelatory but not complete. The songs here take on some of the ugliest stories with which America — and, since it goes international, the world — has to reckon. They mourn the dead and fight for the living. Some are easy to identify as protest songs; others feel like a party. Many address police violence directly decades before that subject became a lodestone in hip hop. Some of these songs have been misinterpreted even when their messages are perfectly clear. All contribute to the history of Black people showing what America's official histories would hide in plain sight: the destructiveness of white supremacy and the uprisings against it that are not only organized and political, but personal. Like music itself, this spirit of resistance takes many shapes, but has never been silenced. As Baraka said of Coltrane, all you have to do is really listen.

Listen to the songs featured below on playlists via Spotify and Apple Music .

Billie Holiday in 1957. Bob Parent/Getty Images hide caption

1927–1963: Witness & Resistance

Sara Martin "Georgia Stockade Blues" (1927)

This Classic Blues from the period dominated by a woman named Ma and a number of Smiths is described by scholar Sarah Haley as, perhaps, "the definitive popular expression of the brutality of southern women's imprisonment." The turpentine farm that sets Martin's scene highlights one of the numerous industries that took advantage of a captive and overwhelmingly Black labor pool in order to build modern infrastructure. The listener knows nothing of why she's there; the only crime explicitly named is the crime of impoverishment ("They found me guilty without one dime") that has forced her into shackles in a place without respite or mercy. —Shana L. Redmond

Louis Armstrong "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead (You Rascal You)" (1931)

Perhaps you've seen the egregious Betty Boop cartoon, wherein a high-flying Louis Armstrong gets conflated with a tribal savage on an African safari. One year earlier, Armstrong and his band had been thrown in jail for running afoul of Jim Crow in Memphis, released on bail with the condition that they play a benefit concert. In a gesture often cited as Exhibit A for Armstrong's trickster reputation, that show featured a version of "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead (You Rascal You)" — which Pops dedicated to the Memphis Police Department. —Nate Chinen

Ethel Waters "Supper Time" (1933)

One might not expect to find a musical revue number in this list, let alone one authored by Irving Berlin. It is both the profundity of the story behind the music and the subtleties of its performance that make it a study in anti-Black state violence. Written for Waters, the song tells the story of a woman struggling to reconcile her daily routine with the news that her husband has been lynched and "ain't comin' home no more." Lynching was a pastime for some in the late 19th and 20th centuries that created its own rules of engagement. Citizens deputized themselves to enact what they considered to be justice, nearly always with the assistance, consent and collaboration of the local police who provided supplies, cover or intel for their mob murders. Families with children often attended, bringing lunches and posing for the photographs that became souvenirs along with bits of rope, tree or the victim's body parts. Waters' delivery of the song, full of painful lyrical articulation and gesture, shows the slow resignation to grief that the victim's loved ones experience. Contemporary lynchings may appear differently but her feeling still speaks volumes. —Shana L. Redmond

Billie Holiday "Strange Fruit" (1939)

Throughline

Strange fruit.

The song, like the singer, is iconic — and the two have been inextricable nearly from the start. One of the most heralded protest anthems on record, "Strange Fruit" paints a chilling portrait of a southern lynching, using language both lyrically formal and brutally direct. First published as a poem by Abel Meeropol, who'd been horrified by a photograph of a lynching in 1930, the song circulated widely in New York leftist circles before it found its way to Billie Holiday. Her early performances of "Strange Fruit," during an engagement at Café Society in Greenwich Village, were an instant sensation. ("She gave a startling, most dramatic and effective interpretation," recalled Meeropol, "which could jolt an audience out of its complacency anywhere.") Because her label, Columbia Records, balked at releasing such charged material, Holiday recorded it as a single for Commodore, a couple of weeks after she turned 24. Backed by Frankie Newton's Café Society Band, which sets the stage with a mournful fanfare, Holiday sings carefully, in a troubled calm. Her composure is critical, enacting both a plea to empathy and a confrontation with ugly truth: When she curls her voice around "the sudden smell of burning flesh," it's a moment made all the ghastlier for its intimacy. Subsequent versions of "Strange Fruit" — by everyone from Nina Simone to Jeff Buckley to Bettye LaVette — would mostly hew to a declarative mode. But Billie still haunts the song, as it haunted her. —Nate Chinen

Vera Hall "Another Man Done Gone" (1940)

The mid-20th century field recordings John and Alan Lomax collected became a cornerstone of the folk revival, but they are not infinitely mutable texts. Many reveal the maps and codes that Black rural Southerners created to survive the nation's ongoing betrayal. This one, shared by the father-and-son duo's favorite singer, Alabama native Vera Hall, bears witness to the destruction wrought by the carceral system built to contain Black Americans after emancipation. Hall's spare verses describe a man who – escapes? is killed? — while on a chain gang, one of the mobile prisons designed shortly after emancipation to contain and terrorize free Black people. John Lomax heard something in Hall's woeful tone, or perhaps in her unrecorded conversation, that prompted him to play "Another Man Done Gone" in 1937 at the 75th anniversary commemoration of the the Emancipation Proclamation's signing.

Later singers filled in the lines of Vera Hall's cipher. Johnny Cash, who heard the song interpolated with the voices of witnesses to lynchings on Alan Lomax's 1957 compilation Blues in the Mississippi Night , added the phrase "they hung him on a tree." Folk revival originator Odetta also made state violence explicit in her version, changing Hall's phrase "he killed another man" to the state-implicating "they killed another man." The song became an emblem of institutionalized violence, used by poets, novelist and activists to demonstrate brutality's dull repetitiveness. "There is all the pathos of the world poured into a few words," an Ebony magazine op-ed on the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. declared in 1968, invoking the song. "No one is exempt." —Ann Powers

Leadbelly "Duncan and Brady" (1947)

Outlaw stories far precede 1990s rap in American music, and often document resistance to police brutality. The novelist Cecil Brown, among other scholars, connects the most famous of all — that of Stagolee, the 19th-century father of Superfly and Ice-T's "Cop Killer" — to this lineage. The Stagolee ballads emerged alongside more explicit accounts of self-defense killings of police, including this one, relaying the story of a Black bartender defending himself against a St. Louis officer intending to "shoot somebody just to see him die." (The actual Brady case was more complicated, and led to the first time a Black lawyer argued a case in the Supreme Court, though Walter Moran Farmer failed to exonerate the possibly innocent Harry Duncan.) When Lead Belly incorporated the song into the repertoire he mostly performed for white audiences after John Lomax brought him to New York, he performed it with cutting sarcasm, apparently recognizing that this was a chance to note the real threat Black Americans faced amidst what some listeners took as tall tales. —Ann Powers

Louis Jordan "Saturday Night Fish Fry" (1949)

Social gatherings have historically offered more than just fun for Black Americans. The rent parties of Harlem, Midwestern "buffet flats" and fish fries of New Orleans provided ways ways to feed the community, pass the hat and gather rent, create informal business networks and, for artists, perfect the music that might eventually bring them fame. These temporary autonomous zones — which have, at times, welcomed the low-level illegal activities dubbed "vice," like sex work and drug use — are routinely disrupted by police, who often use deadly force. Songs like Fats Waller's "The Joint is Jumpin'" and Hot Lips Page's "They Raided the Joint" turn these dangerous encounters into comedy, as does this classic by Louis Jordan — a song some call the first rock and roll record. Jordan's account of a rollicking good time abruptly takes a turn when he's punched in the face by an officer, hustled into a "Black Maria" (or police wagon) and dumped in jail. Jordan's arch delivery belies the detailed account of the pain police induced in partygoers. In the song, Jordan is bailed out by his girlfriend; "Saturday Night Fish Fry" ruled the R&B charts for twelve weeks and made clear that however much the state tried to regulate the creative expression people generated a the parties, the joints would keep jumpin' anyway. —Ann Powers

Alex Foster & Michel Larue "Follow the Drinking Gourd" (1958)

Little is known about the group that released an album named after this song in 1958 — later reissued as American Negro Slave Songs — except that they were folklore collectors and they once rented the Greenwich Village club the Gate of Horn to perform this repertoire. The story of Black performers in the folk revival still begs to be thoroughly told. "Follow the Drinking Gourd" has been classified as a spiritual, but its meaning is very much of this world — it was meant to instruct people fleeing their enslavers to read constellations like the Big Dipper to map their way to freedom. Foster and LaRue's interpretation in modern and evocative, conjuring the night that offered some hope of protection on such perilous paths. Its menace keeps alive the original spirit of a song that today is often defused and redefined as children's music. —Ann Powers

Lord Commander "No Crime, No Law" (1959)

The 1950s launched a global Calypso craze, yet commercial success did not surrender the political content of this famed Caribbean musical genre. One of a number of Calypso Lords from Trinidad and Tobago, Lord Commander used the documentary nature of this dance music to tell the story of the fat cat colonial police officers, lawyers and magistrates who, he says, should be kissing the criminals who keep them well paid. —Shana L. Redmond

Abbey Lincoln & Max Roach "Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace" (1960)

"Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music," Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in 1964, for an essay commissioned by the Berlin Jazz Festival. He was referring to the music made by Black musicians in America, commonly known as jazz — and while he didn't name specific artists, it's no stretch to suggest Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln were rattling somewhere in his mind. We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite was released four years earlier, in 1960. Its cover shows a black-and-white image of a lunch-counter sit in. Featuring music by Roach and lyrics by Oscar Brown, Jr., it's a concept album in every sense, connecting the bitter legacy of American slavery with the push for freedom in South Africa. "Triptych: Prayer / Protest / Peace" is the album's striking centerpiece, a rolling tone poem with Lincoln's wordless vocals out front. In the first section, her incantatory moan evokes both a field holler and the cry of the church; during the final stretch, she sounds spent and becalmed. But the crux of the matter is "Protest," in which Roach rains a hail of blows on his snare and toms while Lincoln screams and howls: a cathartic, unsparing embodiment of righteous fury. Sixty years later, it rages on. —Nate Chinen

John Coltrane "Alabama" (1963)

On Sept. 15, 1963, four young Black girls were killed by a bomb at a Baptist church in Birmingham, Ala. Two months later, saxophonist John Coltrane recorded "Alabama," whose dirge-like cadence was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King's oration at the girls' funeral service. The soft rumble of McCoy Tyner's piano and the ceremonial thrum of Elvin Jones' toms deepen the gravity of a song that frames protest in terms of a human toll, devastating and irretrievable. —Nate Chinen

Stevie Wonder in 1975. Evening Standard/Getty Images hide caption

1967–1985: Black Power

The Equals "Police on My Back" (1967)

After years of effort by Black immigrants in England to rebuild the nation post-World War II, British policy makers in the 1950s and 1960s thanked them with immigration restriction laws as well as housing and employment discrimination, all of which was enforced with assistance from police. The repetitive pop melody of "Police on My Back" mirrors the repetition of police harassment experienced by the singer Eddy Grant, himself an immigrant from Guyana. The passive voice statement that "there was a shooting" offers an oblique reference but no clear justification for the police pursuit that sends him on a sprint via street and railway every day of the week. —Shana L. Redmond

The Lumpen "No More" (1970)

The Lumpen was a little-known soul/funk band formed amongst active Black Panther Party members. Inspired by the example of fellow Party member Elaine Brown, who recorded the 1969 protest album Seize The Time , The Lumpen meant to "use popular forms of music that the community could relate to and politicize it so it would function as another weapon in the struggle for liberation." The Black Panthers were founded with a 10 point program, one of which was "an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people" and this core tenet is at the heart of the group's sole single. One side, "Free Bobby Now," was a contemporary funk tune devoted to Party co-founder Bobby Seale, at the time imprisoned on contempt charges and a cause celebre for activists around the world. The other side, "No More," was performed in a more traditional spiritual style, with lyrics written by Lumpen member Bill Calhoun decrying state oppression "from Watts to Brownsville" but envisioning a future free of "pigs on our streets and poverty." —Oliver Wang

Marvin Gaye "Inner City Blues" & "What's Going On" (1971)

Despite the well-publicized examples of police violence against the Black community through the '60s and early '70s, a star of Marvin Gaye's stature could ill risk writing an entire song dedicated to the topic. However, on his best-selling, era-defining What's Going On, from 1971, Gaye still found ways to call out the police on two of the LP's biggest hits. On "Inner City Blues," "trigger happy policing" is one of the dozens of laments he lists, alongside rising crime rates and falling wages. Likewise on the title track, his line "picket lines and picket signs / don't punish me with brutality," can't be read as anything but a commentary on how civil rights-era law enforcement often responded to nonviolent protests with swinging batons or worse. —Oliver Wang

Gil Scott-Heron "No Knock" (1972)

This "no knockin', head-rockin', inter-shockin'" poem by the "Godfather of rap" speaks as clearly and as devastatingly today as on the date of its release. No-knock warrants permit law enforcement officers to forcibly enter a property without announcement. A no-knock warrant was issued for the home of Breonna Taylor, a Louisville woman killed in her home by police on March 13, 2020. A no-knock warrant was served on the home in which 7-year old Aiyana Stanley-Jones slept in the minutes before her 2010 murder by a Detroit police officer. There was also Kathryn Johnston in Atlanta; before her Alberta Spruill in New York. And as Scott-Heron says, the cops "no knocked on [his] brother," the revolutionary and Chicago Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, assassinating him in 1969. —Shana L. Redmond

Archie Shepp "Attica Blues" (1972)

Several months after the Attica Prison uprising met its infamous and bloody end, saxophonist Archie Shepp made Attica Blues — a teeming, unwieldy concept album bound by searing moral clarity. Its strength assumes many forms, but none more arresting than the title track, a gnarly funk invocation with urgent singing by Carl Hall. "I got a feeling that something ain't going right!" he cries. "And I'm worried 'bout the human soul!" —Nate Chinen

Stevie Wonder "Living For The City" (1973)

In her book about black radicalism in Oakland, named after this 1973 epic, historian Donna Jean Murch quotes Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton, who himself was imprisoned and then exonerated of shooting a police officer in 1967, about the police presence in his city: "The police ... were really the government." Wonder's song draws that bottom line. It's a terrifying inversion of the all-American Horatio Alger story, in which an impoverished boy from "hard time Mississippi" heads to the urban mecca to make something of himself. Instead, as the song's climactic spoken-word interlude portrays, he's quickly set up for a petty crime and nabbed by law enforcement. Anyone who's seen the clusters of blue uniforms on any major city's downtown street corners may get a chill from the rapidity in which our hero becomes a victim of circumstance — and of racism. The words that greet Wonder's protagonist upon arrest — "get in that cell, N*****" – became a key sample in hip-hop, employed by artists from Public Enemy to Slick Rick. —Ann Powers

War "Me and Baby Brother" (1973)

As with other popular soul-era artists such as Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the multiracial Long Beach group War found ways to subtly speak on police brutality. The snappy funk track "Me and Baby Brother," featured on the group's 1973 LP Deliver the Word , is ostensibly about reminiscing on days spent hanging with "baby brother" on street corners and "drinking funky wine" until the song hits the bridge and a chilling line appears: "hang on, baby brother / Oh, they call it law and order." The main hook — "come back baby brother" — returns immediately, but it's easy to mishear it as "shot my baby brother." Years later, on War co-founder Lonnie Jordan's 2007 album War Stories , the version of "Baby Brother" is updated and Jordan now sings, explicitly: "They shot my baby brother, back in 1971 with bombs and guns, and they called it law and order." —Oliver Wang

Sweet Honey in the Rock "Joanne Little" (1976)

Beginning with the defiant and repeated line, "Who is this girl and what is she to you," this song tells the story of Joan (pronounced Jo-ann) Little, a Black woman who, while being held in a North Carolina men's jail in 1974, murdered a guard in self-defense against sexual assault. Her eventual trial drew the attention of prison abolitionists and women's and civil rights organizations, as well as the high-profile support of Angela Y. Davis. Led by the voice of movement artist Bernice Johnson Reagon, the song by Black women's a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock gives Little full dimension and answers the recurring question by naming her our sister, mama, lover and "the woman who's gonna carry your child." —Shana L. Redmond

Fela Kuti "Sorrow, Tears & Blood" (1977)

In 1977, Fela Kuti's creative compound, Kalakuta Republic, was raided and burned to the ground by Nigerian military in retaliation for his political beliefs and public critiques of the government and its military. Kuti, his band and guests were beaten, and his mother thrown from a window, which caused fatal injuries. Instead of silence, he returned with his band Africa 70 to the studio and in 1977 produced a series of albums, including Sorrow Tears and Blood , which, true to form, announces the police and military as the murderers who create a culture of fear and confusion that forces people to "scatter scatter." —Shana L. Redmond

Rick James "Mr. Policeman" (1981)

Funk popularizer James was notorious for being a self-proclaimed Superfreak, and his hits remain party mix staples. But his most successful album – and its cover — showed that he could be a protest artist, too. Inspired by the police shooting of an unarmed friend in his native Buffalo, James wrote a direct and incendiary lyric: "It's a shame, it's a disgrace, why every time you show your face somebody dies, man." He set it to a reggae rhythm in tribute to the 1972 Jamaican film classic The Harder They Come , in which Jimmy Cliff plays a social outsider eventually killed by police. And he styled the iconic Street Songs cover to bring the song to visual life: On the front, James leans against a streetlight as two women in the background struggle in handcuffs, led away by a shadowy lieutenant. On the back cover he's being frisked by the same officer. This twist on the ubiquitous early-1970s romanticization of the pimp in blaxploitation films and music shows that no matter how freaky, an urban hustler could not escape routine police harassment. —Ann Powers

Nina Simone "I Was Just A Stupid Dog To Them" (1982)

The obvious choice would be "Mississippi Goddam," which responds to the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi, among other outrages during the thick of the civil rights movement. But Nina Simone held her anger close in the years to come, well after expatriating to Europe. On this misleadingly jaunty tune, a staple of her repertoire in the '80s, she recalls the death of Bob Marley and the dehumanizing treatment that still plagued her, along with a vow: "Now everything will change." —Nate Chinen

McIntosh County Shouters "Wade the Water to My Knees" (1983)

It's not an exaggeration to say that the stories of violence against Black people in America, preserved in music, are as old as the nation itself. This song is a variant of the familiar spiritual "Wade in the Water," but its roots run even deeper, into the silty banks of Dunbar Creek at St. Simons Island, Ga. There, in 1803, a group of West Africans transported in the Middle Passage revolted at the end of their journey; both history and legend assert that they drowned themselves rather than remain captive. Such narratives were often buried between the lines of the spirituals and shout songs that form the foundation of African-American music. In the past half-century, musical preservationists like Georgia Sea Islands group have revived the original meanings of these songs, reminding listeners that their messages are not piously universal, but hauntingly particular. —Ann Powers

