AIDS Rage: Paranoia and Anger in Music about AIDS

Paul G. Attinello

Music has been written about aspects of the AIDS crisis in a variety of genres since 1983. Although musical and cultural constructions within each genre are often remarkably consistent, among all the genres are recurrent and comparable threads, of which the most common are mourning, fear and loneliness. However, a rarer but culturally important strand is that of anger, aimed from "inside" (that is, from points of view or by creators inside the community of people with AIDS) towards an "outside" of government, religion, health care or a "general public". Most of these pieces are exceptionally marginal in point of view and musical construction, even in the context of art about AIDS, where marginality is a common trope.

Quasi-paranoid narratives and defensive hostility, built around ideas that the virus was artificially generated or distributed, appear as early as the first known piece of music about AIDS, Zappa¹s prologue to his satiric musical Thing-Fish (1983). Similar constructions of anger that include some paranoid elements, though they may sidestep a complete paranoid narrative, appear in performance art music by Diamanda Galás and David Wojnarowicz, as well as in classical music (notably several references in the original volume of The AIDS Song Quilt as well as individual chamber works) and songs by popular groups such as The JAMS and Concrete Blonde. Musical tropes in these genres could be generally identified as "expressionistic", imitating a variety of harmonic, rhythmic and processive patterns familiar from avant-garde and popular models. It is also clear that most are constructed around notably public spaces groups rather than soloists, stage rather than concert which suggests that anger might more typically be expressed in a public rather than a (virtually) private sphere. In all these works, whether such rage and paranoia is a central aspect of the work or a peripheral one, it is given a clearly marked position in the dramatic or musical construction such that, for example, the few angry songs in The AIDS Song Quilt are positioned at climactic and transitional points in the song cycle. This suggests that the expression of rage/paranoia is crucial to the entire body of music about AIDS that, despite its relative rarity, it is a key to the whole.

Finally, the paper will attempt to close the circle between paranoia and anger: if they seem to have a common emotional source and musical expression, they might be linked also in terms of their ultimate meanings. In an important article on paranoia, Sedgwick recently quoted AIDS theorist Cindy Patton as asking whether it would really matter if the virus had been synthesized, if that would change our understanding of the forces involved. Perhaps, twenty-five years on in this crisis, we can reconsider: does it really matter, and to whom?

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