How Conflict Changes the Style of Music
There’s a point in every storm when a voice rises. Not in triumph — not yet—but out of necessity. That’s when music shifts. War, injustice, exile, heartbreak — these aren't just the backdrop to history. They're the percussion. The downbeat. The guttural bass note that turns melody into movement. Conflict doesn’t just shape music — it burns it clean, strips it raw, and rewrites it in the language of the streets, the battlefield, the prison yard, and the refugee camp.
Would you like to know how conflict changes style? Step into the boots of a conscripted teenager in Saigon '68. Hear Hendrix detune the national anthem like a man pulling barbed wire from his chest. Walk through a Birmingham church after the bomb, where Mahalia’s voice floats not just in grief but in righteous thunder. Sit in the dust beside a broken radio in Gaza, and feel the beat still pulsing — cracked, clipped, but alive.
In conflict, the beat gets urgent. No time for frills, just blood and truth. You go from jazz’s elegant swing to Coltrane’s sheets of sound, like fire chasing through a tunnel. You move from Motown polish to the gritty edge of Curtis Mayfield and Gil Scott-Heron. A verse becomes a weapon. A chorus becomes an act of defiance. Style sharpens its teeth.
And when resources vanish, when the power gets cut, when the soldiers come knocking? That’s when music slips underground. The gear might be gone, but the spirit gets louder. You make rhythms with your breath. You hum into plastic mics and loop it. You turn a sampler into a symphony of resistance. Ask the Bronx in ’79. Ask Lagos in the days of Fela. Ask Chile under Pinochet, or the ghettos of Warsaw, where a violin might be the last proof of God.
Conflict also makes music simpler, not lesser, but leaner. Like gospel stripped to a moan. Like punk boiled down to three chords and the truth, spat through a busted amp. The kids in combat boots and the elders in dashikis — they’re all speaking the same dialect: Now. Music of immediacy. Music that doesn’t wait for permission.
But let’s not forget that conflict also makes music beautiful. Pain paints with richer colours. Harmony comes at a cost, so when it appears, it hits harder. Think of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” That wasn’t hope — that was prophecy sung through clenched teeth. Think of Marvin Gaye. Nina Simone. Victor Jara. Each note is a fingerprint from someone who saw too much, felt too much, and still sang anyway.
Ultimately, style is the skin of sound. Conflict peels it back to the nerve.
Any one with Scots blood knows this in their very bones Bill, in 1746 after the Jacobite uprising the British government viewed bagpipes as instruments of war as they had such a stirring effect on men; they were known as the Great Highland War Pipes. Every time EVERY time I was performing with the pipe band and we played a lament I'd see folk in the audience weeping, sometimes men you'd think the least likely to, music is powerful ... instinctual too, it used to amuse me greatly that whenever my son played his pipes when his grandmother (my MiL a snobbish cold English besom) was present she'd get irritated and she was largely ignorant about history :)