Wynton Marsalis "Black Codes" (1985)

Trumpeter-composer Wynton Marsalis was not yet the institutional figurehead he'd become when he made Black Codes (From the Underground) in 1985, featuring his brother Branford on saxophone along with a fearsome rhythm section. The album's title invokes laws in the postbellum South that prevented former slaves from exercising their freedoms. Wynton's slashing horn, and the band's muscular prowess, stand united in proud rebuke. —Nate Chinen

Lauryn Hill in 2001. Scott Gries/Getty Images hide caption

1985–2012: Policing & Protest

Toddy Tee "Batterram" (1985)

Of the long list of decisions made by the LAPD during the reign of now-disgraced former chief Daryl Gates, few were as notorious — and embarrassing — as their construction of a six-ton tank tipped with a 14-foot battering ram. The idea was that the vehicle, officially dubbed a "batterrram," could be used in hostage situations or drug raids by busting through building walls; the 2015 film Straight Outta Compton dramatizes this in its opening scene. Produced by soul legend Leon Haywood, the 1985 single, "Batterram," features Compton rapper Toddy Tee warning listeners, "the Chief of Police says he just might / flatten out every house he sees on sight." Compared with later songs by L.A. rappers, "Batterram" is almost playful in tone, but it was an early example of local artists reacting to overuse of force by the LAPD. After only a handful of deployments, a cavalcade of lawsuits and civic outrage forced Gates to mothball the assault vehicle. —Oliver Wang

N.W.A. "F*** Tha Police" (1988)

Arguably the most blatant protest song in hip-hop, 1988's "F*** Tha Police" left absolutely nothing to the imagination and spoke bluntly to the fractured police/community relations of inner-city Los Angeles. The song not only struck a nerve with countless Black youth in cities nationwide, it caught the attention of the FBI, whose displeasure with the record was documented and sent to the group's record label. Unfortunately, the song's relevance hasn't subdued; over the years it has been remade and re-recorded many times over, most recently by rapper YG during this year's protest. —Bobby Carter

Tracy Chapman "Across the Lines" (1988)

The shooting of Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged through a Georgia subdivision brought into stark relief the threats facing Black Americans when they venture into neighborhoods where they are perceived as strangers. Segregation is one of the most powerful state-imposed reinforcements of American racism, living on informally (and, sometimes, illegally) long after it was supposedly abolished by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Tracy Chapman, born poor in Cleveland in 1965, paid witness as a child to the ways in which poorly enforced integration led to violence against Black citizens in their own neighborhoods. Chapman, whose universe expanded when she received a scholarship to a Connecticut boarding school, brought her political perspective and personal experience of being bullied as a child to her work as a rare Black singer-songwriter in the informally segregated folk-rock scene of the 1990s. This song cries out for all lines to be eradicated even as it contends with the reality that most Americans choose sides, forcing others to run for their lives. —Ann Powers

Public Enemy "Anti-N***** Machine" (1990)

New York's Public Enemy first introduced the phrase "anti-n***** machine" on its 1988 song "Black Steel In the Hour of Chaos," which was a modern-day "Attica Blues," speaking on the American prison system. On the 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet , Chuck D and his group turned the phrase into a short, 90 second song where the "machine" represents the government and justice systems, implicating policy makers and police alike. That said, Chuck's most direct barbs are aimed at law enforcement, especially in the song's second verse: "went to Cali, a rally was for a brother's death. It was the fuzz who shot him and not the bloods or cuzz." It was a prescient line, predicting the L.A. gang truce of 1992. On the album, "Anti-N***** Machine" led directly into the next song, "Burn Hollywood Burn," thus connecting anti-Black racism in law enforcement with racist imagery in popular media. —Oliver Wang

Main Source "Just a Friendly Game of Baseball" (1991)

Lead by Queens rapper/producer Large Professor, Main Source turned in one of the more creative early-'90s rap songs about police violence by comparing it to the national pastime: "To the cops, shooting brothers is like playing baseball, and they're never in a slump. I guess when they shoot up a crew, it's a grand slam, and when it's one, it's a home run." The group squeezes as much as they can from the analogy over three verses, with corrupt government officials being called umpires and the dugout a metaphor for the graves that victims were sent to after being "gunned down" by an outfielder with a badge and firearm. The song, originally released on the group's 1991 Breaking Atoms LP, made such an impression that its remix was one of the only songs by an East Coast artist included on the otherwise West Coast-centric Boyz n the Hood soundtrack. —Oliver Wang

Body Count "Cop Killer" (1992)

Few songs have sparked as much controversy as "Cop Killer," released on the self-titled debut by the rap/rock group Body Count in the spring of 1992. Originally written in 1990, "Cop Killer" found the group's lead, L.A. rapper Ice-T, taking a preemptive "kill or be killed" approach to police violence: "Cop killer, better you than me. Cop killer, f*** police brutality." The song mentioned both LAPD chief Daryl Gates and beating victim Rodney King; its release came barely a month before the King verdict would ignite protests and riots across the U.S.

Police associations, already reeling from criticism, attempted to deflect attention onto "Cop Killer" instead, arguing that its threats to "dust some cops off" put police lives in danger. They demanded that parent company Time Warner retract the Warner Music release and pressured stores to remove it from shelves. The protest went all the way up to the White House, with both Vice President Dan Quayle and President George H.W. Bush castigating the song as well. "Cop Killer" ignited a fierce free speech debate around censorship and though Warner Bros. refused to pull the album, in the end, Ice T made the decision to remove the song from future versions of the album and he eventually broke from the label out of disappointment with Time Warner's handling of the situation. —Oliver Wang

Rage Against The Machine "Killing In the Name" (1992)

"Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses," snarled Zack de la Rocha in the first verse of this oracular explosion from L.A. rock band Rage Against the Machine. The line laid bare a long historical connection between law enforcement and racist hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan — more recently the subject of lengthy FBI investigations. And it announced a new leader in political rock. Radical and unafraid of censure, bursting forth in the moment when the riots following Rodney King's assault by police had ripped Los Angeles apart, Rage brought the confrontational spirit of both punk and hip-hop to a genre that had grown decadent. The band was denounced as a "hate group" by some but inspired a new generation to scream its protest. —Ann Powers

Ice Cube "Who Got the Camera" (1992)

Ice Cube stands as one of the one of architects of hip-hop protest, and has always delivered a message from the perspective of the oppressed. "Who Got The Camera" rings disturbingly relevant, thanks to the sheer volume of police brutality incidents that have been caught on film over the past few years. —Bobby Carter

KRS-One "Sound of da Police" (1993)

While the term "racial profiling" wasn't as prevalent in 1993 as it is today, KRS-One's "Sound of da Police" is a textbook breakdown of what it means to be targeted by law enforcement as Black person in America. "The Teacha" masterfully deciphers this relationship, likening it to that of the slave and the overseer in his signature Jamaican patois. —Bobby Carter

Queen Latifah "Just Another Day..." (1993)

A love song to the New Jersey neighborhoods that raised her, "Just Another Day..." reveals a Queen without her title as she's "just plain old Dana today." Similar to the scenes of Black life popularized in the late 1980s and 1990s by filmmakers Spike Lee and John Singleton, Latifah focusses on street-level interactions and relationships. In them she sees the complicated beauty of her 'hood where, in spite of daily witnessing violence at the hands of neighbors and police, she can also sing and play. —Shana L. Redmond

Michael Jackson "They Don't Care About Us" (1996)

Released on Jackson's HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book 1 , "They Don't Care About Us" was a rare unabashed protest song from the King of Pop, albeit a muddled one. On it, Jackson tries to compare (and conflate) his own legal woes, dealing with accusations and investigations of alleged pedophilia, with a larger commentary on human rights struggles happening globally. "I am the victim of police brutality, now, I'm tired of being the victim of hate," he sings and on one of the two Spike Lee-directed music videos made for the song, we see images of the Rodney King beating cut into a video mostly set inside a prison where Jackson is dressed in county blues. The other video, shot in a Rio de Janeiro favela, doesn't reference the prison system but it does include several pointed scenes of Jackson standing defiantly next to uniformed Brazilian police officers. While some previous songs, most notably "Black Or White," addressed race, "They Don't Care About Us" was Jackson's most strident song about racism. It was a stark departure from his chart-topping pop persona to hear him sing lines such as, "Black male, blackmail, throw the brother in jail." Ironically, the song's underlying anti-racism message was undermined by criticism that some of his lyrics —"Jew me, sue me, everybody do me" — were anti-Semitic. Jackson issued several public apologies in response. —Oliver Wang

Lauryn Hill "Forgive Them Father" (1998)

Songs are open-ended things, their meanings adaptable to new historical moments, making necessary responses. Hill wrote this song as an invocation of Bob Marley's spirit, interpolating the Wailers' "Concrete Jungle" into her litany of call-outs that range from thoughtless men to capitalism itself. In recent years, however, she has made the message more pointed by extending the song's ending in her performances and showing a montage of phone- and videocamera- captured incidents of police brutality as she sings. The song becomes a form of sanctified dissent, a cry for reconciliation and reparations, communicating compassion even as it unwaveringly seeks justice. —Ann Powers

Hip Hop For Respect " A Tree Never Grown " (2000)

