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Soul Train: The New Surveillance and Popular Music*

Gary T. Marx

Videos are watching me

But dat is not stopping me

Let dem cum wid dem authority

An dem science and technology

But Dem can’t get de Reggae out me head.[i]

Zephaniah

Watch therefore, for you do not know

What hour your lord is coming.

Rapture by Steel Prophet

I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places

this heart of mine embrace.

I. Kahal and S. Fain

Contemporary surveillance methods and popular culture both reflect distinctive kinds of soul training. The title of this article plays off of Michele Foucault’s (1977) study of modern means of training the person to be compliant. It also draws from popular rhythm and blues and disco musical culture. Soul Train was a 1970s song title and a popular TV musical program. In connecting these two markedly disparate uses of the term I call attention to the close links between surveillance and culture and control and entertainment.

In considering soul training, Foucault was talking primarily about emerging modern organizational forms of control in the prison, workplace and school. Popular

culture (and music in particular) as entertainment and recreation, might seem very far from the sober hard worlds of surveillance and control. However, music along with television, film, literature and advertisements can also serve as a kind of soul training, alongside of the more familiar formal organizational structures.

Most analysis of information technology and surveillance uses printed words and numbers and looks at structures and behavior. As important as historical, social, philosophical, legal, and policy analyses are, they are not sufficient for a broad understanding. We also need cultural analysis. This article considers surveillance in

__

* In volume edited by E. Leichtman, forthcoming. This article expands on the musical section in G. Marx, “Electric Eye in the Sky: Some Reflections on the New Surveillance and Popular Culture” in D. Lyon and E. Zureik (eds.), Computers, Surveillance & Privacy, 1996. Thanks to my sole soul mate PARM and to Ellen Leichtman, Torin Monahan and Pat Gillham for critical help.

popular music over the last 50 years. Serious social questions raised by surveillance technologies (such as computer dossiers, video and audio monitoring, drug testing, satellites, and electronic location monitoring and undercover methods) can be better understood by considering popular culture. Erving Goffman’s admonition to look for big meanings in little things, as well as Shakespeare’s advice, "by indirections find directions out" apply. There are strong intellectual and political grounds for studying popular culture and information technology.

In contrast to most studies of music lyrics in which the focus is on a genre such as country and western, teen pop or rap (e.g., Vannini and Myers 2002, Whitehead 2005), my emphasis is on a particular kind of lyric expressed across a variety of genres. I view the musical themes as a window into knowledge about surveillance and society.

Our sense of surveillance goes beyond anything inherent in the technology and reflects cultural themes and values. Surveillance technology is not simply applied; it is also experienced by users, subjects, and audiences who come to learn its meanings. Cultural analysis of songs and other popular culture forms can tell us about the experience of being watched, or of being a watcher, and how this reflects and creates social phenomena.

Music and visual images are social fabrications (though not necessarily social deceptions). They speak to (and may be intended to create or manipulate) needs, aspirations, and fears. They communicate meaning. They can also reflect the meanings and shared concerns characterizing a given time period and place. There is, of course, a leap from the analyst’s interpretations and impressions to meaning and feelings more generally. Yet seeking to understand subjective experience must be a part of any broad understanding of human affairs.

Certainly the momentous events of the daily news effect popular perceptions and culture. Yet popular culture may play a role in conditioning what is seen as “newsworthy” and in how events are understood and felt.

One of the more intriguing and enduring aspects of contemporary change is the blurring of borders previously taken for granted.[ii] Consider surveillance and media content (whether entertainment or news). These are increasingly delivered through the same digital (and often wireless) technology. In addition it is often not possible to draw a clean line between contemporary newsworthy events and popular culture. They may be mutually inspirational (if that isn’t too elegantly put) and interwoven.

Rather than being distinct, popular culture and the news may be intricately involved with each other and with surveillance. Foucault’s emphasis was on the shift of punishment and surveillance away from being grand spectacles in public view. In contrast, the mass communications and public informational expectations and rights that appeared simultaneously in the 19th century (and have in many ways been growing since), bring some aspects of the spectacle ever more graphically into public view.

This is nicely symbolized by the surveillance camera (whether hidden or not) which delivers crime and social control events to the six o’clock news. The same electronic means and messages serve as both surveillance and as communication and entertainment --most frequently, sequentially, but sometimes simultaneously as with “live” helicopter video images of car chases, or Web telecasts or videoconferences.

Surveillance data feed the mass media’s appetite. This in turn can re-enforce cultural beliefs about crime and control and strengthen public support for surveillance as a result of the need demonstrated by the “news” (Mathiesen 1997; Altheide 2002; Doyle 2003). Mass media communication about surveillance may serve as a soft means of social control by offering morality tales of what happens to those caught by panoptic mechanisms and by advertising the presence of control. The media of course may have other consequences such as stimulating resistance to control and encouraging crime.

Real criminals get ideas from television and film. Media creators draw on the news in mixing fact and fiction. Real events generate simulated docu-dramas and mocu-drams that are then offered back (or come to be understood) as “real” representations. Music may be folded into real life events and then communicate about them.

The current violent conflict between some hip hop artists and between them and authorities reflects threats made in the music, as well as real world shootings subsequently reflected in the music. Graffitti wall art may show equivalent interactions (Ferrell 1996).[iii]

In a case of life imitating and using art, Sting’s “Every Breath You Take” was popular with police doing surveillance (thus detectives in Boston, and likely elsewhere, played the song while they tailed organized crime figures -Lehr and O’Neil 2000). Or consider the song, “I fought the law and the law won” played during the investigative partying of an undercover agent (Wozencraft 1990).

Surveillance and content may also overlap in the tracking systems that measure mass media consumption –whether the statistical inferences drawn from Nielsen ratings, records from cable and satellite transmissions, internet communication or music purchases. The medium that brings entertainment also reports back on the audience for billing and marketing purposes (a topic we will return to in the conclusion).

In identifying songs I drew on my own and others’ suggestions and searched the Internet for songs with words such as surveillance, watching, police, FBI, DEA, video, spying, big brother and privacy.

Care must be taken with respect to the kind of sample conclusions are based on. Clearly, surveillance is not a theme in most popular songs and is under-represented even in protest songs (these initially sang of class and racial injustice and more recently of war, nuclear, famine, AIDS and environmental issues). Not having taken a representative sample, I cannot say with specificity how minimal it is. However, I am confident that the materials here are reasonably reflective of the music that does deal with surveillance.

There are many ways that surveillance and music concerned with it can be categorized. First is consideration of the kind of role played and the organizational forms present. We can note a distinction between the agent (the watcher or data collector) and the subject (the watched about whom personal information is collected), whether the surveillance involves an organization or an individual and whether or not it is reciprocal. The kind of personal information collected such as visual, auditory, biological, chemical, geographical, or on networks can be considered. A related question involves the kind of technology that is used --from the un-enhanced senses we have seen ever expanding forms such as video, electronic location monitoring, DNA analysis and drug urine testing. We can also ask about evaluation standards. [iv] How is use of the technology justified or criticized? Finally there is the question of the presumed goal(s) of the surveillance.

In the discussion below I make reference to all of the above, but I organize the music primarily around the question of goals. Among the most commonly expressed goals are those involving protection, control, the search for and the expression of love, suspicion and protest.

A. Watching as Heavenly and Parental Protection

Praise of an all knowing and protective God is a central theme in religious music. Let us first consider songs for children. The voice here is that of the agent of surveillance (or his or her agent).

Among the best known of all surveillance songs is "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town." The words to this religious panopticon song are well known --Santa "knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake." The message here is one of control and threat –don’t be good because it is right, but be good because you will be externally rewarded and won't get away with bad behavior anyway. Consistent with an age of science --we even have a concern with verification, "He's making a list, he's checking it twice."

Rejecting the notion of possession by the devil and oblivious to environmental determinants (or statistical correlates) of behavior, Santa instructs the child to do the right thing, implying that the child clearly knows what that is, and is capable of doing it. In visiting your town Santa brings the notion of individual responsibility and choice along with presents.

Lullabies promising tripartite protection by God, angels and parents are among the first things a child repetitively hears, even before the words are intellectually understood. Consider:

Go to Sleep

Go to sleep my darling, close your little eyes.

Angels are above us, peeping through the skies.

God is in his heaven, and his watch doth keep.

Time for little children to go to sleep.

Lullaby and Good Night

…Lullaby and good night, thy mother’s delight

Bright angels beside my darling abide

They will guard thee at rest

All Through the Night (Sir Harold Boulton 1884)

Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee,

All through the night;

Guardian angels God will send thee,

…Mother dear her watch is keeping,

All through the night.

God is here, thou’lt not be lonely

…tis not I who guards thee only

…Night’s dark shades will soon be over,

Still my watchful care shall hover.

God with me his watch is keeping,

All through the night.

There are also many adult versions. In the midst of problems, contemporary singer Hilary Duff finds hope in “Some One’s Watching Over Me”:

So I won’t give up

No I won’t break down

Sooner than it seems life turns around

And I will be strong

Even if it all goes wrong

When I’m standing in the dark I’ll still believe

Someone’s watching over me

I’ve seen that ray of light

And it’s my shinning destiny

Many songs promise surveillance as both protection and control.[v] The former is particularly needed when the protected is sleeping and the latter when he or she is awake and faces temptation. Such watching is omnipresent and omniscient.

