Jake Low
A few weeks ago, I was able to sit down and do an over-the-phone interview with Cyrus Youngman, one of the guest speakers who came to our Spring 2024 Rhythm and Revolution class. It was a very productive and insightful conversation and both of us greatly enjoyed the discussion. The theme for the interview was the role of music and of musicians in impacting positive social change. It was incredibly philosophically and intellectually stimulating. It was then that I knew that for my second feature article, I wanted to conduct a second interview. Enter Jake Watson…
Along with having an incredibly masculine first name, Jake W (who will be referred to as JW for the interview portion, and I will be referred to as JL to avoid confusion) is a doctoral student in the Communication Studies program at IUI, the teacher’s aide (TA) for our Rhythm and Revolutions class, as well as a musician. I got to speak with him over the phone for an hour and to ask him questions similar in spirit to those I asked of Cyrus Youngman. However, I wanted to weave his expertise in communication to create an opportunity to get yet another unique perspective on how music can impact social change. This article is the spiritual successor to the one I conducted with Cyrus Youngman. The theme of this article is how music, communication and social change are intertwined. And now with the context in mind, let’s dive into the interview.
Jake Low (JL): “How did you get your start as a musician and what drives you?”
Jake Watson (JW): “Hmm. That’s a good starting question…I play drums. I think I [always] had a tendency to tap on stuff and in about my freshman or sophomore year of high school a friend, who was in band playing drums, started trying to teach me rhythms mostly on my desk in Geometry class… so he started teaching me just like rhythms with my hands. At the time I was involved in a youth group at a church, and they had a drum set. They let me and him go in there together so he could show me things on the drums…He started to teach me a few things on their kit, and they would actually let me go there and play by myself which was actually really cool. And of course I didn’t know what I was doing, so I’m self-taught/taught by a friend. I never really learned to read music, but at some point I excelled fairly quickly, and he said ‘Well, two drummers is kind of useless,” so he just started learning to play guitar and we started a band. So by the time I was either 16 or 17…we were writing what we thought of as music, at the time at least [*JL chuckles, followed by JW chuckling*]. As a fellow musician I’m sure you look back at past projects and think, you know, ‘What the hell was I doing?’ I’m quite a bit older than you so I have more time between some of the stuff I was doing when I was 20 and now. It’s atrocious. But I’ve just been doing it ever since, basically…I’ve come to be a musician because of community, through and through. I do what I do because I am fortunate and privileged enough to be surrounded by just ridiculously good friends and musicians who are all better than I’ll ever be and because of them, I am driven to make art and I like doing that with people who inspire me. And for folks who create art, there is always a dialectical tension between self-expression and connection with other people. It’s cliché, but I feel that the saying, ‘If even one person was touched by the art that you make then it is worth it’ is true.”
JL: “What impact do you think music and musicians have on bringing about social change? Would you say your music pushes for social change of any kind?”
JW: “It’s good to tie those together like that, I think. That’s pretty cool. Obviously the course that you’re in and that I sort of coteach with Trevor is about this topic—social change—so I’ll be honest, I never really thought about it in that way before this course. But now that we’re all having these conversations and I’m reading the work of the students, I’m reflecting on both broad macro-level sort of social change as it relates to music but then more to how I think of it now. The first part is, I never thought of the music I was making personally as having some purpose for social change, but I also at some point became aligned with and identified as straight edge. There’s an entire movement behind that, and I was young and wanted to have some identity with some group because I think that’s just the nature of being an ape-ish creature on the planet. I do think that that is an example of a social movement that was tied very closely to a musical genre, as it were, that was meaningful to a great many people. Frankly, it’s probable the reason that I’m alive because if you remember, or maybe don’t because I’m quite a bit older than you, but there were these commercials that were essentially ‘_such and such_ is my anti-drug’ and I really think that music was my anti-drug. And given my family history of addiction, I don’t think that had I engaged in those things it would have gone well for me. In some sense, at least in my life, there’s this implied existence because of music, not in the usual sense like ‘I exist to make music’, but rather ‘because I make music, I exist’. I don’t think that any of the music I’ve made or been involved in has any explicit or overt claim of being political, per se, or being protest songs. However, I don’t necessarily think of communication—since this is a communications course—as something we do or don’t do. I think of communication more as a primary social process that we are always engaged in—100%, regardless. ‘We can’t not communicate’ is an old saying. When you switch it that way, instead of saying ‘I’m communicating or not’, you’re saying ‘We’re always in the process of communication.’ So what are we doing? What does the conversation look like? Sometimes we’re just sitting alone, but we’re still systematically connected to everyone we’ve ever been in contact with, and our thoughts are always tied to social milieu and ecology. I think music is the same thing. I think music is a behavior that we do, and it’s part of the larger communication process. The research I do focuses on everyday talk. So one thing I’ve been thinking about since we started this class is ‘How does the process of being engaged in music—whether you’re going to shows or concerts, or playing shows or concerts, or just exchanging songs with a friend, or whatever—since we’re in contact and conversation with each other, now what can we do with that time and space together that maybe we otherwise would not have shared because of the music?” And that’s actually, to me, I think more interesting. Writing a song for a particular purpose is very useful, and they’re not mutually exclusive, but that’s not as interesting to me than what I just said of just ‘How many conversations have I had in my life about a show with somebody that left a mark on me?’ or vice versa…We have a mantra in my research group: ‘Every interaction is an intervention.’ So we think of going into a community for community engagement doing an intervention…We know that relationships are primary…so if relationships are primary, then shifting our focus there, to me, makes it more interesting to think about the conversations we have in relation because of the process of being in community via music.”
JL: As a communications grad student, what do you think the role the communication field has on impacting social change?
JW: “Funnily enough, this is really important question because the discipline of Communication Studies, we say that it’s siloed, that we have bunched up and aggregated our thinking into different silos. We have health communications—which is what my degree will say when I graduate—which is thought to be distinct from family communication, or interpersonal communication. The problem to me with that, is I don’t actually think communication is inherently or intrinsically different in those different contexts, nor when communicating about different content. I think communication is just communication; it just is the process [that] we’re always doing. Sometimes we talk about health when we’re at a doctor’s office, but trying to parse out to me isn’t useful to me. I say that because we have sort of the most common type of work that we see in communication studies—and people argue about the number, but there are traditions—seven, or eight, or nine traditions of thought and these shape what we think communication is and how it works. The most common one is the social-psychological tradition and it thinks the world works a certain way and thus we can know certain things about it. One of the things I spend my time thinking about, and researching and will likely write about in my dissertation is ‘What happens when we step back from the silos and the disciplinary traditions, per se, and think about communication in a different way than what is most commonly done’ and it changes the questions we ask and the kind of research we do. So as a discipline, I think communication has so much to offer because, I’ll cite a quote that everyone has heard some version of: ‘When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. I’m a communication scholar, so of course I think everything is a communication problem; the people who study psychology think everything comes back to what happens inside peoples’ minds. But once you see something, it’s really hard to unsee it. I literally see the world as communication in process. So rather than thinking ‘what effect can communication have on the world?’, the question I ask is ‘How can we make the world different by the ways which we choose to communicate?’ because we’re going to do it anyway. We’re already doing it every day. Everyone is always already communicating, but we can make choices. As a discipline, we can literally change the world by changing how we talk to one another. I think that what communication can offer the world is that communication is how we make the social world, and so we should really stop and think about the choices we make…everything that humans do happens within communication, whether it’s physics, or biology, or playing Jenga, or making food, or loving someone—all of it is already communication. So that’s what we have to offer, I think, as a discipline, is that we study the essence of what means to be in community with each other, and in my opinion, what it means to exist.”
JL: “So the role that communication would have in impacting social change is that it is truly the impetus for any kind of social change you would be making would be to communicate. And since that’s inherent in everything we do, the conversation surrounding social change would inherently have to be ones had through communicating with each other at the human and group level. Is that right?”