In February of 1999, four plain-clothed NYPD officers in the Bronx shot and killed Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea, mistaking his wallet for a gun. Infamously, they fired 41 shots at Diallo — that number became a shorthand for the excesses of police force. Diallo's killing and the subsequent acquittal of all four officers drew widespread condemnation and sparked dozens of musical response, including a project from the 41 rappers who comprised the Hip Hop For Respect project, assembled by Mos Def and Talib Kweli. Their 2000 EP included "A Tree Never Grows," its title a mournful commentary on what was lost with Diallo's death. On the song's hook, Mos Def sings of Diallo's mother: "As the coffin had closed, committed to the earth below, first seed she had sewn, would be a tree never grown." —Oliver Wang

Gregory Porter "1960 What?" (2010)

Led and grounded by upright bass, Porter's deceptively powerful question—"1960 What?"—refuses the narrative of exceptional or isolated incidences of violence as he sings into one deadly genealogy the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the murder by police of a young man carrying "three pieces of black licorice." —Shana L. Redmond

Esperanza Spalding "Land of the Free" (2012)

As a bassist and composer, Esperanza Spalding makes a virtue out of virtuosity; as a singer-songwriter, she often bends her ebullience toward a pointed aim. "Land of the Free," a secular hymn from her 2012 album Radio Music Society , tells the tale of Cornelius Dupree, Jr., who spent 30 years imprisoned on a wrongful charge. From this particular miscarriage of justice, she draws a circle wide enough to implicate our entire society. The song ends with a pause where you'd expect to hear the word "free," followed by the slamming of a cell door. —Nate Chinen

Ambrose Akinmusire in 2011. Eva Hambach/Getty Images hide caption

2014–2020: Black Lives Matter

Vince Staples "Hands Up" (2014)

About a month after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Vince Staples released "Hands Up," which became a rallying cry for the protests that followed. Over a manic instrumental, the Long Beach rapper delivers furious bars, mostly focused on the corruption within various Los Angeles law enforcement divisions. The parallels between his personal experiences and the ones reported across the globe are undeniable. —Bobby Carter

Ambrose Akinmusire "Rollcall for Those Absent" (2014)

The haunting drone of a Mellotron has a near-liturgical quality as it supports the voice of a young child reading the names of dozens of men, women and children murdered by police and vigilantes. More than once, the voice lingers in repetition of the name Trayvon Martin, the Black teenager whose 2012 murder by a neighborhood watch coordinator in Florida elicited widespread outrage, public memorials and a personal statement from President Obama. —Shana L. Redmond

Kendrick Lamar "The Blacker the Berry" (2015)

Not long after the release of To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015, Lamar's "Alright" was adopted as a protest chant across the U.S., beginning in Cleveland among activists rallying against the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by officer Timothy Loehmann. However, the song's more incendiary sibling was "The Blacker the Berry," which found Lamar defiantly excoriating anti-Blackness in all its forms: "This plot is bigger than me: It's generational hatred, it's genocism." The rapper had previously taken heat for his views on the role of personal accountability in confronting violence within Black communities. Though most of "The Blacker the Berry" is directed at white supremacy, his last lines reignited the debate: "So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street / When gang-banging make me kill a n**** blacker than me?" —Oliver Wang

Georgia Anne Muldrow "Blam" (2018)

Even under assault, generations of oppressed people have done much more than simply survive, or even fight back. They have flourished, nurturing the roots that others would upend. The funky, hypnotically soulful music of Georgia Anne Muldrow evokes the beloved neighborhoods, community circles and cultural hubs that many commenters celebrate when they say the phrase, "I love us ." This song is a call to the battlefield of an "ancient war" – the same one that took out Tulsa's Greenwood district in 1921, put an interstate through North Nashville in 1968 and bombed Philadelphia's Cobbs Creek neighborhood in 1985. Muldrow's groove is steady, the mood she raises coolly defiant, as she leads the chorus: "Before I be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave." —Ann Powers

Jorja Smith "Blue Lights" (2018)

Jorja Smith: Tiny Desk Concert

Before she had even released an LP, the British singer-songwriter took a stand with "Blue Lights." The song is an ode to the Black men of her hometown in the West Midlands of England, who fear the mere sight of those lights in the city. —Bobby Carter

Our Native Daughters "Mama's Cryin' Long" (2018)

Today's movement seemed to erupt from the streets themselves, propelled by the rapid-fire distribution of horrifying images across social media. Yet diligent work by artists, journalists and historians has also played a role in shifting American consciousness. The novels of Colson Whitehead and Jesmyn Ward, the films of Steve McQueen and Ava DuVernay, the music of Dom Flemons and Cecile McLorin Salvant, and the massive, historically grounded 1619 Project led by Nikole Hannah-Jones at The New York Times – as well as Lin-Manuel Miranda's smash hit musical Hamilton – have all helped make the buried or overlooked lineage of resistance feel visceral. Rhiannon Giddens has been a leader in these endeavors. On her own albums and with the quartet Our Native Daughters, Giddens has opened herself fearlessly to be inhabited by the stricken spirits of the women who suffered and fought against their own objectification and confinement on the block, in the fields and on the run throughout America. This harrowing song employing call and response and the rhythms of the diaspora is a powerful example — Giddens sings as a child witnessing her mother's personal revolt against a rapacious enslaver, and that mother's death. Heartbreakingly beautiful work like this motivates and sustains. —Ann Powers

Terri Lyne Carrington & Social Science feat. Malcolm Jamal Warner "Bells (Ring Loudly)" (2019)

Terri Lyne Carrington + Social Science: Tiny Desk Concert

Social Science, the improvising collective fronted by drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, tackled a welter of issues on its 2019 album Waiting Game . The most visceral of them inspired this track, composed in the wake of Philando Castile's killing by a police officer during a traffic stop in 2016. Debo Ray sings the heartbreaking chorus, while Malcolm-Jamal Warner intones an indictment: "Blue lives try to play Picasso / By splattering red on canvases of brown skin / As if Black lives mattering is a game to them / And not a basic right within." —Nate Chinen

Rapsody "Nina" (2019)

Featured on the 2019 album Eve , "Nina" opens with the piercing voice of namesake Nina Simone, singing her rendition of "Strange Fruit." Rapsody's opening line is a reminder of the specter of violence that haunts Black lives: "Emit light, rap, or Emmett Till," referring to the 14-year-old lynched in Mississippi in 1955. However, "Nina" is ultimately a song about resistance in the face of turmoil, especially by Black women: "Failed to kill me, it's still me, woke up singing Shirley Murdock / As we lay these edges down, brown women, we so perfect." —Oliver Wang

Terrace Martin "Pig Feet" (2020)

One of the first songs to emerge in the wake of national protests after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, "Pig Feet" is a furious, frenetic composition by jazz artist Terrace Martin that features rappers Denzel Curry and Daylyt and saxophonist Kamasi Washington, plus cameos from G Perico and Britney Thomas. Curry opens his verse pulling no punches: "Helicopters over my balcony / If the police can't harass, they wanna smoke every ounce of me." The music video is no less impactful, built from footage of recent protests and violent police responses against them. The song itself lasts roughly three minutes, but the remainder of the nearly five minute video is given over to a slow, sickening crawl of hundreds of names of Black people killed by the police. This portion passes in silence, yet it speaks with a deafening volume. —Oliver Wang

Lil Baby "The Bigger Picture" (2020)

All Songs Considered

Heat check: bigger picture.

Lil Baby invites us into his consciousness and vividly illustrates the complexities of what it means to be a young Black man in America in 2020. The Atlanta MC struggles with fear for his life, his family and his community at the hands of law enforcement, but brilliantly incorporates messages of hope and resilience. It's as powerful a protest song as any we've heard in decades past. —Bobby Carter

Leon Bridges "Sweeter" (2020)

Sweet is not the word most would use to describe our contemporary moment, but for soul singer Bridges, it's a future worth hoping for. Written in 2019, "Sweeter" feels just as revelatory in 2020, linking the past and present in tragic continuity. With Terrace Martin lending his talents on saxophone, Bridges sings of the terrors of persistent violence against Black communities who, nonetheless, extend care to one another through tears and song. —Shana L. Redmond

Listen To A Century Of Black Music Against State Violence

• Leon Bridges
• Terri Lyne Carrington
• Lauryn Hill
• Ambrose Akinmusire
• Kendrick Lamar
• Gregory Porter
• Vince Staples
• Tracy Chapman
• Terrace Martin
• Jorja Smith
• Our Native Daughters
• Archie Shepp
• Wynton Marsalis
• Billie Holiday
• Georgia Anne Muldrow
• Stevie Wonder
• Louis Armstrong
• Queen Latifah
• John Coltrane
• Abbey Lincoln
• Esperanza Spalding
• Nina Simone
• Sweet Honey In The Rock
• Public Enemy
• Marvin Gaye
• Michael Jackson
• Gil Scott-Heron

Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Rap Music — The Evolution of Rap Music in the World

The Influence of Rap Music on Society: Glorification of Drugs, Violence, and Misogyny

• Categories: Hip Hop Rap Music

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Published: Jan 29, 2019

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Introduction, problematic issues in rap music, violence and crime.

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I Knew Diddy for Years. What I Now Remember Haunts Me.

Looking back on my life as a woman in the music industry, I’m unsettled by the inescapable sexism perpetrated by Sean Combs and others.

Credit... Artwork by David Samuel Stern

Supported by

By Danyel Smith

• Published July 12, 2024 Updated July 14, 2024, 3:19 p.m. ET

A thing happened between Sean Combs and me. Unlike what he has been accused of over the last eight months, what occurred between us was not sexual. It was professional — demonstrative of the way dynamic and domineering men moved in our heyday. Combs and I worked together a lot. Competed, in our way. So often I thought I came out on top. I was mistaken. I had reason to fear for my life. What happened was insidious. It broke my brain. I forgot the worst of it for 27 years.