Jesus Loves His Little Children

…Jesus sees His little children

When they fold their hands to pray;

And however softly they may whisper,

He can hear each word they say.

Jesus sees into the hearts of children,

Ev’ry thought that’s good or ill;

And he knows the ones who truly love Him,

Those who long to do His will;

Like a shepherd, Jesus watches

Over them both night and day,

As he safely guides their little footsteps,

So that they don’t go astray.

Rebecca St. James in “Universe”

…When I’m awake, You see what I’m thinking

and when I’m asleep, You’re watching…

I can’t get away from you.

Conversely there can be alarm over the possibility of not being watched. Ani Difranco’s in “What if No One’s Watching” asks:

…What if no one’s watching

What if when we’re dead, we’re just dead

…What if it’s just us down here

What if god is just an idea

Someone put in your head.

B. Protective Lovers

Another common theme is the yearning for a lover and/or protector by someone who feels weak or vulnerable and seeks to be a subject of surveillance. Such songs seeking protection were much more likely to be sung (and perhaps written) by females than by males, at least until recently. Consider the familiar song "Someone to Watch over Me":

Looking everywhere haven’t found him yet… There’s a somebody I’m longing to see, I hope that he turns out to be Someone to watch over me… I’m a little lamb who’s lost in the woods I know I could always be good To one who’ll watch over me… Won’t you tell him, please, to put on some speed Follow my lead, oh, how I need Someone to watch over me

In “Inside of Me” Madonna expresses a near magical faith in the protective power of the lover:

I keep a picture of you

Next to my bed at night

And when I wake up scared

I know I’ll find you there

Watching over me

Such songs are the passive expression of a hope or a plea, rather than an active seeking out of the individual. In contrast, males as surveillance agents have been more likely to write and sing about their prowess as active protectors, watchers and discoverers. Watching over can have both a metaphorical and a sexual meaning:

Emerson, Lake & Palmer in “Watching Over You”:

Sleep tight, sleep tight.

Know everything is alright.

And tonight I will be here

Watching over you.

For tonight and forever, be watching over you.

So sleep, little darling, sleep on through.

I will be watching over you.

In “Look Through My Eyes” Phil Collins promises protection through his watching:

It will be alright

You’ll see

Trust me

I’ll be there watching over you

Supertramp offers protection in “Listen to Me Please”:

Please believe me and all this will be yours

Your vision will be clear, your pain will disappear

You’ll know that I’ll be watching over you

I’ll chase your blues away

The value of the protective gaze can also be seen in songs about its disappearance. In “Fields of Fire” Bon Jovi laments a lost love in singing, “there is no-one watching over me tonight and I’m afraid to turn out the lights.”

C. Looking for Love and Loving Looks

In their 1957 song "Searchin'," the Coasters express a common ballad theme --the search for true love. Unlike later songs, this is not a threat, nor is it bragging. The actions are not motivated by an untrustworthy femme fatale, nor by the desire to gratify a secret obsession. Instead, the song represents a statement of determination, optimism, and yearning as the singer proclaims that he will "find her" --the ideal woman.

The singers compare their search to that of the detective. They are like the Northwest Mountie and will bring in the ideal woman "someday." “Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Sergeant Friday, Charlie Chan, and Boston Blackie” have nothing on them. There is an explicit link between the male gaze and the gaze of the professional surveillant.

Hank Williams reports success and no need to look further in “Hey Good Lookin’”[vi]:

:

… No more lookin'

I know I've been tooken

how's about keepin' steady company

… Say hey good lookin'

whatcha got cookin'

how's about cookin' something up with me

The surveillance in "On Every Street," by Dire Straits involves locating a particular individual. The song refers to the tracks increasingly left by inhabitants of an electronically and chemically marked world: "There's gotta be a record of you someplace, you gotta be on somebody's books" and "somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete." This involves a sadder, less hopeful search than that of the Coasters; perhaps the yearning is deepened because the singer knows exactly what he has lost.

Other romantic songs focus not on watching to find, but rather as an expression or generator of love. Here there is none of the suspiciousness and hard-edged, obsessive watching and/or covert surveillance seen in some songs.

The syrupy theme song of Rear Window sung by Bing Crosby, "To See You Is to Love You," is a traditional ballad of adulation, attesting to the powers of the love object.[vii] Here the mere sight of the woman is sufficient to make the infatuated singer love her. Real watching and fantasy merge. "To see you is to love you and you're never out of sight."

She has invaded and colonized his mind. Her charm means that the male singer sees her, "anyplace I look" and "I see you all the time." Consider the common expression, “I can’t take my eyes off of him/her”. Similarly, Frankie Valli sang, “At long last love has arrived…You’re just too good to be true, can’t take my eyes off of you.”

Alfred Hitchcock juxtaposes the professional surveillance of James Stewart as a photographer-detective suspiciously watching a neighbor's window with Stewart’s more personal gazing watching his girlfriend, played by Grace Kelly, and in another window, a scantily clad female entertainer. The pleasure of watching is an end in itself rather than a professional duty.

In its reciprocal and freely chosen form watching is highly valued in our culture and is a means of expressing/experiencing love and appreciation. The look can be a way of honoring the other. Recall Humphrey Bogart’s canonical, “here’s looking at you kid” in the film Casa Blanca, as he peers into Ingrid Bergman’s eyes.

It is integral to flirting. In a country and western song that endures and endears because it touches a universal experience and the play of infinite regress, Buck Owens sings:

“I was looking back to see if you were looking back to see if I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me …And the way that she was stacked I wish I’d ‘ve had a Cadillac …You were cute as you could be standing looking back at me And it was plain to see that I’d enjoy your company.”

In “Potential new boyfriend” Dolly Parton sings:

Got my eye on a boy He’s eyeing me back It’s looking real good This could be it

In contrast, voyeuristic watching is darker and likely to be non-reciprocated. Its very secrecy reflects the watcher’s power. In “Watching Alice” Nick Cave & The Bad Seed sing:

Alice wakes

It is morning

She is yawning

As she walks about the room

Her hair falls down her breast

She is naked and it is June

Standing at the window

I wonder if she knows that I can see…

In Queensryche's unsettling song "Gonna Get Close to You”, the singer is "outside your balcony I have a room with a view and I'm watching you." He knows, "when you're alone, I know when you turn out the light."

In "Voyeur," by Lizzy Borden, we hear a similar theme: "I'm watching you,

you're in my sights. I know you so well, I know your every move." In this song there is an element of compulsiveness ("I can't stop watching you") and the singer is distraught "because you don't even know me." However as long as he is unknown, he can not be rejected or in trouble for his behavior.

In the 1950s The Four Lads openly reflect the theme in:

Standing on a corner

Watching all the girls

Go by

…

Haven't got a girl

But I can wish

So I'll take me down to Main street

And that's where I select

My imaginary dish

…

Brother you can't go to jail

For what you're thinking

Or for that woo look

In your eye

This behavior of course is often unwelcome, even if, “the eyes cannot by the law of England be found guilty of trespass.” [viii] Consider the early feminist response offered by Hank Williams to the male gaze in “Hey Good Lookin’”:

I got a little gal that wears her hair up high, The boys all whistle when she walks by. why don’t you mind your own business… Well, if you mind your own business, you won’t be minding mine.

With increased feminist and lesbian consciousness, songs of women watching men and other women can also now be seen, as well as contradictory messages to stop watching or that watching doesn’t matter or bring it on.

The music video of “Whatta Man” by Salt N Pepa is in some ways a contemporary inversion of the 1950s “Standing on the Corner” by The Four Lads in objectifying the male.

My man is smooth like Barry, and his voice got bass

A body like Arnold with a Denzel face… He dresses like a dapper don, but even in jeans

He's a God-sent original, the man of my dreams

Natalie Imbruglia in “I’ve Been Watching”:

I stand at an open window

I see everything there is to see

I’ve been watching you

Melissa Etheridge’s in “Watching You” sings:

That’s a good question, why am I standing out here alone

I guess I don’t know enough to come from the rain

I was watching your window from here below

I think I just might stay here all day cause I gotta do something

…

And if you don’t want me, I don’t know what to do

But oh keep watching you until I see right through

In Girls Aloud “Big Brother” appears as a welcomed voyeur meeting exhibitionist needs for attention:

Big brother’s watching me

And I don’t really mind

I like him, watching me

Watch him watch life

There’s nothing he can [t?] see

And not much he won’t find

He likes me

Watching him watch me all night

Rather than bringing pleasure, the act of watching and listening can of course be the vehicles for conveying the bad news.

