Regarding Christina Aguilera’s “Torture”
Music, we have a taker:
LOONY TUNES
Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast,
Or cause cardiopulmonary
arrest.
It all depends on the listener’s cultural level:
Will certain strains tend to make
him revel
Or will they turn his stomach inside out,
Prepared to spill the secrets he
knows about,
And rather than endure another note,
Make him jump in front of a
torpedo boat?
Hitchcock used it in “Foreign Correspondent,”
Playing music-as-torture
to torment
A captured government biggie so he’d sing;
Believe the music was Benny
Goodman swing?
And in Waco, to drive the Branch Davidians sane
The Feds applied
the ultimate in pain,
Playing endless disks, both fast and slow,
By king of disco Barry
Manilow.
Yes, music has more uses than one’d suppose —
Witness both
Lord Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose.
— Leon Freilich