Listen to this article, read by Janina Edwards

It was July 1997. In the fading smoke of the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., I was named editor in chief of a music magazine called Vibe. Started by Quincy Jones and Time Inc. in 1992, the magazine chronicled Black music and culture with rigor and beauty, 10 issues a year, for an audience that was relentlessly underserved. When I took over, we thought hip-hop might have died with our heroes, and we were determined not only to keep it alive but also to give it the cultural credit it was due.

Hip-hop was both in mourning and in marketing meetings. Combs, Biggie’s creative partner and label boss, was the personification of this dichotomy. His Bad Boy Records was having a $100 million year — much due to the work of Biggie and Mase, as well as Combs’s own debut album, “No Way Out,” which was anchored by the blockbuster Biggie tribute “I’ll Be Missing You” featuring Faith Evans. Other singles, “It’s All About the Benjamins” and “Been Around the World,” functioned as a score for hip-hop’s megawatt moment — its commercial evolution and international expansion. (“No Way Out” would go on to sell over seven million copies.) So I wanted Combs on the cover of Vibe’s December 1997/January 1998 double issue. And I wanted him to wear white feathered wings.

My point of reference was the poster for “Heaven Can Wait,” a 1978 film starring Warren Beatty. The movie is about a quarterback who dies before his time and is reincarnated as an idiosyncratic and callous billionaire. Vibe’s working cover line for Sacha Jenkins’s article was “The Good, the Bad and the Puffy.” Not so elegant, but it would work if the fashion director Emil Wilbekin and I got Combs (then known as Puffy, or Puff Daddy) to put on the angel wings. And if we also got a shot that looked even slightly mischievous, we could do a split run of the cover — one with heavenly signifiers and another with hellish ones. Possible cover line: “Bad Boy, Bad Boy, Whatcha Gonna Do?”

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Indigenous leaders hope music festival events will prevent family, domestic violence in Kununurra

Kununurra has routinely recorded some of the highest rates of family and domestic violence in Western Australia.

The local women's shelter organised a free, no-alcohol music festival that has been embraced by residents.

What's next? 

Residents hope the fresh approach will help build stronger families and create positive environments for children.

A local rock band belts out originals and covers as an elder busts out dance moves in front of her grinning friends.

Children laugh and play as their parents relax in camping chairs and put on a picnic spread.

The one-day music festival might seem like a fun, carefree community event but for Indigenous groups and traditional owners in Kununurra, 3,000 kilometres north of Perth by road, it has a serious purpose.

Miriwoong woman Margaret Moore said she was heartened to see families and children having fun, especially those she knew lived in tough circumstances. 

"It's a big thing. It touches my heart," she said.

Petina Pitt-Lancaster, who manages a women's shelter that organised the alcohol-free Badayijeng Ninggoowoong-woorr Festival said the aim of the event was to encourage families into a positive social environment.

"Over the years everything is about crisis intervention, crisis driven, crisis funding," she said.

"There's a lot of work done around separation and court systems and sending people to jail. We're trying to get in the space before that happens.

"We want people to go home tonight with their family with smiles on their faces and feeling really good about themselves."

Violence crisis

Police statistics indicate Kununurra recorded just over 930 domestic assaults last year, more than WA's largest regional city Bunbury, despite having just 6 per cent of its population.

About a third of people in the East Kimberley hub are Indigenous, with social issues such as overcrowding, poor health outcomes, and youth crime linked to intergenerational trauma being well documented.

The escalating violence has resulted in the deaths of a number of young women.

Late last year, Warrick Walkerbear was sentenced to 11 months in jail for killing his partner , known culturally as Ms Waterloo or NW, in the town and dumping her body in bushland.

Other cases continue to work their way through the court system.

Every year Indigenous leaders publicly gather and reflect on the pain caused by the incidents and some people who have experienced violence share their stories.

Just the beginning

Rozanne Bilminga is from Mirima Indigenous community on the town's fringe.

The Miriwoong Gajerrong woman, also known as Darrgeyi, attended the music festival with her family and supported the positive approach to tackling an issue that had caused much heartbreak.

"This is just the beginning. It would be good to have every year," she said.

"Tonight you can see a lot of kids running around a lot of adults, a mix you know, white and black. Good to see people enjoying themselves."

Magistrate vents concerns

Indigenous leaders hope such events also empower victims to use programs and the justice system to help put themselves on a better path.

Kununurra Magistrates Court sits for about a dozen days every month, and cases from the town can also be heard by video link when required.

When the ABC attended on June 28, at least 12 matters involved domestic violence.

Magistrate Colin Roberts expressed his frustration at the system.

He observed a high prevalence of alleged offenders denying the charges against them, therefore pushing cases to trial, and victims often not attending court to give evidence.

"It's incredible the amount of matters set down for a hearing, and complainants don't turn up, no wonder they plead not guilty," Mr Roberts said.

"Something should be done about it."

Sentencing a man who kicked his partner in the head, Mr Roberts noted the lower penalty that came with a guilty plea.

"I'm giving you a good credit, given just about everyone else pleads not guilty to assaulting their female partners," Mr Roberts said.

His concerns have been supported by others who work in the justice system, who told the ABC pressure from perpetrators' families and the sheer length of court processes discouraged victims.

Preventing violence before it happens

Margaret Moore said the court system was intimidating for people suffering violence.

"They tend not to go to court to lock their partners up for a long time," she said.

"There's a lot of us around who knows family members who are involved with DV, and I'm one of those people. It's horrible."

Petina Pitt-Lancaster said she hoped a fresh preventative approach would tackle the issue at the source.

"The court system isn't an easy avenue for everybody, especially our women," she said.

"We are focusing these events on a space where people aren't getting charged and there's no violence. So we are trying to get in before that stuff happens."

Brianna Ozies, who grew up in the Kimberley town of Derby, was also at the festival.

She said she was undertaking a medical placement in Kununurra as part of her training to become a doctor.

The Djugan woman said she had witnessed domestic violence firsthand.

She said positive and preventative programs and events could help empower victims.

"Sometimes people are literally too scared to leave," Ms Ozies said.

"Hopefully, through programs like this, we can provide some kind of support work so they feel that strength to leave that situation and better themselves and better their lifestyles for their kids as well.

"Having events like this and having local people in positions where they can talk through those processes so they can understand how to work the system so they can have better outcomes."

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How violence has become 'a public spectacle' in this outback town.

With 19 incidents every day, domestic violence rates jump by 50 per cent in far northern Western Australia

Court hears of 'catastrophic' police failings the night a Kimberley man killed his partner

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Republicans should not fall into the trap of blaming Democrats after Trump shooting

Opinion: now that we’ve had an assassination attempt in the presidential election, we don’t need more division..

Republicans will be greatly tempted to blame Saturday’s attempted murder of Donald Trump on the Democrats and left-wing media.

They should resist.

Both the liberal party and media for years have depicted Trump as a would-be dictator and tyrant on the cusp of turning America into a fascist state. 

On its June cover, The New Republic merged Trump’s face with Hitler’s and invited writers to imagine what the Trump dictatorship would look like.

On Sept. 1, 2022, Joe Biden lit Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in Nazi two-tone – red and black – and turned the birthplace of our democracy into one of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies.

Biden warned in that Philadelphia speech that MAGA Republicans “are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.” 

Yes, he was comparing MAGA Republicans to Hitler’s brown shirts.

You can’t deny Democrats were reckless

Those messages were irresponsible and overwrought, but so is much of the political speech in this country, and it didn’t start with The New Republic and Joe Biden. 

We have long been a nation tightly coiled and eager to burst through the lines of good taste and judgment. Both right and left cross lines all the time.

If America has entered a new period in which political violence grows more common, well, both parties have left a long trail of highly exaggerated and provocative rhetoric.

When a man shot and killed five people at newspaper office in Maryland, Trump was accused of inciting the violence after having called the media the “enemy of the people." But rhetoric didn't kill those people. Bullets did. The gunman's hatred for the newspaper began long before Trump made his comment.

When a crazed gunman fired point blank at people at Tucson supermarket in 2011, severely wounding Gabby Giffords and killing six others, the Democrats blamed the Republicans.

They screamed at Sarah Palin for using gun imagery – rifle sights – on a campaign web page, and they blamed the conservative live-wires on talk radio for inciting the shooter.

They were wrong. 

The right knows what it’s like to be the accused

The shooter was a severely mentally ill young man who disliked Giffords' grammar, which, by the way, was pristine. He was crazy.

Conservatives who have been the targets of these recriminations should learn from such moments and react differently — react in a conservative way. In fact, in that most conservative of ways. 

Blame the shooter.

Whoever pulled the trigger is either evil or seriously cracked and is not representative of the American people. The vast, vast majority of us would never think to do something so vile.

The near miss in the attempted assassination of Trump presents an opportunity to start dialing down that impulse that makes us blame the wicked acts of one person on millions of Americans.

For Democrats, it’s a reminder that Donald Trump is a human being who bleeds real blood. He’s not the Hitler caricature you’ve created in your minds and have now put on the cover of The New Republic. 

We should take heart that rank-and-file Democratic leadership stepped forward after the Trump shooting to express their genuine concern for his well-being and to condemn the violence.

Responsible Democrat leaders speak out

 “ Horrified by this apparent assassination attempt. ... Wishing President Trump a swift recovery."