In contrast to the joy of watching, in the “Two Silhouettes” the singer is concerned “that there is something going on” and as he arrives at his girl friend’s house, “what did I see through the bedroom light Two Silhouettes, standing face to face” he then “turned away, didn’t wanna see.”[ix]

Similarly Luther Allison in “Watching You” doesn’t like what he sees:

Watching you baby, watching you all the time

Watching you baby, just watching you all the time

Watching you destroy yourself woman,

All you do is sit around drinkin’ wine

In “Watching Me Fall” Cure’s fall is narcissistically observed:

Yeah I’ve been watching me fall

For what seems like years

Watching me grow small

I watch me disappear

Slipping out my ordinary world

Out my ordinary eyes

“Watching in Silence” by Circle II Circle, suggests a visual chronicling of apocalyptic events:

See me as I fly

So high in the night…

With these wings I’ll fly

So high in the sky

I’ll watch the world

As it goes down

It’s buildings crumbled to the ground

The panic-ridden streets

Will cry on

D. Suspicion-Driven Surveillance

In 1956, in "Slippin' and Slidin'," Little Richard has been "peepin' and hidin'" to discover his baby's jive, and as a result he "won't be your fool no more." Bobby Vee sings that "the night has a thousand eyes" and that these eyes will see "if you aren't true to me." If he gets "put down for another" or told lies, he warns, "I'll know, believe me, I'll know." The Who more directly imply the possession of extrasensory powers when they sing, "There's magic in my eyes." The singer knows he has been deceived because "I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles." Hall and Oates sing about the inability to escape my "Private Eyes," which, while "looking for lies," are "watching you. They see your every move."

The Doors sing about "a spy in the house of love" who "can see you and what you do" and who knows your dreams and fears, and "everywhere you go, everyone you know."

The Alan Parsons Project makes direct use of technology to discover lies and to tell the deceiving lover to "find another fool" because "I am the eye in the sky looking at you I can read your mind." Perhaps surprisingly for a group called the Information Society, the emphasis in their song "What's on Your Mind?" is not on sophisticated communications technology but on traditional means, perhaps involving intuition, and a gentle plea to inform the singer. The song contains the lines "There are some things you can't hide" and "I can see behind your eyes," yet asks, "If you hide away from me, how can our love grow?"

The classic song of this type is "Every Breath You Take," written by Sting, who reports that it is about "the obsessiveness of ex-lovers, their maniacal possessiveness"-written after a divorce. While Sting reports that he reads Arthur Koestler (1984) who wrote about the dangers of totalitarianism, he says his song is personal, not political. The female is warned that her faked smiles and broken bonds and vows will be observed by the singer. The song is about surveillance, ownership, and jealousy (Rolling Stone, March 1, 1984).

While the song does not mention technological supports for the omnipresent and omnipotent surveillance it promises, it is easy to connect it with contemporary tools. One can hear the song to suggest an encyclopedic list of the means that were coming into wider use in the 1980s:

Every breath you take [breath analyzer]

Every move you make [motion detector]

Every bond you break [polygraph]

Every step you take [electronic monitoring]

Every single day [continuous monitoring]

Every word you say [bugs, wiretaps, mikes]

Every night you stay [light amplifier]

Every vow you break [voice stress analysis]

Every smile you fake [brain wave analysis]

Every claim you stake [computer matching]

I'll be watching you [video]

Subject Chronicles: There is No Escape

In contrast to the above songs in which surveillance agents brag of their process and even threaten, are chronicles of surveillance offered by subjects, or those sympathetic to them. The vast majority of these have a protest theme. But let us first consider songs of resignation. In these the singers, while hardly apostles of law and order and maximum security, conclude that resistance is likely to be futile and that the best response is to follow the rules.

An early statement of this is Sonny Curtis of the Crickets who wrote “I fought the Law”:

Breakin’ rocks in the hot sun I fought the law and the law won

Consider the instructions of Ice-T in “Pain”:

Jail cells know me too damn well

Seems like I’ve built on earth my own personal hell

No matter how high I climbed, somehow I always fell

I guess a lot of players got this story to tell

…Custody haunts my dreams, nightmares of capture

Paranoid of surveillance, phobia of cameras

My banks bigger, but so are my fears

…No matter who you trust, you simply cannot win

It’s always fun in the beginning

But it’s pain in the end

Nelly in “Utha Side” similarly tells a dealer in trouble:

I heard your clientele is doin well

I see you boomin out the S-T-L…

Now the feds knocking at your door, you took the bait

They got taps on your mobile phone

They do surveillance all around your home

Now ya pawnin’ everything ya own

Calling on your partners for a loan

No more slip and sliding on the chrome

Your good days have come and gone

I tried to tell you

Judas Priest, in "Electric Eye" sings of the awesome power of the technology. But unlike some songs that encourage resistance, this one advises, "There is no true escape" and "There's nothing you can do about it." While it is unlikely that these heavy metal pioneers are advocates of such surveillance, the satire, if that it be, is all too muted.

Ja Rule in “Watching Me” asks, “Are ya watching me? They be watching, niggas they be watching, keep watching …And hustlers ya’ll keep slanging We stuck in the game wit not a lot to gain but everything to lose”.

A sense of inevitability can also be seen in religiously inspired music about the coming of the anti-Christ. Steel Prophet in “Rapture” draws on the coming of the anti-Christ and the sign of the beast (666) as supposedly expressed in microchip implants:

His globalist plans for a one world government and its assault on our privacy

Personal freedom will soon disappear, under surveillance we all live in fear

Bio chips implants in the wrist or the head, resist his orders, you’ll end up dead

Spiritual warfare now has begun, with the light of his coming the battle is won

From the torments you’ll withstand, you think that evil’s in our control

You can’t deny that the beast possesses your soul

Watch therefore, for you do not know

What hour your lord is coming [Matthew 24:42]

In a related form New Eden in “Emptiness” sing:

Darkened skies as worlds collide endorsing death and genocide

…

new world order police the globe

enslave the people under mass control

pure deception still we see no wrong

eye of surveillance microchip the population

Lyrics about the disappearance of personal freedom, micro chips and mass control suggest protest themes, whether intended or not. The watching by the audience called for here is in the form of being on guard and aware, rather than watching one’s self to be sure of conformity, or watching out for the predatory and/or control efforts of others. However given the power of cataclysmic events and the predetermined nature of who will be saved, the events are likely to be self-evident and the role of individual responsibility and calls to resist is less clear than in many songs.

Warnings About, Chronicles of, and Resistance to Surveillance: Popular Music as Sociology 101

Surveillance is certainly about inequalities in power and can serve to sustain an strengthen the status quo, wherever (and even if) it lies. In broad outline as Ray Charles sang, “those that get are those that got.” Yet in societies with civil liberties and a market economy, there are forms of resistance and unintended consequences, and the situation is more complicated than a reductionist, zero-sum power perspective suggests.

Music can offer examples of cultural neutralization –ideas which help rationalize and call forth resistance to surveillance. [x] These may make it easier for persons to engage in behavioral neutralization involving tools of resistance.[xi]

Bruce Springsteen in “No Surrender” says, “We learned more from a three minute record [a form of music before CDs] than we ever learned in school”. Yet he may be setting up too rigid a distinction, at least for protest songs. Many of their central themes can also be learned in an introductory criminology class as it treats social control issues involving the increased power of surveillance, profiling, corruption, varieties of interdependence between rule enforcers and rule breakers and more broadly, the fit between official ideas and the empirical world and intentions and outcomes. The words of the prophets may appear in multiple places – in university halls, as well as on subway walls.

In the protest songs the voice is not that of the surveillance agent claiming omnipotence, making veiled threats or offering a morality tale. Rather we hear from the individual subject to surveillance, or of a third party telling about it. A central theme is, "They are watching us" and it’s wrong. It can be wrong for a variety of reasons.

The songs are concerned with threats to liberty, racism, injustice --especially with respect to false accusations and lack of due process, inequality, the chilling effects of being spied upon and the loss of privacy.

Judas Priest in “Electric Eye” offers an analytic summary of key aspects of the new surveillance involving omni-presence, omnipotence, accuracy, invisibility and uninformed and involuntary subjects. Surveillance watches “all the time” probing “everything you do” and “all your secret moves”, while offering “pictures that can prove.” The song links knowledge with power: “I feed upon your every thought and so my power grows.” People think they have private lives, but they should “think nothing of the kind.”

Jill Scott in “Watching Me” gives concrete examples of the abstractions in the previous song. She sings of the variety of forms and comprehensive nature of contemporary surveillance across life areas:

Satellites over my head

Transmitters in my dollars

Hawking, watching, scoping, jocking

Scrutinizing me

Checking to see what im doing

Where i be

Who i see

How and where and with whom i make my money

What is this??

… Se-cur-i-ty

Video cameras locked on me

In every dressing room On every floor

In every store

…Direct tv

Am i watchin' it or is it watchin' me

In Orwell's 1984, a video device links mass surveillance with mass communication.[xii] Individuals have almost no control over being seen or over what they see, hence they are doubly controlled. There are allusions to either or both mass surveillance and mass communication in a number of songs.

The television viewer as a manipulated voyeur is a theme in several songs. Siouxsie and the Banshees, in "Monitor," express discomfort at seeing a victim who "looked strangely at the screen." Something too personal has been communicated to a mass audience in the comfort of their living rooms. The singers suggest a double meaning in singing about a "monitor outside for the people inside." This could refer to outside leaders watching citizens, or to a TV monitor for citizens outside the system of power to watch and be conditioned by. The monitor offers both a "prevention of crime, and a passing of time." Here we see surveillance as control and entertainment.

