Loud Is a Method

Woody Guthrie’s guitar had a sticker on it that read this machine kills fascists. It was not a metaphor. He was serious. The guitar was the machine. The song was the killing. The evidence was the room full of workers who left the meeting angrier than they came in, which is what he wanted, because there were things to be angry about.

The standard critique of loud, angry, argumentative music is that it is loud, angry, and argumentative — and that people who make loud, angry, argumentative music are therefore not serious. This is like saying that people who use a hammer are not serious about carpentry because a hammer is loud. The volume is the tool. The anger is the tool. The argument is the point.

What follows is a brief technical manual.

Step 1: Have something to be right about

Most yelling fails at step one. The person yelling has an unexamined intuition, a bad mood, a stomach complaint, or a Twitter feed, and they mistake any of these for a position. This is amateur yelling. It sounds correct because it is loud, but the underlying claim, when isolated, dissolves into vapor.

Correct yelling begins with a defensible claim. Not a feeling. A claim. Something that could, in principle, be wrong. Something that has been checked. If you cannot state, in a single sentence, what you are yelling about and why the yelling is warranted, do not yell yet. Read something first.

Bad Religion have released seventeen studio albums, most of them under thirty minutes, most of them yelled. Greg Graffin has a PhD in zoology from Cornell. His dissertation was on how working scientists reconcile their empirical practice with religious belief. The yelling and the PhD are the same activity performed at different volumes.

Step 2: Understand what yelling is for

Yelling is a compression algorithm. A calm essay can afford three thousand words. A song has ninety seconds before the second chorus. Everything in the song has to be lossily compressed until only the argument’s spine remains, and then the spine has to be delivered at a volume the listener cannot politely ignore.

This is why bumper stickers are not literature and songs are not blog posts. Different formats, different jobs. A bumper sticker that reads I have complicated feelings about the current administration is not a bumper sticker. It is a suicide note for the sticker.

Yelling compresses. That is the function.

Step 3: Anger is data

Moral outrage has been studied empirically for at least twenty years and is now a substantial subfield of social psychology. The finding, briefly: outrage functions as a social signal. It tells other people that a norm has been violated. It coordinates response. It costs the yeller something — social standing, calories, sleep — which makes the signal costly, which makes the signal credible.

A calm person disagreeing with a norm violation is, from an evolutionary standpoint, indistinguishable from a person who did not notice. An angry person disagreeing with a norm violation is the fire alarm. One of these gets the room evacuated.

The people who tell you to calm down are, on average, the ones who benefit from the norm violation. This is not a coincidence. It is a design feature of the request.

Step 4: Do not yell what you cannot defend calmly

This is the discipline that separates the yell that changes minds from the yell that gets you unfollowed.

If you cannot, when asked, sit down and defend the yell in ordinary conversational English with sources and reasoning, do not yell it. The yell must be the compressed version of a longer argument that exists somewhere, in your head, on a page, in a footnote, in a citation. The absence of the longer argument is why most yelling on the internet is unpersuasive: nobody wrote the essay behind the tweet. The compressed version has nothing to decompress into.

Correct yelling has the essay behind it. The listener may never read the essay. That does not matter. The essay has to exist, because it is the source of the yell’s density. A yell without an essay is a scream. A yell with an essay is an argument played at high volume.

Step 5: Play loud

Once the essay exists, the discipline is complete, and the argument has passed the checks, the last step is to play it as loudly as the room will allow, because the volume is the whole point. The volume is what distinguishes the yell from an academic paper nobody reads.

Nobody has ever been persuaded of anything at a volume of zero. This is not a critique of paper. Paper is a fine format for long thoughts that need to sit still. But some arguments will die on paper. Some arguments require a stage, a chord, a room full of people who came to have their preexisting suspicions confirmed at high fidelity.

The essay is the machine. The yell is the trigger. The room is the ammunition. And there is, still, quite a lot to be angry about.

Play loud.