— U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

“ I thank God that former President Trump is safe.”

— Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi .

"Lori and I are praying for President Trump, the Secret Service officers who protected him, those attending the event, and all of the first responders still on the scene.”

- Josh Shapiro, Democratic governor of Pennsylvania

"There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy. ...We should all be relieved that former President Trump wasn’t seriously hurt and use this moment to recommit ourselves to civility and respect in our politics. Michelle and I are wishing him a quick recovery."

-- Barack Obama, former U.S. president

I might reject their politics, but I recognize something American in their response. They make me proud they’re my countrymen.

On the right, I am warmed by the comment of an old friend — Zuhdi Jasser, an Arizona Republican candidate for Congress and one of the bravest men I know.

A devout Muslim, Jasser became a leading U.S. reformer of Islam after 9/11 — making himself the target of fierce and even dangerous backlash.

After news of the Trump shooting broke, Jasser tweeted out on the social media platform X, “This moment should remind us to listen to one another and to call on the better angels of our nature and come together as Americans.”

If Republicans are in doubt how they should respond to this shooting, do as Zuhdi Jasser has done.

Lead with grace.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at [email protected]. 

Monday, July 15, 2024

Ramaphosa and other world leaders react to Trump rally shooting

U. S. Republican presidential candidate former President Donald raises his fist as he is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024. The former president suffered a gunshot wound to his ear after a suspect fired gunshots at his Pennsylvania rally and he survived the assassination attempt. According to the law official, the suspected shooter was killed by the Secret Service. ( The Yomiuri Shimbun ) (Photo by Takayuki Fuchigami / Yomiuri / The Yomiuri Shimbun via AFP)

Published 10h ago

World leaders and governments reacted with shock to the wounding of former US president Donald Trump in an assassination attempt at an election rally.

Leaders globally spoke out against political violence and expressed their support for those affected by Saturday's shooting, which killed one bystander and left two other spectators critically wounded.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she was "deeply shocked" by the attack.

"Political violence has no place in a democracy," she said.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called the shooting "despicable" and said "such acts of violence threaten democracy."

In neighboring France, President Emmanuel Macron called the assassination attempt a "tragedy for our democracies."

"France shares the shock and indignation of the American people," he said.

Russia strongly condemned any violence in the context of politics, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Sunday.

"After numerous attempts to eliminate candidate Trump from the political arena using, first, all legal tools... it is obvious to all outside observers that his life is in danger," Peskov said.

He added, however, that "we do not at all believe that the attempt was organized by the current power."

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was "appalled to learn about the shooting" and wished Trump a "speedy recovery."

"Such violence has no justification and no place anywhere in the world. Never should violence prevail," he said.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed confidence "that the investigation into the attack will be carried out in the most effective way and that the perpetrators and their instigators will be brought to justice as soon as possible in order not to cast a shadow on the US elections and global stability."

The Vatican, meanwhile, voiced "its concern following yesterday's violent episode which injures people and democracy, provoking suffering and death."

Argentina's President Javier Milei blamed the "international left" after the assassination attempt.

"In panic of losing at the polls, they resort to terrorism to impose their backward and authoritarian agenda," said the populist president.

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the shooting "must be strongly condemned by all defenders of democracy and political dialogue."

Chilean President Gabriel Boric also expressed his condemnation, calling violence "a threat to democracies" which "we must all reject."

Colombia expressed its "solidarity with the United States at this difficult time."

"As a country that has suffered from violence, we reaffirm that it has no place in the political and electoral debate," the government said.

In Bolivia, President Luis Arce said, "Despite our deep ideological and political differences, violence, wherever it comes from, must always be rejected by everyone."

Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador also condemned the shooting, saying, "Violence is irrational and inhumane."

Asia-Pacific

China's Xi Jinping expressed his "compassion and sympathy" for Trump, with a foreign ministry spokesman saying Beijing was "closely following" the incident.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was "deeply concerned by the attack on my friend."

"Violence has no place in politics and democracies," said Modi.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also spoke out against political attacks, saying "we must stand firm against any form of violence that challenges democracy."

Taiwan's President Lai Ching-te offered his "sincere condolences" to the shooting victims.

"Political violence of any form is never acceptable in our democracies," he said.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos said it was "with great relief" that he had learned that "Trump is fine and well after the attempt to assassinate him."

"Together with all democracy-loving peoples around the world, we condemn all forms of political violence. The voice of the people must always remain supreme," Marcos said.

From Pakistan, jailed former prime minister Imran Khan "strongly" condemned the attack, saying, "Political violence is a tool of cowards and has no place in a democracy."

Middle East

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he and his wife Sara "were shocked by the apparent attack on President Trump."

"We pray for his safety and speedy recovery," Netanyahu said.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi described the shooting as a "treacherous incident."

Sisi wished the US "election campaigns to continue in a peaceful and healthy atmosphere, free of any manifestations of terrorism, violence or hatred."

Qatar's foreign affairs ministry said regardless of the motives of the attack, it underlined "the necessity of adopting dialogue and peaceful means and avoiding political violence and hatred to resolve conflicts at all levels."

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the attempt served as "a stark reminder of the dangers of political extremism."

"Political violence is the antithesis of democracy," he wrote on social media platform X, wishing Trump a "speedy recovery."

"We unequivocally denounce this political violence and earnestly hope that the citizens and leaders of America will have the fortitude and sagacity to reject violence and seek peaceful solutions."

Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu called the attack on Trump "distasteful," adding that it "goes beyond the pale of democratic norms."

"I extend my sympathies to the former president and wish him relief," he added.

Related Topics:

Biden says America 'must not go down this road' after Trump assassination attempt: Updates

BETHEL PARK, Pa. – President Joe Biden called on Americans to cool the partisan fervor in the wake of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, encouraging peaceful debate but decrying any form of political violence in his Sunday evening address to the nation.

"There's no place in America for this kind of violence or any violence, ever, period, no exceptions," Biden said. "We can't allow this violence to be normalized."

Trump said Sunday that "God alone" had spared him from Saturday's brazen assassination attempt , the likes of which America had not seen since an attack on President Ronald Reagan's life 43 years ago. Trump, who was injured in the right ear when a sniper opened fire, traveled to Milwaukee on Sunday for this week's GOP convention.

One spectator was killed and two others were critically injured when bullets rained down from an AR-15-style rifle from a rooftop about 400 feet outside Trump's campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The FBI identified the gunman as Thomas Matthew Crooks , 20, of Bethel Park, outside Pittsburgh. Crooks was killed by Secret Service agents moments after gunfire erupted at the rally.

Biden referenced the victims of Crooks' assault and mentioned other prominent instances of political violence in the U.S. in recent years, such as the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington and the brutal attack on the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

"We cannot, we must not go down this road in America," Biden said. "The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It's time to cool it down. We all have a responsibility to do that."

Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania: Trump wounded in assassination attempt. Biden calls it 'sick': Here's what we know

Developments:

∎ House Speaker Mike Johnson said on the "TODAY" show Sunday that the country has to "turn the temperature down" in the political discourse, and he promised Congress will do a full investigation of the incident "to determine where there were lapses in security and anything else that the American people need to know."

∎ The gunman's father, Matthew Crooks, told CNN Saturday evening that he was trying to figure out "what the hell is going on" and would "wait until I talk to law enforcement" before sharing details about his son.

∎ U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland canceled travel plans for this week to stay in Washington, D.C., and "closely monitor the investigation" into the assassination attempt, Justice Department Director of Public Affairs Xochitl Hinojosa said in a statement Sunday.

Biden: 'We must unite as a nation' after assassination attempt

After calling for national unity earlier in the day, Biden strongly urged Americans to "take a step back" from overheated politics and refrain from violence in a national address from the Oval Office.

Though he reiterated his belief that the November election pitting him against Trump will shape the future of America and the world, Biden nonetheless insisted political differences must be settled peacefully.

"Politics must never be a little battlefield, or God forbid, a killing field," Biden said. "I believe politics are an arena for peaceful debate, to pursue justice, to make decisions guided by the Declaration of Independence and our constitution."

Early in the afternoon, Biden said that he'd spoken with Trump on Saturday night and was "sincerely grateful" his political rival was recovering well from Saturday's shooting.

"Unity is the most elusive goal of all, but nothing is more important than that right now," Biden said, adding, "We must unite as one nation to demonstrate who we are."

− Rebecca Morin

Trump's motorcade arrives at Milwaukee hotel

A day after being the subject of an assassination attempt, Trump’s plane landed in Milwaukee at Mitchell International Airport as a small crowd waited for his arrival.

"Based on yesterday’s terrible events, I was going to delay my trip to Wisconsin, and The Republican National Convention, by two days, but have just decided that I cannot allow a 'shooter,' or potential assassin, to force change to scheduling, or anything else," Trump said on his Truth Social account.Some filmed or photographed the plane landing on their phones. Onlookers in four cars waited for the former president’s arrival, some standing outside their cars and looking up at the sky.

Trump’s motorcade later arrived at the Pfister Hotel, where many expect he will stay for the Republican National Convention. A crowd of spectators — some with boxes of popcorn — peered through the fence to catch a glimpse of the former president, just 24 hours after he survived an attempted assassination.

Secret Service agents lined the perimeter and eyed the surrounding rooftops as dozens of SUVs pulled up to the storied hotel. Trump, however, could not be spotted exiting his vehicle.

A tent waited outside the entrance, and security quickly shut the curtains.