Fish in "The Voyeur," deals with predictable themes such as "private lives up for auction," information overload, and living vicariously through the mass media. As in the Peter Sellers’ film Being There, the individual’s persona is formed by reflecting back what he sees on television.

The song suggests a rarely acknowledged aspect of video --narcissism and exhibitionism. Television permits the narrator to identify with media stars and to fantasize that he too is a celebrity. More generally, negative reactions to video invasions of personal space are very much tempered by the allure of being seen.

I like to watch as my face is reflected in blank tv screens

The programmes are over, I like to pretend that that’s

Me up there making headlines, camera close-ups

Catching my right side I don’t care if it’s only a moment

As long as it’s peaktime, just as long as all of

My friends and family see me, the world

Will know my name –come on down.

Rather than privacy lost, here we have “hey ma look at me”.

Yet concerns over lost privacy are also common. In “Fingerprint File" the Rolling Stones also complain about "feeling followed, feeling tagged." The fingerprint file, "it gets me down." In a rare direct attack: "There's some little jerk in the F.B.I. a' keepin' paper on me ten feet high." Concern is expressed over "listening to me on your satellite," informers who will sell out and testify, and "electric eyes." Listeners are urged to be suspicious, lay low, and watch out. The song ends in a whisper: "These days it's all secrecy, no privacy."[xiii]

Moses Allison in “Big Brother is Watching Over You” brings the new and in so doing offers some rather impractical advice:

Every little thing you do

Big Brother is watching over you

Don’t put your business on the telephone

Don’t go out and get well known

Don’t tell nobody when your having fun

Don’t say nothing about a C.E.O.

Michael Jackson, hardly one to anonymously blend into a crowd, never-the-less complains in his song “Privacy” of unwanted attention and media invalidity:

…You keep on stalking me, invading my

privacy Won't you just let me be 'Cause your cameras can't control, the

minds of those who know That you'll even sell your soul just to get a story

sold …Now there's a lesson to learn, stories are twisted and turned Stop

maliciously attacking my integrity

I need my privacy, I need my privacy

So paparazzi, get away from me

XTC's 1979 song "Real by Reel" protests the secret "invading our privacy" as "we play for the ministry." The most mundane acts and private recesses are now subject to documentation. "They" can film you everywhere-in bed, in the bath, when you cry or laugh. The camera can distort "so you won't know what's 'real by reel.'" It can even record "everything you feel."

Rockwell begins "Somebody's Watching Me" with a synthesized voice asking, "Who's watching me?" He is just an average man who works "from nine to five" and all he wants "is to be left alone in my average home." The listener is led to ask, "Why would anyone want to monitor him?" The implied answer is that the surveillance is out of control. Even ordinary people there is no reason to suspect become targets, not simply those who "deserve" to be surveilled. We cannot be sure if this is an out-of-control system or a logic of random application to create deterrence through uncertainty.

The singer always feels "like somebody's watching me and I have no privacy." Unlike the singers of religious songs, he does not get a feeling of safety from this surveillance. He wonders if the watchers are neighbors, the mailman, or the IRS. Yet these realistic questions give way to satire. He wonders if the persons on TV can see him and he is afraid to wash his hair, "'cause I might open my eyes and find someone standing there." The latter could also be interpreted as satirizing those who complain about the loss of privacy.

Sy Kahn in “Who’s Watching the Man” reports confusion -- he doesn't understand why he is a target, because he pays taxes and doesn't vote or criticize. He reports a truck with a telephone company sign next to his house, which has no phone, and new wires on his roof. He wonders about three men in his barn "trying to read my electric meter through a telescope" and about someone living in his TV set.

The standard by which surveillance is allocated can be controversial. Are there specific, empirically and legally supported reasons for suspicion? Is surveillance“equal” in being applied categorically or randomly, such that all persons are potential subjects, even if there is no articulable reason for the target chosen? In the above songs, subjects feel they are watched for no reason. In other songs there is a reason, but it is viewed as illegitimate. Surveillance is based only on general stereotypic characteristics most commonly associated with being less powerful.

Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” offers an early example of categorical searching based on age profiling. Youth are being watched, regardless of whether or not they have actually done anything wrong. Given covert surveillance involving a "man in a trench coat", microphones planted in the bed, and telephone taps a satirical warning is offered: “look out kid, no matter what you did”. To avoid surveillance, they are told not to wear sandals and to try to be a success.

Concern over social control is a major theme in rap songs. Yet as with graffiti wall art, the emphasis is most likely to be on direct coercion, harassment and arrest at the hands of uniformed patrol officers, rather than with the more subtle forms of surveillance.

N.W.A. in “Fuck Tha Police” call attention to age and style:

Fuckin with me cuz I’m a teenager

With a little bit of gold and a pager

Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product

Thinkin every nigga is sellin narcotics…

Lights start flashin behind me

For Anti-Flag in ”Police Story” it is race and age:

Patrol man cruising in his car at night

Just looking for some homeys he can rough up in a fight

Pulled over 3 kids in a total rage

Next thing that you know there's bodies all over the place

His back up came & they're all acting tough

3 kids vs. 6 or 7 cops all armed with billy clubs

The cops they did it just cause those kids color and their age

In “I Don’t Give a Fuck” 2Pac criticizes the use of racial criteria for surveillance and seeks a free market response by taking his business elsewhere. Yet he also implies that this may not work given the widespread use of such criteria.

Walked in the store what’s everybody staring at

They act like they never seen a mutha fucker wearing black

Following a nigga and shit

Ain’t this a bitch

All I wanted was some chips

I wanna take my business else where

But where?

Trick Daddy in “Watch the Police” adds dress style and location to age and race, as criteria for wrongful police surveillance. Unlike some rap songs where the emphasis is on not getting caught for drug dealing and related activities, here it is on not being framed. The police need to be watched to see that they don’t misbehave.[xiv]

Watch the police when I’m rolling through the projects

My pants sag so I’m labeled as a suspect

Who be the boys in blue, the authority

To arrest me cause I live in a minority

…so you look for the product it could be narcotic

But just because I’m from the CP#

I gotta watch the police because they scared of me

Watching the police, coming straight from the underground

Watch the police, Murder got it bad cause I’m brown

Watch the police, if you a teenage (Watch, watch)

Watch the police, nigga, better goal, and a pager

Watch the police

In my hood, they’ll pull you over

And put dope on you and bring you to jail

In “The Men in Blue” Prince Paul talks of corrupt police, informing and faked evidence:

New York's largest crew, it's the Men in Blue

we stick together like glue and make lies come true… if we make this connection, I'll give you protection

In this year the mayor's up for reelection

so rat out all the competition in your section In the next day, there will be a drug sweep around your way

so let your crew know, it's time to stay low

keep up in the dough and you get the info

on what's goin down and we can run this town

straight into the ground, while we rise to the top

there ain't no such thing as a dirty cop

cause I plant what I want on any crime scene

I keep my hands clean, you know what I mean

In the early rock and roll song "Framed," the Robbins offer a first-person account of victimization by an informer rather than police. The lead singer is put in a police lineup and realizes he is a victim of "someone's evil plan. When a stool pigeon walked in and said, 'That's the man."' In the political and commercial climate of the 1950s it was easier to talk of betrayal by an informer than by police.

Other songs go beyond bringing the news about potential abuses and urge active resistance. As Rakaa Iriscience bluntly puts it:

no questions

I pledge resistance to the grass

That hides the snakes of America

so they watch it, now I walk with caution…

Under heavy surveillance

They might call you a traitor if you want something greater

In “Del’s Nightmare”, Del the Funky Homosapien observes:

…They give us a white Jesus to appease us.

We talk among ourselves and hope nobody sees us.…

The slave master watching over you,

Always trying to tell you what the fuck to do!

The slave master watching over you,

But ain’t nothing gonna stop me and my crew!

Tupac Shakur in “All Eyez on Me” will do what he desires in spite of being scoped:

…Live my life as a Boss playa (I know y’all watching)

(I know y’all got me in the scopes)

Live my life as a Thug nigga

Until the day I die

With respect to drug testing Mojo Nixon applies Nancy Reagan's "Just say no" to his defiant "I Ain't Gonna Piss in No Jar" (1987). He can be fired from his job, but something more important can't be robbed "my freedom and my liberty." He urges everybody to go to Washington. If "they want our piss we ought to give it to 'em. Yeah, surround the White House with a urinary moat."

"Spy in the Cab" by Bauhaus protests meters recording the driving behavior of truckers. The electronic extension of the employer's vision is resented by the drivers. "Hidden in the dashboard the unseen mechanized eye" with "a set function to pry," brings a "coldly observing" twenty- four-hour "unblinking watch."

In “The Smoke Police” The Intended sing:

Undercover smoke police sulk in holes and corners they do not warn you openly like a cop in uniform does … Who knows if they will ask to smoke, thus hoping to entrap you?

Relative to officers in uniform, covert enforcement by those in plainclothes is seen as sneaky. There is no warning and there is the danger of entrapment. In addition, the song reflects knowledge of the organizational process of goal displacement (e.g., as seen in parking enforcement) when it asks, “will they make a busybody cause into a city cash cow?”

