Politics & Power Quote by Holly Near

Holly Near draws a clean blade between music as intimacy and music as infrastructure. The line lands because she refuses the comforting myth that art is automatically liberating; sound is power, and power is always up for grabs. By pairing “Muzak” with “lullaby,” she makes the same basic function - soothing - split into two moral universes: one chosen, one imposed.

“Muzak” isn’t just a genre here; it’s a system. It’s the background score of malls, offices, waiting rooms: music engineered to smooth friction, dampen dissent, and keep bodies moving through routines. When Near says it can “put a whole nation to sleep,” she’s aiming at mass sedation as cultural policy: distraction that feels like comfort, a constant low-grade pleasantness that makes it harder to notice what’s being taken, who’s being harmed, what’s being normalized. The subtext is political: if a population is numbed, it’s governable.

Then she pivots to the lullaby, a deliberately small-scale counterexample. A lullaby is also manipulative - it alters mood, it regulates attention - but its intent is care, not compliance. The key phrase is “in a sweet way,” which argues that ethics in music aren’t about purity, they’re about relationship: consent, proximity, accountability.

Near’s context matters: a lifelong activist-musician from the folk tradition where songs are tools - for organizing, mourning, survival. Her warning isn’t anti-music. It’s a call to listen like a citizen, not just a consumer, and to ask who benefits from the quiet.