"Using music to promote hate seems to be the bastardisation of music to me"
About this Quote
Chris Lowe calls out a moral inversion: turning a medium built for connection into a weapon. To call it a "bastardisation" is to say the music has been adulterated, its lineage corrupted. Melody and rhythm bypass our rational filters; they gather people in bodies and moods. When that power is used to seed resentment and dehumanize, the art is not simply carrying a message; it is being bent against its nature, the way a bridge meant to span a river can be used to blockade it.
The perspective fits the Pet Shop Boys ethos. Emerging from club culture that offered refuge to outsiders, their pop has long argued for empathy, irony deployed against cruelty, and dance as a site of belonging. It is no accident that "It’s a Sin" turns shame into catharsis, that "Being Boring" mourns with tenderness, or that "Integral" critiques authoritarian overreach. The duo rose amid the AIDS crisis and moral panics in the UK, when music and nightlife were lifelines for LGBTQ communities. For Lowe, a scene that taught solidarity and play makes any attempt to recruit music for bigotry feel not just wrong but scandalously off-key.
There is a useful distinction between art that challenges injustice and art that targets people. Protest music imagines a wider circle of care; hate anthems narrow it. One seeks to open the social imagination; the other to harden it. Because songs can lodge in memory and be shared at scale, responsibilities multiply. Lowe’s phrase "seems to me" softens the rhetoric but not the principle: art has agency, and so do artists and audiences. To steward music is to keep faith with its capacity to humanize. When it is drafted into campaigns of contempt, the harm is double, wounding both the targets and the medium itself. The defense of music’s dignity is, here, a defense of communal possibility.
The perspective fits the Pet Shop Boys ethos. Emerging from club culture that offered refuge to outsiders, their pop has long argued for empathy, irony deployed against cruelty, and dance as a site of belonging. It is no accident that "It’s a Sin" turns shame into catharsis, that "Being Boring" mourns with tenderness, or that "Integral" critiques authoritarian overreach. The duo rose amid the AIDS crisis and moral panics in the UK, when music and nightlife were lifelines for LGBTQ communities. For Lowe, a scene that taught solidarity and play makes any attempt to recruit music for bigotry feel not just wrong but scandalously off-key.
There is a useful distinction between art that challenges injustice and art that targets people. Protest music imagines a wider circle of care; hate anthems narrow it. One seeks to open the social imagination; the other to harden it. Because songs can lodge in memory and be shared at scale, responsibilities multiply. Lowe’s phrase "seems to me" softens the rhetoric but not the principle: art has agency, and so do artists and audiences. To steward music is to keep faith with its capacity to humanize. When it is drafted into campaigns of contempt, the harm is double, wounding both the targets and the medium itself. The defense of music’s dignity is, here, a defense of communal possibility.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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