Jill Scott in “Watching Me” illustrates the neutralization moves of refusal and blocking in singing:

“Excuse me miss

May i have your phone number and your social security ?

Who me?

When all i came to do is buy my double or triple a batteries

Please

I decline!!!

…I'm gonna build me a lead house

Keep them satellites out

Sy Kahn, in "Who's Watching the Man," poses a classic issue for social control theory, asking "Who is watching the man who's watching the man who's watching me?"

Eric Carmen in LOST IN THE SHUFFLE separates himself from most of popular music in offering a satirical Marcusian critique of what is seen as the illusion of freedom.

You know you pay your taxes and you work all day

But you better watch out for the C.I.A.

“Cause they’re putting together a dossier on you

And now I’m glad I’m livin’ in the land of the free

Where I can speak my mind if I don’t agree

But it seems like it really doesn’t matter

What I say or do

“Cause I feel I’m lost in the shuffle

Black Bomb in “Police Stopped da way” note social control exists for the body and the mind which will be resisted:

Police for everything police…

Stop da way…

Police for da crimes

Stop da way

Police for da mind

Stop da way

When you think I’ll surrender

You get it wrong

I will not stay in you shit

When you think you’ll get my mind

You get it wrong

I prefer to start a fight

You get it wrong

In “Privacy Invasion” Exploited draws a parallel between physical and mental invasion and pessimistically suggests it’s too late.

You're led to think we're free, a democratic race Told of equal rights well that's just not the case It couldn't happen to a democratic nation Afraid we've got it now a privacy invasion Afghanistan's the last time, Poland's next in line …A PRIVACY INVASION It's good to know you're thought of, it's good someone should care It's good to know you're trusted but not to know they're there Too late to shut your curtains they've caught you unaware They're not at your window man, they're sitting in your chair A privacy invasion of the head

In an uncommon juxtaposition, Dead Prez expresses the traditional bourgeois concern with privacy, as well as noting the role of surveillance in sustaining inequality. In “Police State” we hear:

FBI spying on us through the radio antennas

And them hidden cameras in the streetlight watching society

With no respect for the people’s right to privacy

I’ll take a slug for the cause like Huey P. …

And the jobs don’t ever pay enough

So the rent always be late.

Can you relate?

We living in a police state

Anti-Flag in “Police State in the USA” responded to the fall of communism by observing similarities between elite control in the East and the West:

Politicians from the West claim the police state’s dead

But what of the police state in the West?

Police State in the U.S.A.

Fascism with a friendly face

Police State in the U.S. U.S.A. U.S.A. U.S.A.

The government controls everything you do

With police and fed watching over you…

It’s a big brother state it’s the same as the East

The cops protect the rich and corporate elite

Police State in the U.S.A.

In The Broadway’s “Police Song” we see the counter-intuitive suggestion that social control may threaten rather than protect public safety and attention is called to the parallels between control in prison and in society more broadly.

Tell me is this security, do we need protection from the police?

we need to reassess the power vested in authority

and social control threatens public safety do you feel safe?

…do you know what happens when we accept everything that we’ve been told?

We all fall down and we close our eyes and pretend not to see

…I had a dream that my whole town had turned into a prison

a cop on every corner but I don’t feel too safe

feels like I’m in jail

Similarly in “Bang Bang” Young buck asks, “…Why you mad at me? The Government’s the Drug Dealers.”

Jill Scott in her watching song suggests that surveillance is misplaced:

You busy watching me, watching me

That you’re blind baby

You neglect to see

The drugs coming into my community

Weapons in my community

Dirty cops in my community

And you keep saying that I’m free

Finally we can note several chronicles that focus on the sad fate of the agents rather than the subjects of surveillance. As in the film The Conversation, surveillance can be harmful to its practitioners in multiple ways:

Got to fix him before its too late

Police informer

Police Informer

You’ll end up dead

The 1966 television theme song "Secret Agent Man" warns of threats to life ("Odds are you won't live to see tomorrow") and depersonalization characteristic of bureaucracy and the need for secrecy ("They've given you a number, and taken away your name"). For Dire Straits, "Private Investigations" result in being "scarred for life-no compensation." At the end of the day you are left with whiskey and lies and a "pain behind the eyes."

In Exploited’s “Police Informer” we see a reverse morality tale. Rather than warning subjects to conform because of surveillance (e.g., the Santa Claus song), listeners are urged to be careful and informers are warned they will be killed.

Don’t tell him where you’ve been

And don’t tell him who you’ve seen

…Don’t tell him what you’ve got

And don’t talk about your mates

Cos he’ll grass them up as well

Technology Appreciation

While protest songs are common, we can also note songs that are neutral or suggest there is nothing to worry about. The taken for granted technology is part of routine activities and serves the interests of the user, with no judgment offered beyond implicit support.

In “Survival of the Fittest” C-Murder sings of his financial success protecting his family through video and canine surveillance:

My clientele was growin’ started investin’ in some other shit

Barber shops on every block, even had a weed spot

Moms and the kids put away up in the house

Surveillance cameras and alarms to spook a nigga out

Pitbulls in the backyard trained to kill

In “Ripples” by 4 Runner a voyeur is simply seen as part of the secret landscape of small town America:

The bank’s called in Bubba’s note

The Higgins boy’s done got on dope

And ol’ man Dodd’s been peeping through windows with a telescope

How can there be so many ripples in this tiny puddle

In what could be an advertizement for a telephone company REM in “Star 69” (the call trace number entered to identify the most recent caller) sings:

You don’t have to take the bar exam to see

What you’ve done is ignoramus 103

…I know you called, I know you called, …

I know you hung up my line

Star 69

In Roger Waters’ “Watching TV” the technology facilitates witnessing as it documents news of far away events that might be denied, were they not seen and heard.

I’ve been watching

In Tiananmen Square

Lost my baby there

My yellow rose …

We were watching TV

Watching TV

Watching TV

If not appreciation, we at least see routinization in the Red Hot Chilli Peppers song “Police Helicopter”. Such non-evaluative references may serve to familiarize listeners with the technology (although punk audiences familiar with the group may not require explicit evaluation to view it negatively).

Police Helicopter

shot the sky

Police Helicopter landin’ on my eye

Yeah!

Police Helicopter

takes a nose-dive

Police Helicopter, he ain’t shy

Yeah!

Aw!

Just Be Happy

Note also songs that either romanticize or make a joke out of surveillance activities. Cold war culture offered both Glamorized technology may be triumphantly used by the good guys as with James Bond. But consider also songs that satirize.

In "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues" Bob Dylan parodies the surveillant’s search for communist conspiracies. The problem is not surveillance, but the supposed cleverness of the communists. This requires extreme investigative means. In a social process endemic to the truly paranoid, the failure of strong measures to find subversives proves the need for even stronger measures. Communists are looked for "under my bed," "in the sink and underneath the chair," "up my chimney hole" even "deep down inside my toilet bowl," "in my TV set," "the library," and among "all the people that I knowed."

The 1985 film “Spies Like Us” is based on incompetent CIA aspirants who get caught cheating on the entrance exam.[xv] They are then hired to be unknowingly used as bait against the Russians. In the film’s theme song Paul McCartney sings:

Hey don’t feel afraid

Of an undercover aid

There’s no need to fuss

There ain’t nobody that spies like us

Some Implications

We didn’t have any answers, but at least we brought up the questions.

David Crosby of Crosby, Sills and Nash

In the first instance, the materials discussed above literally or symbolically speak for themselves. As with a good meal, the value comes from the experience. The uplifting religious music, fear and guilt inspiring melodies and orchestration, and the evocative or clever poetry of lyrics are just there. Experiencing them communicates on a level that goes well beyond academic analysis. In that sense questions about representative samples or social theory are beside the point.

Consuming the materials in cultural analysis is an end in itself. The material might even be profaned by shining too bright and probing a scientific beam on it. Yet it has meaning beyond the individual consumer. However, rather than deductively straining these materials through varieties of available explanatory theory, I will proceed inductively and indicate some implications for understanding surveillance and society.

Social scientists generally draw too rigid a line between their data and the offerings of the artist. Artistic creations can significantly inform us about surveillance and society. They can be approached from the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge and we can ask about the message conveyed, how this has changed, and how it correlates with the characteristics of the context, creator and the audience. Here art is treated as a dependent variable. But the materials can also inform us about broader societal issues, and we can speculate on their social impact as independent variables.

The treatment of surveillance in popular culture –whether music, television, cinema, cartoons, literature or advertisements brings the news. Broadly speaking such songs may educate by bringing descriptions and moral messages. The songs inform the audience about what surveillance can, or is presumed to be able to do. Because they are not bound by specific empirical cases, such cultural forms can bring us the big picture and push conventional boundaries of thought and image. They can be like the “ideal type” concepts of the social scientist which can help with understanding, even though as pure cases they do not really exist. Or they can be like some science fiction in offering a view of what could, or may happen.

