When the World Is Loud — On Music, Conflict, and the Art of Being Heard

Rafi Mercer
2026-01-21T10:38:37+00:00

Discover a reflective essay on music, conflict, and why the most enduring sounds resist urgency — exploring jazz history, modern noise, and listening as a quiet act of defiance.

More

Listening as resistance in an age of permanent transmission

By Rafi Mercer

In a world that insists it is listening — dashboards glowing, feeds refreshing, voices multiplying by the second — it is striking how little actually arrives. Sound moves faster than ever, yet meaning feels strangely stalled. We hear everything, but receive almost nothing. And in moments of global conflict, that paradox sharpens: urgency everywhere, resonance nowhere.

It’s tempting to imagine that earlier musical communities had it easier — that the right sound once cut through more cleanly. But the truth is more unsettling, and more useful. The jazz community of the past didn’t emerge in calm or consensus. It formed in pressure. Segregation. War. Economic precarity. Surveillance. Exile. Jazz was never created in a world that listened well. It was created in a world that misunderstood, mislabelled, and often actively resisted it.

That’s why jazz didn’t try to speak plainly. It encoded. Swing bent time when daily life felt rigid. Blue notes carried grief without naming it. Improvisation insisted on freedom where none was granted. When words were dangerous or insufficient, music carried truth sideways. Not louder — deeper.

What those musicians understood intuitively is something we struggle to remember now: that being heard and being broadcast are not the same act. Today, expression is frictionless. Anyone can speak. Everyone does. But listening has become performative — a posture rather than a practice. The result isn’t silence, but saturation: everything flattened to the same volume, the same tempo, the same emotional register.

In that environment, the “right sound” doesn’t disappear. It becomes difficult to recognise. It refuses immediacy. It won’t summarise itself. It asks for time — the one resource the present withholds most aggressively.

Historically, the music that endured did not dominate its moment; it outlasted it. Bebop turned inward just as popular culture demanded spectacle. Modal jazz slowed harmony when the world accelerated. Spiritual jazz widened time altogether when politics narrowed lives. These weren’t retreats. They were recalibrations — new internal clocks set against the noise of the age.

What feels different now is not conflict itself, but compression. Algorithms reward reaction, not reflection. Outrage travels well; nuance does not. Grief is contented. Anger is optimised. In such conditions, sound is instantly thinned — urgency stripped of depth, complexity reduced to position. The world is loud, but acoustically shallow.

So perhaps the lesson from jazz history isn’t about finding a louder voice, but about protecting conditions. Room. Silence. Duration. The courage to leave space untouched. The willingness to let a note arrive late, or not at all. Listening that isn’t public-facing. Attention without urgency.

This is why the most meaningful music today can feel almost inaudible. Not because it lacks force, but because it resists the prevailing tempo. It doesn’t ask to be amplified; it asks to be met. And meeting it requires something unfashionable again: patience.

Music has always reflected its time, yes — but the deepest music also leans slightly against it. It creates an alternative pace inside the chaos. A place where thinking can catch up with feeling. A room where conflict isn’t solved, but held — carefully, humanly — without being flattened into noise.

In that sense, listening becomes more than a cultural preference. It becomes an ethic. A quiet refusal to be rushed into certainty. A belief that meaning needs air around it to survive. When the right sound feels hard to hear, it may be because it is doing exactly what it has always done at moments like this: slowing the world down just enough for us to recognise ourselves again.