The Sound of Power — Listening in the Cheney Years
Cheney years — a time when power was loud, protest was quiet, and music taught us how to hear again.
By Rafi Mercer
History has its own acoustics. You can hear it if you listen closely — the frequencies of an era, the hum beneath the headlines. In the years when Dick Cheney held power, America sounded a certain way. It was the early 2000s, and the world moved through static — news tickers, jet engines, the digital dial of a thousand rolling broadcasts. It was a time when noise replaced nuance, when certainty was amplified and dissent turned to background.
Now, as the world notes his passing, it’s worth listening again to that moment — not through policy or politics, but through sound. The Cheney years had their own soundtrack, one built from tension and control, ambition and fear. The air itself seemed compressed. The guitars were heavier, the drums tighter, the mixes louder. Compression wasn’t just an audio tool — it was a metaphor for a nation holding its breath.
After 9/11, America’s sound shifted overnight. Silence became symbolic; music became moral territory. Springsteen released The Rising — a record of grief and resilience. Rage Against the Machine were censored from the airwaves. Country music surged on the back of patriotism, while protest music went underground. Even pop carried the echo of anxiety — beats sharpened, melodies tightened. The listening experience itself changed; it became defensive, even patriotic.
That’s what makes listening such a powerful political act. It’s not passive. It shapes how we process truth. In the Cheney era, the architecture of sound mirrored the architecture of power — vast, controlled, centralised. Media consolidated; playlists homogenised; radio lost its regional edges. Everything became broadcast rather than conversation. The louder the volume, the narrower the bandwidth of thought.
And yet, as always, resistance had its rhythm. The underground responded with depth — Mos Def, The Roots, Erykah Badu, and early Kendrick Lamar offered complexity where public life had none. British and European producers were turning to dub, ambient, and broken beat — sounds of reflection and distance. Music became the refuge of nuance. While the politics of the time sought control, the music quietly insisted on feeling.
It’s easy to forget how deeply those years shaped listening culture. They taught a generation to question what they were hearing — not just musically, but morally. The early internet age promised access, but not understanding. People had more information and less interpretation. That’s why, looking back, the Cheney years feel like the beginning of our current listening crisis — too much signal, too little space.
If the listening bar culture means anything today, it might be as a quiet reaction to that era. In a way, every room that lowers the lights, places a record on the turntable, and invites people to sit and listen together is an antidote to the world Cheney helped define — a world of broadcast and control. Listening bars turn the monologue back into dialogue. They replace volume with proportion. They remind us that power isn’t about speaking louder; it’s about hearing more.
There’s something poetic in the idea that as the generation of those power brokers fades, a new generation is learning to listen again — to slow down, to attend, to value the small signal over the vast system. It’s not political in the partisan sense, but it is political in spirit. It reclaims attention as agency.
So, what might Dick Cheney have been listening to? Perhaps old country, maybe jazz from Wyoming evenings, perhaps silence — the kind that power mistakes for peace. But the more interesting question is what we were listening to, and what we learned from it. Those years taught us that volume is not authority, and that sound — when used carelessly — can divide as easily as it can unite.
Now, as the world grows louder once again, listening feels like the most radical act left. The politics of Tracks & Tales have always been simple: to restore proportion in an age that mistakes volume for value. The listening bar, the home hi-fi, the quiet record spinning at dusk — these are not escapes from the world, but re-entries into it, on human terms.
History will debate the legacy of Dick Cheney in policy. But sound will remember him differently — as the echo of an age when power spoke too much and listened too little.
And perhaps, in that sense, the next revolution really will begin not with protest, but with a record quietly played — a room full of people finally listening.
Quick Questions
What was the “sound” of the Cheney era?
Compressed, controlled, and centralised — mirroring the politics of the time. Big mixes, tight beats, little silence.
Why connect politics to listening bars?
Because listening culture restores what political life often forgets: proportion, empathy, and presence — the art of hearing.
Where can I explore more essays on sound and society?
Discover reflections in The Edit, explore cities shaped by listening culture in City Pages, or uncover protest and power in sound via The Listening Shelf.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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