Songs often offer a mix of the real and fantasy and are more likely to exaggerate, than to under-estimate the power of surveillance. But even that can be instructive when it anticipates actual developments. Life may imitate art, as things based on the imagination of the artist later come to exist. An early example is the 1936 film Modern Times, in which Charlie Chaplin's private reverie in the bathroom at work smoking a cigarette is shattered by the sudden appearance of his boss on a wall-sized video screen gruffly saying, "Hey, quit stalling and get back to work." The boss has a two-way video camera. H. G. Wells, James Bond, and Star Trek are some other familiar examples. Note also Television sets that can look back and the equivalent (and much more) of Dick Tracy’s wristwatch TV and Spiderman’s electronic location device (a Spider-Man comic inspired a New Mexico judge to implement the first judicial use of electronic location monitoring equipment).

Popular culture treatments of surveillance can help us “see” and understand (whether emotionally or cognitively) new developments in surveillance. Visual and auditory artistic expressions offer an alternative way of knowing relative to words –whether fiction or non-fiction. For example, we can more readily understand electronic data and microscopic DNA sequences when they are transformed into images through artistic representations. The blurry line between the human and the nonhuman --robots, cyborgs, implants, is more easily grasped when we see the results through artists' imaginary creations, or hear an electronically generated voice or weird sounds.

Songs such as “Watching Me” by Jill Scott or Judas Priest’s “Electronic Eye”, in bringing together so many different aspects, can help us grasp the scale, totality, comprehensiveness, and simultaneity of the new forms of surveillance across multiple dimensions. We can literally more easily see the larger picture. These songs are the equivalent of a New Yorker cartoon “Joe’s Drive-Thru Testing Center” which offers motorists tests for emissions, drugs, intelligence, cholesterol, blood pressure and the polygraph. (Fradon June 29, 1987)

The meaning of authoritarianism, repression, domination, intolerance, and spying is likely to be different when experienced vicariously through seeing and hearing, as against reading and quantifying. The traditional role of the artist in making the unseen visible (or what is not yet possible, imaginable) can be observed in some songs. Such media can educate in a distinctive and perhaps more profound sense than can the traditional written text. For example a popular protest song that periodically enters consciousness will likely have a much wider, more enduring and in some ways different, impact than an op-ed article or pamphlet on the same topic.[xvi] A melody, rhyme or rhythm may insinuate itself into consciousness (although the extent to which this comes with comprehension of the words is an empirical question).

Attention to the kinds of technology the music of a given period deals with can help chart change, just as the analysis of news stories or research articles on a topic can.[xvii] Contrasting song titles and lyrics over time and across settings can reveal the archaeological stratum of a culture as it influences, and is influenced by, social and technical change. Consider how songs have evolved as the technology has.

Bessie Smith in her 1923 rendition of “T’Ain’t Nobody’s Business” offered a libertarian plea consistent with Warren and Brandeis (1890) emphasis on the importance of a right to privacy that involves being “let alone”:

If I go to church on Sunday And I honkytonk all day Monday Ain’t nobody’s business if I do

In a related plea for tolerance, in the early 1950s Hank Williams in “Mind Your Own Business” complained about other individuals, rather than governments or corporations, invading privacy:

Oh, the woman on our party line’s the nosiest thing She picks up her receiver when she knows it’s my ring Why don’t you mind your own business

While by the 1990s REM in Star 69 sings about the ability to trace the last telephone number dialed. Paul Simon in the 1960s said of "Mrs. Robinson," "We'd like to know a little bit about you for our [presumably manual] files" and in “America” sang of the spy in a gabardine suit whose "bow tie is really a camera". Several decades later he was writing about, “lasers in the jungle” and “staccato signals of constant information” in "The Boy in the Bubble”.[xviii] Still later songs are concerned with DNA and microchips.

In a period of rapid technical change the songs risk being quickly dated and having their humorous or satirical punch undermined (e.g., songs from the 1970s and 80s suggesting that the TV camera one watches could be looking back at the watcher). Now, with systems for monitoring television viewing, webcams and video phones, this is science not fiction. While still far from being able to know “everything I am thinking”, technologies for reading emotions and assessing truth telling from facial expressions, eye movements and brain wave patterns are under development. Consider also seat cushions that measure wiggling as signs of attentiveness.

Kinds of Content

From a Marxian or Gramscian perspectives stressing the links between power and culture, the songs (and other forms of mass media) should be thematically supportive of the established order. The dominant ideas in a time period are likely to reflect the interests of those who are dominant, given their disproportionate control over the means of culture creation and distribution and their ability to censor. Glorification, spinning, obfuscation and censorship are certainly prominent features of the mainstream media. Escapist media may further call attention away from social issues.

In the themes of children’s songs and those by suspicious male lovers power differences and the case for conformity and the status quo are clearly heard. Beyond the reassurance offered by protection, their message is, “you are not alone and you can’t get away with it”. As with the implicit morality of the fairy tale, the dominant figure knows what the child (or adult) is up (or down) to. Rewards and punishment will flow from that knowledge.

The music accustoms the child to being watched by benign (sometimes unseen), all-powerful authority figures. This encourages internalization of the dominant society’s standards. Children come to look at themselves through the eyes of presumably loving authority figures that benignly and paternalistically have their best interests at heart. The message carries over into adulthood as they become citizens and workers.

These songs are meant to inspire confidence and to re-assure. Others in a one-sided glorification of surveillance exploits ala James Bond may do the same thing. Even some songs from the point of view of those watched, while not meant to be supportive or reassuring, may encourage conformity by suggesting that resistance is futile.

Songs with humorous and/or satirical components may suggest that there is nothing to worry about. The entertainment quality may be beguiling. If surveillants are simply Keystone Cop bunglers, or have magical and exaggerated powers far beyond what the technology can presently do, then there is little to worry about (at least for now). Their incompetence makes them incapable of doing harm, in spite of their technology or the technology is depicted so unrealistically as to be unworthy of concern. Such songs, along with those that simply fold the technology into other themes hardly inspire vigilance.

Yet in spite of fashionable concerns about capitalist cultural hegemony, we can also note capitalist irony and complexity. There is much space for counter-messages even if they are in the minority, nor found equally in all communications media (the Internet for example opens up vast new opportunities for those previously unable to own a printing press or a radio or television station). Whatever the disproportionate influence of the dominants (sounds like the name of a rock group), this is far from total. Factors undercutting dominant voices can be identified.

A counter view offered by the pluralist perspective, while not claiming that all messages or images are equal, observes that a free market economy with civil liberties offers opportunities for opposing voices. These are further encouraged by the fact that ideological systems contain contradictory and inconsistent elements. Belief systems are rarely so clearly specified with respect to their meaning in particular cases as to avoid legitimate challenges (at least in the eyes of the challengers).

Marked discrepancies between the claims of the dominant world view and the observable empirical world may generate critiques and alternative views. The dominant culture also contains value conflicts. The interest of elites in ideological hegemony may conflict with the profit motive of some segments (consider record companies profiting from selling anti-establishment materials –whether Columbia Records’ early endorsement of folk music or the current establishment marketing of rap music).[xix]

The idea of the all-knowing surveillant carries the threat to conform to the standards of the watcher, or face the consequences. Where there is a high degree of consensus about rules this is not an issue, but with contested norms (e.g, involving work monitoring, drugs, life style or the legitimacy of political and other elites) surveillance can become very contentious and meet with opposition. The protest song reflects a type of cultural neutralization that, in bringing the news about the bad things “they” are doing, may encourage questioning and call forth resistance. If such things can happen to ordinary people like the singer as several songs suggest, then they could happen to anyone.

There may be dialectical processes in which what is dominant calls forth its opposite, which in turn calls forth opposites in a long chain. Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” was written in response to “God Bless America”. The hegemonic lesson in “I fought the law and the law won” was eventually matched by the Dead Kennedys “Drinkin’ beer in the hot sun I Fought the Law and I Won”. In spite of a large number of anti-war songs in response to Viet Nam, the most popular record of the period was “The Ballad of the Green Beret”. The abundance of 1960s and 1970s songs criticizing establishment ways, encouraging protest and supporting counter cultural life styles were met by tunes such as Merle Haggard’s “An Okie from Muscokee” – “a place where even squares can have a ball …wave Old Glory down at the courthouse And white lightnin’s still the biggest thrill of all …and the kids still respect the college dean”.

This is not to suggest that views in opposition to the mainstream receive equivalent attention, nor that they are equally found across types of expression and media. Strong opposing views are much more likely to be found in popular music (even if in a minority of songs), in cartoons and on websites than in television, major studio films or newspapers. The degree of corporate control and the resources needed for expression are relevant factors here.

Socialization for Conformity or Calls to Resist?

The music and other artistic expressions can be seen as part of a broader political struggle over the meaning of surveillance technology and how it ought to be judged. Is surveillance best seen as benevolent protection or malevolent domination and when? This involves conflicts over symbols and words. Cultural communications and political interests are often linked.