− David Jackson, USA TODAY; Claire Reed and Genevieve Redsten ; Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Victims of rally shooting identified

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro identified the man killed in the shooting at Trump's Butler rally as Corey Comperatore. Shapiro said he spoke with Comperatore’s family, who described him as a father of two girls, a firefighter, a faithful churchgoer, and an avid supporter of the former president.

"Corey died a hero," Shapiro said. "Corey dove on his family to protect them last night at this rally. Corey was the very best of us. May his memory be a blessing." 

Pennsylvania State Police identified the other two attendees who were shot at the rally as state residents David Dutch, 57, of New Kensington, and James Copenhaver, 74, of Moon Township. Both are hospitalized and listed in stable condition. Shapiro said he spoke with the family of one victim and received a message from the other.

Flags will be flown at half-staff in memory of Compertore, Shapiro said. He added that he spoke with members of Trump’s team and got a call from Biden, whom he lauded for reaching out to Trump.

"All leaders need to take down the temperature and rise above the hateful rhetoric that exists in search of a better, brighter future for this nation," Shapiro said.

− Sheridan Hendrix

Biden keeps NBC interview, cancels trip to Texas

Biden plans to go forward with a Monday afternoon sit-down with NBC host Lester Holt. The interview was previously scheduled for Texas and will now take place in Washington, the White House said Sunday. 

An address Biden was supposed to deliver at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, was postponed following the attempt on Trump's life Saturday. The White House said it will reschedule the visit.

Biden will resume his travel schedule Monday evening. He'll depart Washington for Las Vegas and appear at the NAACP National Convention on Tuesday and the UnidosUS Annual Conference on Wednesday.

− Francesca Chambers

Shooter used AR-style rifle, had 'suspicious device' in car, FBI says

The gunman in Saturday's assassination attempt used an AR-style rifle using 5.56mm ammunition that was purchased legally and found next to Crooks at the scene where he was shot dead, FBI special agent Kevin Rojek told reporters on a call Sunday.

He also said a "suspicious device" was found in Crooks' vehicle and that bomb technicians inspected it and rendered it safe.

"I'm not in a position to provide any expertise on the specific components of any potential bombs or suspicious packages," Rojek said, adding that the device was sent to an FBI lab for further analysis, as was the shooter's cell phone and other evidence as authorities search for a motive.

Rojek also said the gunman appears to have acted alone and there is no ongoing threat to the public.

– Aysha Bagchi

Fateful events leave family near Butler shaken

Shirley and Jim Iman, of nearby Franklin Township, were thrilled when the Trump campaign announced a rally would be held in Butler. "It was just so exciting that we had something of that magnitude here," Shirley Iman said. 

Having never seen Trump before, they immediately got tickets. When Jim couldn't go, Shirley took her adult daughter. Now they both are shaken, Shirley Iman said, and her daughter couldn't stop crying. 

Shirley Iman said they had been standing in the heat "all day" just beyond a barricade line that divided those with seats from those standing. She said she could only see Trump on the screen, but decided she needed to sit down just minutes into the rally to avoid fainting.

As soon as she did, she heard "pop, pop, pop."

"It was silent, and then everyone started screaming," Shirley Iman said. They asked themselves over and over again, "'Seriously? Is this really happening?'" A man near them prayed. 

Still, Shirley Iman said they didn't know at the time Trump had been injured. Her husband texted her that news as they walked out with the crowd. 

"I started telling people, 'Trump was hit,'" she said. "Nobody knew."

− Jennifer Pignolet, Akron Beacon Journal

Congressional Democrats to pause fundraising, ads

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee will pause its fundraising activities and advertisements, according to a source familiar with the plans, following the assassination attempt on Trump.

The Biden campaign announced Saturday it was pausing all outbound communications and pulled down television ads following the shooting. 

– Rebecca Morin

Neighbors who knew Crooks stunned by the shooting

Jason Kohler attended Bethel Park High School with Crooks and said he sat alone at lunch and was "bullied every day." Kids picked on Crooks for wearing camouflage to class and for his quiet demeanor, said Kohler, 21.Since hearing Crooks was named as the shooter, Kohler has been speaking with classmates who knew him, most of whom are stunned by the news. "It’s really hard to comprehend," he said.

In Bethel Park, Dean Sierka, 52, said he has known Crooks and his parents for years. The neighbors were separated by only a few houses and Sierka’s daughter, Lily, attended elementary, middle, and high school with Crooks. She remembers him as quiet and shy.

Later on, they would see Crooks at least once a week, often walking to work. "You wouldn’t have expected this," Dean Sierka told USA TODAY. "The parents and the family are all really nice people. It’s crazy.”

− Christopher Cann

'Boom, boom, boom, then screams': Neighbors watched from nearby homes

The streets around the Butler fairgrounds were bustling Sunday morning with law enforcement agents blocking entry to the site of the shooting. Pat English told USA TODAY he was at the Saturday rally but left when his grandson got overheated.

"We watched it from my deck," English said, pointing to his backyard bordering the fairgrounds. "I heard a boom, boom, boom, and then screams. I could see people running and the police run in."A few doors down, Lonnie and Kelli Rensel thought they heard fireworks. But then came the screams. "That’s when we knew something was wrong," Kelli Rensel said.Lonnie Rensel, who viewed the rally from his childhood home bordering the grounds, saw a cloud of dust rise from the site.“A stray bullet must have hit the speakers hanging by a lift because they collapsed,” he said.

−Bryce Buyakie

Melania Trump urges Americans to 'ascend above the hate'

Former first lady Melania Trump called on Americans in a statement Sunday to “ascend above the hate, the vitriol, and the simple-minded ideas that ignite violence” after an assassination attempt on her husband.

She thanked the Secret Service agents for protecting the former president and offered her sympathy to the victims were shot at the rally.

“When I watched that violent bullet strike my husband, Donald, I realized my life, and (son) Barron's life, were on the brink of devastating change,” she wrote in the statement.

The former first lady went on to criticize the “monster” who attempted the assassination, adding that Donald Trump has been labeled “an inhuman political machine.”

Trump called on Americans to transcend politics and emphasized that "love, compassion, kindness and empathy are necessities."

Maps, graphics show how the Trump shooting unfolded

As the investigation into the shooting at Trump’s rally continues, maps, graphics and a timeline by USA TODAY show how the incident unfolded.

At 6:11 p.m., while Trump is speaking, multiple shots are fired toward the stage, and less than a minute later, Secret Service agents jump on top of the former president and escort him off stage. At 6:14 p.m., his motorcade leaves the fairgrounds.

Explore the full timeline and graphics here.

− Sudiksha Kochi

Officials: Trump campaign to tighten security

Top officials at the Donald Trump campaign told staff members that they are re-doubling security measures at their offices in light of Saturday's assassination attempt.

“We are enhancing the armed security presence with 24/7 officers on-site," said a staff memo signed by senior campaign officials Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita. "Additional assessments will be in place. Our highest priority is to keep all of you on this staff safe."

The officials urged employees to stay away from offices in Washington, D.C., and West Palm Beach, Fla., on Sunday "as we assess both locations."

Wiles and LaCivita also asked campaign employees not to comment on Saturday's shooting. "We condemn all forms of violence," they said, "and will not tolerate dangerous rhetoric on social media."

The memo also said the Republican convention would go on as scheduled.

− David Jackson

Democrats also adjusting security measures

Chicago Alderman Brian Hopkins, chairman of the city’s Public Safety Committee, said the assassination attempt on Trump "will have an impact on everything we do" for securing the upcoming Democratic National Convention in August.

"It’s a reminder that having an effective security plan is not good enough if it’s not executed perfectly," Hopkins said Sunday. "If there’s any vulnerability or weak link, it can be exploited, which clearly played a role in yesterday’s events."

The longtime city council member did not anticipate any concrete changes in plans to protect Biden, since he isn’t expected to speak outside the convention hall. But Hopkins expected adjustments to security measures around the convention hall, where protest groups have sued the city for permission to picket outside.

"They want unfettered access to everything and this is a reminder of why that simply can’t be allowed," he said. "We can’t have radical protest groups who often engage in inflammatory rhetoric, we can’t have them on the sidewalk outside the convention center. It simply isn’t possible."

The Secret Service plans to release the finalized security perimeter for the event on July 25, Hopkins said.

− Michael Loria  

Trump's top finance person launches GoFundMe for rally shooting victims

A high-profile political fundraiser from Florida has launched a "President Trump Authorized" GoFundMe aiming to raise $1 million for those "wounded or killed" in  Saturday's attempt on the former president's life .

Meredith O'Rourke of Tallahassee, also Trump's top finance person, is listed as the organizer of the  online fundraiser , which as of 10 a.m. Sunday listed over $600,000 in donations, including $50,000 from musician Kid Rock, a major Trump backer.

Other top donations so far include $30,000 from former Republican challenger Vivek Ramaswamy and $25,000 from investor and entrepreneur John Shahidi, a Southern California native behind several companies, among them  Shots Studios ,  described  as "an entertainment company that uses data to create the next digital stars."

Also donating were conservative commentator Ben Shapiro ($15,000),  Florida Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson  ($10,000) and Trump's daughter Ivanka and husband Jared Kushner ($10,000).

− Jim Rosica

What we know about the weapon used by the shooter

Joseph Price, special agent in charge of the ATF in Pittsburgh, said the rifle Crooks used "was nothing special.''Price said investigators are still determining how many shots the gunman fired. − Stephanie Warsmith 

White House says Biden call with Trump 'respectful'

The president spoke with Trump on Saturday night after Trump was targeted by a sniper at a rally in Pennsylvania

Biden told reporters when he initially tried to call Trump, the former president was with his doctors. A White House official said later Saturday that Biden had spoken with Trump, Shapiro and Bob Dandoy, the mayor of Butler.

