A World Without Music?
BD, No Music Day, 96-sheet billboard, Mersey Tunnel, 2005, organised by Alan Dunn
“Imagine waking up tomorrow, all music has disappeared. All musical instruments, all forms of recorded music gone. … What is more, you cannot even remember what music sounded like or how it was made. You can only remember how important it had been to you and your civilisation. And you long to hear it once more.”
No Music Day was a project instigated by KLF co-founder Bill Drummond that ran from 2005 to 2009. Some interpreted the event as an attack on music, an attempt to remove it from public life. But this is the opposite of what Drummond intended. He felt that music had become something that we take for granted. Before the dawn of recorded music, we were active participants in the process of music-making. Music was once conceived to be heard at certain times, on specific occasions, or at preordained sites to create moments of spiritual uplift, ritual and celebration. Now with advent of the internet, we can access almost every piece of music ever recorded at a click of a button. By not listening to music for a day, Drummond hoped we would start to appreciate it more and realise how valuable it is to us.
Others have proposed similar acts of creative abstinence. In 2001, Luke Haines announced the First National Pop Strike in which he proposed that no music should be produced, consumed or listened to for seven days. Haines was aware that the pop strike was doomed to failure, admitting that he did not expect musicians to stop playing their instruments and listeners to turn off their stereos. Like Drummond, his intention was to ask us to imagine what it would be like if everyone in the creative industries suddenly downed tools. Would this force us to re-evaluate the work they perform? Would it prompt us passive consumers to explore our own creative potential? The purpose of the thought experiment was to provoke us to interrogate the structures of our society, to question who gets to create music and art, and to consider why others cannot. Drummond believes that making music is something everyone should be able to do, and questions why it has become something most of us leave to the professionals.
“…imagine if the porn industry had been so successful it had convinced the mass majority of people that they no longer needed to have sex anymore, because we now had experts at sex to do it for us. All we had to do is pay to watch the experts do it instead. That is what the music industry achieved in the 20th century.” 1
– Bill Drummond
There were many reasons for observing No Music Day, but importantly the event was not promoting a product and had nothing to sell. Similarly, the thing that motivates most people to make music is not money – they do it because they love it (which is another reason why asking them to go on strike is an impossible request: musicians want to hear music too). As a consequence, musicians can be open to exploitation and are often expected to work for free. Many artists struggle to make a living from their work and need to take on a second, third or even fourth job to make ends meet. Some believe the reason that “struggling artists” are struggling is because they do not provide goods and services of sufficient value. However, this point of view ignores other forms of value and the contribution that culture makes to our lives. Art and music can bring us together, providing moments of collective joy that help overcome the day-to-day struggles that we face individually and collectively. Being creative should be open to everyone in society, not just the professionals. Engaging in creative activities is extremely satisfying and involves considerable amounts of effort, even more than we would be prepared to invest in the labour we undertake for a wage.
One argument for introducing Universal Basic Income is that it would enable more people to pursue creative ideas without worrying about whether they would make money. Enabling more people to make art could help democratise the creative industries, which are currently extremely unequal and rely on vast amounts of unpaid work for them to function. Consequently, people from working class and ethnic minority backgrounds are under-represented as they are unable to take on unpaid work, and lack the personal networks or insider knowledge which people from more privileged backgrounds can access. Universal Basic Income would not solve this problem, but it would enable more people from different backgrounds to become artists. It would also allow people to create new art scenes that represent them, instead of trying to enter ones built on hierarchy and privilege.
Andy Abbott, who co-founded UBI Lab Arts with me, has years of experience of participating in and organising DIY art events. He believes DIY culture offers multiple examples for what people would do if they had more free time to engage in creative activities, and did not need to worry about them making money: “As well as entertaining themselves and each other, people choose to build networks of solidarity, care and mutual aid.” The radical sociologist David Graeber felt that people are naturally creative, industrious and empathetic, and by detaching livelihood from work, a Universal Basic Income would enable all of us to contribute to society in different ways.
The idea of a world without music sounds dystopian to me – it is one that I don’t want to imagine. I prefer to think about a world filled with art, music and culture, one in which we are all active participants in creating, rather than just consuming, art. I believe that a UBI could help to make this utopian vision of the future possible.
[1] Drummond, Bill (2012) 100. Penkiln Burn. P39
More about the author
Toby Lloyd - @TobyPhipsLloyd
Toby P Lloyd is an artist and researcher based in Newcastle upon Tyne. He is currently undertaking a PhD at Newcastle University exploring the role participatory arts practice can play in engaging issues of active citizenship and re-evaluating our current relationships to work to inform understandings of a post-work society?
He is the co-founder of UBI Lab North East and UBI Lab Arts.