Each side has its preferred outlets and audience. For governments and manufacturers and vendors offering surveillance services communications tend to be directed to focused, rather than mass audiences. There are no songs praising political surveillance, drug testing, informing, video surveillance and work monitoring (although in Japan company songs might encourage conformity with the latter two).[xx] Instead print media, speeches, professional publications and advertisements are the preferred outlets for their supportive views regarding protection, order and security. Employers and merchants generally say much less about their control means, although signs may inform subjects about video cameras, searches and drug tests. Given their dominant position, such notice is for legal reasons and to encourage deterrence, rather than as propaganda to persuade.

In contrast, artistic expression in a society with civil liberties is a prime means for expressing criticism and this tends to be addressed to a mass audience. Plato wanted poets to be controlled by the state --and with good reason, from an establishment perspective. Cartoonists, popular songwriters, and artists, when dealing with the topic, often demystify, expose, and delegitimate surveillance and take the role of the watched, controlled or victim.[xxi]

Reduced to essentials, the artists tend to view technology as the enemy or the problem, and control agents and those who meet their needs view it as the savior or the solution. The sides are mirror opposites. It is an interesting exercise to fill in the other half of the story. The various means of communication are as revealing for what they say, as for what they do not say.

Just whose message gets across most successfully, under what conditions, to what audiences is a topic for quantitative empirical research and goes far beyond the literal words of a song.

Frank Zappa observed, “there are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.” In considering the impact of a song’s words we must be humble and tentative and not assume that they will be uniformly heard and understood, or lead to feelings or action that might be desired by the artist. There is great variety among listeners, contexts, music and time periods. Lyrics can be analyzed for their presumed intended meaning (whether by the creator, performer or promoter), or with more confidence, their meaning to the listener. A song’s origins, assumptions and connections to other songs and things happening in the society can be analyzed. But in most cases it is a leap from there to broad generalizations about the meaning of a song to mass highly variegated audiences. However song content can be considered with respect to some broad factors involving the contemporary sociology of surveillance.

But first a brief comment on disentangling lyrics and music. A song’s effect may stem from more than the meaning of its words. The interaction of lyric, musical structure and instrumentation on the listener is a topic for a musicologist, rather than an amateur listener. But here we can at least note that certain chords, rhythms and instruments are heavy and somber and others communicate lightness and seem upbeat. One need not know how to read musical notation to read music. Consider John Williams’ work for the Star Wars and other films, or the warning viewers experience when a film’s music suggests doom and dread, or the uplift when the music suggests that victory is at hand.

Words may say one thing even as the melody communicates something very different.[xxii] We hear through our bodies as well as through our ears. Thus Little Richard in “Slippin’ and Slidin” is behaving badly in spying on his girl friend, but the song has a toe tapping, upbeat rhythm which makes one want to dance and ignore the content. Compare the infectious rhythms of this song to the somber, threatening feeling generated by Queensryche’s equivalent voyeuristic song “Gonna Get Close to You” with different instrumentation and slow rhythm. The words to Sting’s “Every Breath You Take” suggest a massive invasion of privacy, yet the song is often heard as a love song because of its melody. Consider also songs in a different language whose words are not generally understood, but that become popular because of a the familiar melody. Nor are words necessary –note Jimi Hendrix’ protest version of the national anthem at Woodstock in 1968 in which the guitar simulates the sounds of guns, sirens and screams.[xxiii]

Hits and Misses

This article is drawn from a broader project on surveillance. Most of the analysis there is in a traditional social scientific vein in which I analyze observable events –the actual behavior of individuals and organizations and documents such as laws and policies. The empirical analysis emphasizes the complexity, contradictions and multi-dimensionality of surveillance. There are conflicting aspects which means that sweeping either/or positions, whether moral or explanatory, will seldom apply. We also see this within themes of the music. The music further illustrates aspects of this complexity and offers a kind of validation, or at least extension of the more general argument.

Thus individuals need protection from many things and this changes depending on factors such as social characteristics (e.g., age and ethnicity) and context. We have considered songs in which protection is promised and is sought. Children need protection and parents sing about this, whether by God or the parent. The emphasis is on watching the subject, the environment and others who might do harm.

Lovers sing about looking out for (and at) each other. Here we see not only the protective theme, but the idea of surveillance as a form of pleasure, whether reciprocal or not. (Delint 2000, Pecoria 2003, Marx 2003,).

Protective and romantic surveillance tend to be consensual and to serve the interests of both the watched and the watcher. Songs here involve thankfulness and appreciation, or revel in the positive functions of watching. From the standpoint of those protected and their protectors and co-surveillants, this is less controversial than forms only serving the social control and strategic goals of the surveillance agent. The latter tend to be non-consensual and/or done without the subject’s knowledge.

Yet if the songs reflect many aspects of surveillance in our culture, there are others they ignore. For example they do not deal well with the topic’s inconsistencies, conflicts and ironies for both the individual and society. Perhaps the medium’s form does not lend itself as well to this (limited time, short and repetitive phrases), as is the case for the written word.

The songs do not deal with the conflict in values of liberty and order, individualism and community or secrecy and openness, nor of the tradeoffs public policy involves. Rather, only one side of the equation is noted, whether the protective or control aspects.

Nor is there consideration of the inconsistency and ambivalence seen in survey data. Privacy and often anonymity are elements individuals highly value for themselves, even as they seek transparency with respect to the behavior of others. Nor do the songs consider the tension between the individual’s need to be noticed and the need for privacy. Depending on the context, individuals want to be both seen and not seen and too see and not see others. Given the social nature of identity, acknowledgement from others is central in a media defined society. Yet so too is the space to be “ourselves” in a society so steeped in communication and surveillance. Curiosity is a defining characteristic of a heterogeneous society and the modern age is steeped in vicarious experience and validation of identity through seeing images of one’s self.[xxiv] Yet there are also things one does not wish to know about others, even as they may wish to inflict images and stories upon us.[xxv]

This contradiction between the desire for visibility and invisibility is particularly pronounced for media figures. For both commercial and psychological reasons they seek attention. Michael Jackson’s complaint about paparazzi and privacy is resonant, yet ironically the notice brought by the media is central to his career.[xxvi]

In addition privacy, or more broadly the ability to control personal information, ironically can be the means to community, as well as destructive of it. Intimacy for example is dependent on the exclusion of others. Separation from others can serve to increase the togetherness of a couple. Consider “Tea for Two” –“nobody near us to see us or hear us, no friends or relations on weekend vacations, we won’t have it known dear that we own a telephone” or the rock and roll song, “Hey Seniorita, let me take you home, if you do that baby, then we could be alone”. Blue in the appropriately titled “Privacy” sings, “think it’s time for us to leave, can we get some privacy”. Dolly Parton’s

“Potential New Boyfriend” is “…twisting my ignition key Turn my motor on …Give us some privacy.”

Songs complaining about the invasion of individual privacy are found along with romantic ballads in which couples seek to be alone in order to cross conventional privacy borders, but no songs acknowledge both. In generally bringing a single message, the songs are one-sided against the richness of social life.

The surveillance protection songs ignore surveillance as control and domination, or imply that controlling the person’s behavior is always for their own protection. The protest songs tend to reflect the view of those subject to control and are unappreciative. Given values of liberty and equality, there is much not to appreciate. Unreciprocated and unbounded surveillance can deny dignity, inhibit creativity and make autonomous group life impossible. Yet even with surveillance as social control, there is also much to appreciate and the songs are notably silent here. Surveillance with its visibility can bring accountability. (Etzioni 1999; Allen 2003). Privacy taken to an extreme can hide wrong doing.

Apart from the religious songs praising sacred and parental protective surveillance, there are almost no songs praising government, corporate and employer surveillance. The means of expressing a cultural message, as well as its content, varies depending on whose interests are served.

Regardless of the content pulsing through the medium, the new technologies allow for a previously unimaginable accounting and control of consumer behavior. This is rationalized by embedded notions of pay as you go and information as private property.

Controversies over "digital rights management" technologies reflect this.

Here the concern is not with a governmental large sibling, but with big corporation controlling what one is “entitled to” listen to and watch and whether or not it can be copied or altered. With this comes the monitoring of communications behavior to insure conformity and for billing purposes. Of course one can always just say “no” to the control via code and infrastructure offered by means such as cable TV, TIVO and internet song purchasing. But to the extent that these become ever more seductive, available and monopolistic, opting out becomes harder.

The content of the protest songs considered here largely reflects only one aspect of traditional surveillance –the political. At some point however there will likely be songs that ironically use the very means of entertainment delivery that they rally against and in doing this may undermine dominant interests.

The content and structure would then be joined in an ironic way. We earlier noted how the means of delivering entertainment also served as surveillance mechanisms. But roads go in two directions. The control found in the means of media delivery may themselves come under a critical spotlight. Such content would reflect concern over corporate media surveillance and social control rather than political spying and would rely on the very means they challenge. The enduring potential for the appropriation of technology (and control means more generally) by those it is directed against offers rich material for the student of unintended consequences.[xxvii]

I have tried, as singer David Crosby suggests to bring the questions and to suggest some possible answers. A next step is for more systematic empirical research and to relate music as a cultural form to other surveillance message bearers such as cinema, jokes, literature and advertisements.

REFERENCES

Berko, L. 1992. “Surveying the Surveilled: Video, Space and Subjectivity”. Quarterly Review of Film and Video. 14:1-2.