Biden’s phone call Saturday night with Trump was "good, respectful and brief," according to a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity saying it was a private discussion.

– Michael Collins and Joey Garrison

Secret Service pushed Trump to the stage, eyewitness says

Erin Autenreith, who sat in the middle of the front row at Trump’s rally, said on the TODAY show Sunday that she heard “pop, pop, pop” sounds and watched as Secret Service men quickly pushed the former president down on stage for a couple of minutes.

“They started saying ‘Clear right, clear left. OK on three stand him up.’ So one, two, three - they stood him up. He was facing me and his eyes were bright. I knew that he was OK. But there was a little bit of blood coming,” Autenreith said.

She said the interesting part was that “nobody in that first row even took cover. It seemed everybody was just - wanted to protect the president and I think we all knew that that's what the shooter was after.”

−Sudiksha Kochi

Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson says nephew injured at Trump rally

Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, said Saturday on X, formerly Twitter, that his nephew was among those injured at Trump’s rally in Butler.

“My family was sitting in the front, near where the President was speaking. They heard shots ringing out — my nephew then realized he had blood on his neck and something had grazed and cut his neck,” he wrote.

On Fox News Saturday, Jackson told host Sean Hannity that a bullet had grazed his nephew’s neck. He noted on X that his nephew is doing well and that his injury was not serious. 

“He was treated by the providers in the medical tent. Thank you to all those that have reached out to check on him,” Jackson wrote.

Trump urges supporters to 'stay united'

Trump told supporters Sunday that he would still attend this week's Republican convention in Milwaukee. The shooting will almost certainly lead to a drastic ramp-up in security for the more than 50,000 GOP politicians, delegates, and media personnel expected to flow into Milwaukee for the convention over the next 36 hours.

"Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers yesterday, as it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening," Trump said in an early morning post on Truth Social.

Trump added that "we will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness." Urging people to stay united and to "show our True Character as Americans," Trump said:  "I truly love our Country, and love you all, and look forward to speaking to our Great Nation this week from Wisconsin."

− David Jackson, Sarah D. Wire, Sam Woodward, and Alison Dirr

No word on shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks' motive

Little is known about Crooks beyond the fact that he lived in a home with his parents in Bethel Park.

Crooks was 20 years old, registered as a Republican, and had an active voting status, meaning he had voted in recent elections. He appears to have attended Bethel Park High School, graduating in 2022.

Crooks carried no identification and his body had to be identified using other techniques, said Kevin Rojek, FBI special agent in charge, at the late-night news conference in Butler. The methods included DNA and biometric confirmation, Rojek said.

Crooks was killed by law enforcement officials moments after opening fire.

Political rally shooter identified: Thomas Matthew Crooks identified as Trump shooter at Pennsylvania political rally

'It feels like something out of a movie'

The streets surrounding Crooks’ home were swarming with reporters and curious locals who ventured out to get a look at the scene and sizable police presence early Sunday morning. The home sits along a winding suburban road in Bethel Park, about 42 miles south of Butler.

Cathy Caplan, 45, extended her morning walk about a quarter mile to glimpse what was happening outside Crooks’ home.“It came on the morning news and I was like ‘I know that street,’” she said.The local school district employee said she was “still in disbelief” about the shooting and that “it feels like something out of a movie.”

Wes Morgan and his four children were at Panera Bread on Sunday morning when he found out he lived within a mile of Crooks. After breakfast, Morgan and the kids, ages 6-9, parked among dozens of reporters and other residents and walked up to the police perimeter, around the corner from Crooks’ home.It was rare in this sleepy suburb of Bethel Park to have any sustained and visible police presence, he said. The 42-year-old said he hopes the investigation progresses smoothly so the neighborhood can return to normal“We’ve never had anything even close to this before,” Morgan said. “We ride bikes down this road all the time, and to see this today … it’s just a shame.”

'It's insanity that anyone would do this'

Around 1:30 a.m. Sunday, dozens of law enforcement vehicles were stationed outside Crooks' residence listed on his voter registration record. Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives were on the scene and a bomb squad was at the residence.

Neighbors standing outside the home where the gunman lived said they were in disbelief. Dan Maloney, 30, said he saw the shooter’s name on social media and then discovered he lived down the road.

“It’s insanity that anyone would do this,” Maloney said, adding that he at one point had planned on attending the rally.

Crooks is registered to vote as a Republican in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, according to county voter records. His voter registration status has been active since 2021.

Scott Graham, who lives in the Bethel Park neighborhood, was riding his bike Sunday morning. He said he doesn’t know the shooter but was shaken by the incident. “It hits so close to home. I had two kids who graduated from Bethel Park High School. My kids graduated in 2016 and 2018.”

− Christopher Cann, Aysha Bagchi , Andrew Dolph

How the chaotic scene erupted: Video captures moment when Trump reportedly shot on stage at rally

Attack harkens back to dark years of violence

The most recent attempt on a presidential candidate was on March 30, 1981, when Republican President Ronald Reagan was shot by  John Hinckley Jr.  after a speaking engagement just two months after taking office. The then 70-year-old was seriously injured and underwent emergency surgery before being released after almost two weeks in the hospital.

Reagan suffered a punctured lung, a broken rib, and internal bleeding.

On June 5, 1968, the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy, Senator  Robert F. Kennedy , D-N.Y., was shot and killed by a Palestinian activist for his support of Israel during the Israeli-Arab conflict. Kennedy was campaigning in California for the presidency and lived just one day after being hit twice, once in the neck and the armpit. He was 42.

President John F. Kennedy  was riding in a motorcade with First Lady Jackie Kennedy in downtown Dallas on November 22, 1963, when he was shot in the neck and head by Lee Harvey Oswald. The 46-year-old had yet to announce his re-election campaign and was riding with then-Texas Democratic Gov. John Connally, who also was shot.

Kennedy was pronounced dead and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president.

−Elizabeth Weise

In videos and maps, how the Trump assassination attempt unfolded

What started out like any other rally ended with one person dead and two seriously wounded after a gunman took aim at former President Donald Trump. Here’s what we know about how it happened.

Editor’s note: This story contains images that some readers may find disturbing

By Jiachuan Wu, Marin Scott and Jason Abbruzzese July 14, 2024

Evan Vucci / AP

It was several hours before former President Donald Trump was scheduled to speak when his supporters began to fill a grassy expanse in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The usual festive atmosphere had started early, with pre-rally music playlist rolling as temperatures climbed toward 90 degrees..

Gene J. Puskar / AP

Butler is a city of about 13,000, north of Pittsburgh. Saturday's rally was one of Trump's last public appearances before the Republican National Convention.

Butler Farm Show, a fairground, played host to the rally with bleachers surrounding a stage where Trump would speak and most attendees on a lawn. There's a small lake on one side and buildings on the other.

Trump took the stage shortly after 6 p.m. ET.

At 6:11 p.m. ET, the first shot, a pop, can be heard. Trump flinches and grabs his right ear. He and audience members duck as Secret Service agents rush the stage.

The crowd reacts to at least seven more shots fired by a gunman..

Your browser does not support this video

An attendee described the moment to NBC News.

"i heard 'pop, pop, pop.' i thought it was, like, a cap gun.", "next thing you know, everybody around us was down.".

Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

Secret Service agents are heard on live microphones organizing to get Trump on his feet and out of harm's way. They lift him up, and he pumps his fist in the air and repeats "fight!"

Video taken from behind trump also showed his reaction and the ensuing chaos..

An NBC News analysis of user-generated video, combined with satellite images of the area and firsthand accounts, reveals some details about where three people were when they were struck by the shooter’s bullets.

Authorities said one person, a former firefighter hailed as a hero for protecting his family, died and two were critically injured..

The gunman gained access to the roof of a nearby aluminum company's building and fired across the event grounds, striking at least one person in the northernmost stands, closest to where the gunman was positioned.

Law enforcement counter-snipers on a roof just behind where Trump was speaking had a vantage point to the rooftop where the gunman took aim.

Video posted online from the event appears to show law enforcement snipers positioned on the rooftop behind Trump reacting to the gunshots.

Two people familiar with u.s. secret service operations told nbc news that the nearby rooftop had been identified as a potential vulnerability in the days before the event., “someone should have been on the roof or securing the building so no one could get on the roof,” said one of the sources, a former senior secret service agent who was familiar with the planning. , video taken by kip tom, who was u.s. ambassador to the u.n. agencies for food & agriculture under trump, showed the immediate aftermath of the shooting, with law enforcement clearing attendees and carrying a body from the stands., details in the video — including the rooftops in the background and the yellow crane — line up with other video and images that showed the northernmost bleachers., nbc affiliate footage of the aftermath showed one person being carried out of those bleachers with a towel over their head, as described by witnesses., one person on the bleachers told nbc news that they saw a person with a head wound who they believed had been killed., another angle captured law enforcement scrambling to help the wounded person..

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Two more people were shot and seriously injured, but it's unclear where. Videos show attendees on the bleachers on the opposite side of the event, the southern bleachers, signaling for help, though it was not clear if they were indicating people suffered gunshot wounds there.

The local district attorney told nbc news that authorities believed the two people who had been wounded were somewhere behind trump but that they did not have any more details..

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