De Lint, W. “Arresting the Eye: Surveillance, Social Control, and Resistance. Assemblages: Space and Culture. 7:21-49.

Eglash, R., Croissant, J., Di Chiro, G., Fouche, R. 2004. Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power. Minneapolis: University of Minn. Press.

Ferrell, J. 1996. Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Style. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Fusco, C. 1995. English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New York: New Press.

Koestler, A. 1984 Darkness at Noon. New York: Bantam.

Lehr, D. O’Neill G. 2000. Black Mass. Washington DC Public Affairs.

Marx, G. 1997. “The Declining Significance of Traditional Borders and the Appearance of New Borders in an Age of High Technology.” in P. Droege (ed.) Intelligent Environments. North-Holland: Elsevier Science. 484-494.

--1998. "An Ethics for the New Surveillance." The Information Society. 14:171-185.

—2001. "Murky Conceptual Waters: The Public and the Private." Ethics and Information Technology, 3:157-169.

—2002a. "What’s New About the New Surveillance?: Classifying for Change and Continuity." Surveillance and Society, 1:

—2002b. "Technology and Gender: Thomas I. Voire and the Case of the Peeping Tom." The Sociological Quarterly, 407-433.

---2005a. “Seeing Hazily (But Not Darkly) Through the Lens: Some Recent Empirical Studies of Surveillance Technologies”. Law and Social Inquiry, 30:339-399.

---2005b borders

—forthcoming. "Varieties of Personal Information as Influences on Attitudes Toward Surveillance." In R. Ericson and K. Haggerty, The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press.

Monahan, Torin. 2005. Globalization, Technological Change, and Public Education. New York: Routledge.

Pecora, V. 2002. “The Culture of Surveillance”. Qualitative Sociology. Vol. 25:3.

Rule, J. 1983. “1984 –The Ingredients of Totalitarianism”. 1984 Revisted, ed. I. Howe. New York: HarperCollins

Sykes, G., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22, 664-670.

Vannini, P. and Myeres, S. 2002. “Crazy About You: Reflections on the Meanings of Contemporary Teen Pop Music”. Electronic Journal of Sociology. Vol. 6: 2. content/vol006.002/

Warren, S. and Brandeis, L. 1890 “The Right to Privacy” Harvard Law Review. 4.

Whitehead, S. N. 2005. “The Enemy in Blue: The Image of the Police in Music”, in this volume, pp. - -.

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[i] But note he takes no notice of emerging technologies for brain wave reading. In similar fashion, the technique of the heroes of Fahrenheit 451 who preserved books from burning my memorizing them, would also be at risk. The film The Truman Show ends on a similar note when Truman says to his failed creator, “but you never had a camera inside my head.”

[ii] In Marx (1997, 2001 and 2005b) some blurred forms considered are space, distance, darkness, time and social and cultural borders. Globalization figures in many of these changes. Monahan (2005 p. 4) views globalization “…as the blurring of boundaries previously held as stable and fixed under conditions of modernity: between local/global, public/private, self/other, nation/world, space/time, and structure/agency, to name a few. This blurring process is characterized by increased flows, exchanges, and interconnections but also by points of resistance, disconnection, and abjection.”    

[iii] Consider as well participants in reality television shows who later come to “play” themselves in soap operas based on their persona. Pecora (2002) describes one such case. Note also the related form of those who use their non-artistic experiences to later create art. Books by crooks and cops are a prime example. In the mid-18th century Henry Fiedling, a central figure in the creation of the modern British police, was a novelist and also a justice of the peace.

[iv] Analysis of these means of categorization are in Marx 2005, forthcoming, and 2002a respectively.

[v] That protection defined as rule enforcement is not always protection for the subject is a bit too subtle for this context. Some observers may see a less than clarion and rigorous logic here. If these forces are so all powerful and determining (e.g., the claim that Jesus “safely guides their little footsteps so they won’t go astray”), why should the individual be punished for violations? Does every social control effort protect the presumed subject? Just who sets the standards and whose interests are served when the controlled are stopped from disobeying the standards of the authoritative?

[vi] There is an ambiguity in look. In singing, “Hey good looking” Williams clearly means that she is good to look at. But being a good looker can also suggest that one is, ala flirting or being a skilled detective, good at looking at others. Note also the double entendre in the classic, “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places.”

[vii] The film Rear Window appeared at the height of a Cold War-generated climate of suspicion and as new imaging technologies such as the zoom lens became available. It contains Thelma Ritter’s classic line, "We have become a nation of Peeping Toms."

[viii] As held in the 1765 British case of Entick v. Harrington. The case contrasts mere looking with physical trespass and physically taking away tangible items from a private residence. Yet several centuries later with sexual harassment legislation and employee protection laws, looking can apparently be legally regulated as well. See the curious case of Tom I. Voire (Marx 2002b)

[ix] This version is sung by Russ Ballard. In another version done by The Rays when he arrives and knocks on the door he discovers that he is “on the wrong block” and overwhelmed with love, rushes to the correct address.

[x] The idea of neutralization was first applied to culture by Sykes and Matza (1957 ) as they asked how cultural messages helped individuals rationalize rule breaking. Music can be an important source for such counter- messages.

[xi] I have identified 11 behavioral techniques of neutralization (Marx 2003) used to thwart the collection of personal information --e.g., the use or discovery means such as traffic radar detectors or of masking techniques such as dextox products to deceive drug tests.

[xii] Rule (1983) notes 20th century developments permitting both mass surveillance and mass communication.

[xiii] Here we see a common confusion. These are not necessarily opposed. Secrecy can be involved in protecting privacy when the very existence of a type of information is not known or the key to accessing information is secret (e.g., a password). Yet the secrecy of covert surveillance can also be a means of invading privacy.

Whether or not something is secret refers to the empirical status of information –whether it is known or not known. As such it is adjectival in a way that private is not. That is, information can be private in the sense of being normatively subject to the control of the person to whom it refers. If the person chooses to release it or if it is discovered, it ceases to be secret even though it retains its normative status of being private information.

[xiv] Such sentiments inform police department’s videotaping police and the activities of a former Southern California police officer who created a citizen organization to follow and videotape police-citizen encounters.

[xv] Consider also the theme music associated with the Pink Panther series and the misnamed Maxwell Smart in the 1960s sitcom “Get Smart”. As a bumbling secret agent working for CONTROL Smart demonstrated a profound ineptitude. The sole of his shoe was a telephone that frequently dialed the wrong number and his jet shoes propelled him into the roof.

[xvi] Labor organizer and singer Joe Hill reportedly observed that a pamphlet no matter how good is only read once.

[xvii] For example from 1960-1970 Sociological Abstracts listed just 10 articles that included the concept surveillance, this increased to 87 and 156 in the next two decades: From 1990-2000 577 such articles appeared, and in just the next three years, more than half that number. Using the concept privacy, the search engine LegalTrac reported only 37 law-related articles using the concept privacy in 1980, 275 by 1990, and 649 in 2002.

[xviii] Ambivalence not protest is the theme here. He sings these are the "days of miracle and wonder" with heart transplants and the boy in the bubble-yet this appears to be sarcastic, as these also come wit images of remote bombs in baby carriages/

[xix] In a related example the advertisements that accompany protest (and other lyrics) on the web must cause a smile in even the most jaded social critic. Note advertisements to “Send [name of singing group] polyphonic ringtone to your cell phone” or a moving target under the banner “SHOOT THE PAPARAZZI! Get Your FREE Sony PSP or Nintendo DS.”

[xx] But contrast the propaganda efforts on behalf of informing seen the USSR. A young boy who informed on his father’s bourgeois sentiments was made a national hero.

[xxi] There is of course variation within musical genre –thus religious and country and western music are in general supportive and folk, alternative and rap music more critical. There are many country and western songs about “big brother”, but these are always about an elder sibling.

[xxii] They may also work together to give a consistent picture and feeling. Stephanie Whitehead (2005)

notes how the violent lyrical content regarding police in alternative and rap songs is supported by the music. The negative feelings created by, “smashing drums, the harsh guitar licks, and the deep bass noises” serve to “…associate the police with the darker side of humanity. No cheerful beats are heard in these songs, what you hear is fear, pain, hatred, and anger.”

[xxiii] Performers may also encourage social and political change through concerts that seek to raise funds and increase awareness in which most, or all, of the songs performed lack a protest message (e.g., Farm Aid).

[xxiv] There were so many participant applications for the second edition of the TV program “Survivor” that Federal Express stopped delivering to the producers. (Pecora 2002). More than a decade ago the program “America’s Funniest Home Videos was receiving more than 2000 videos a day. (Berko 1992)

[xxv] When even just two persons our considered, this offers a rich field for analysis of the correlates and consequences of varying preferences. The most interesting are those where preferences are discordant.

[xxvi] Apparently within the professional ethic (or if that is too flattering a term --at least ethos) of the paparazzi a distinction is made between images captured with the connivance of the subject and those more genuine in which according to a leading practitioner the idea “...is to hide and catch the real stars just being themselves.” New York Times, Sept. 14, 2005.

[xxvii] On appropriated technologies for example see Eglash et al 2004 and Fusco 1995.

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