JW: “Exactly, and actually you refocused me because I got a little off topic. I think a couple things through communications as a discipline that don’t happen elsewhere as much … A lot of people focus on messages ‘What should I say?’—whether I’m persuading someone, or just giving them information, and so that’s a specific thing that happens in Comm Studies that isn’t so much focused on in other disciplines like anthropology, sociology and psychology. I think that’s useful. The other thing is, a lot of places where people are saying, you know, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’ We’ve all heard that, and then along with that there’s anything from YouTube videos, to corporate trainings, to classes where people say ‘Well, we need to be kind; we need to be empathetic; we need to practice active listening.’ What communications studies actually can do is actually tell us how to do that. ‘WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE in action to actually practice empathy?’ Not only can communication studies outline that, but when we align ourselves with science, we can do it based on the best science that we have. We know how to engage people’s nervous systems in a more receptive way via conversation, from facial expressions to tone of voice, we can get that specific with it. Anthropologists don’t do that. I study anthropology quite deeply, and I have a vested interest in psychology because I actually study mental health pretty deeply as well, but I come from a communication perspective. Not just that I think about communication, but from within the discipline there is some named thing called ‘the communication perspective’ … that says, ‘the thoughts that are in your head exist because you’re in relation to others,’ and your nervous system is in relation to others, and it’s all connected. So how can we do that thing called ‘active listening’? What does that mean? And communication studies can in fact offer that. That’s pretty powerful.”
JL: “How are music and communications intertwined?”
JW: “I think I sort of touched on this with your first question. Since I think personally of communication as something that is just default—we’re always in communication—I think of music as just behavior. It’s another behavior; it’s another conversation; it’s another storytelling medium if you will. But also, it’s part of our total communication ecology, which is a term we use in the research that we do with the folks I work with. Everything that we interact with—from people, to billboards, to books we read, to our own thoughts, to music—all of it makes up communication ecology and shapes us neurologically, psychologically, et cetera. More importantly neurologically, because when you listen to music it literally changes your nervous system. When you have a conversation with somebody, you’re shaping and reshaping each other’s brain structure. It’s not to minimize any particular thing, it’s actually the opposite. Reductionism, as a mode of inquiry in the world, breaks everything down and tries to find constituent parts and says, ‘Okay, what variables affect this conversation?’ and inevitably, you miss so many things. A more complexity informed perspective—which is where I come from—would say, ‘How does music shape the person’s communication ecology?’ So if, for example, you’re a musician the way that music factors into and shapes your life might be, in many ways, very different than somebody who just doesn’t even think about music. And I know people who are like ‘Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t really even listen to music.’ And that’s a mode of existence that is totally foreign to me, but I do know people like that.”
JL: “Do musicians have a responsibility to try to bring about social change in the music they create? And then again, why or why not? And I know I’m kind of in that dichotomy mindset there, that ‘either/or’ mindset, but I’m curious about your thoughts on that.”
JW: “Yeah. Of course I think they do. And I actually think it’s okay to dichotomize because I don’t think that’s there actually any really solid footing on which to base an argument—and it depends on what you mean by ‘social change’—but I don’t see a strong argument against that because if we conceptualize social change as, in this case, ‘I released a song and people voted differently’ and we can measure that or whatever. Okay, sure. They either did or they didn’t. But that’s not how I think about social change. EVERYTHING is ALWAYS already in motion. We know this to be true; physics is very clear about this. So everything is always already changing, and we’re always already in relation to others, so we’re always within a social milieu—so it could be argued that music as a part of our total communication ecology is always already changing us. The question is the degree of change, not whether it’s changing or not. Some things, I think, make big changes. Complexity theory is pretty clear about how unpredictably small little inputs in a system can have sweeping, catastrophic or other change within a total system so I don’t think of music or musicians any differently. Basically I think we can’t know what that change will be like. We can do everything we want and work on the lyrics and make it really poetic and market it to the right people and work really hard, (and still) it might just flop. Or we could write a song that’s just like ‘I don’t know! This thing kind of sucked! I should write a story about it!’ and people are like ‘Holy cow. I’m going to go and lobby congress.’ So yeah, I absolutely think that both in the music we make and how we lead our lives—because we also talk about this in the class, too. There’s people who write things with the intention and there’s people who maybe don’t so much, but they use their platform as people, they donate money, they have conversations … So yeah. All that to say, ‘absolutely’. Musicians, with their music and also outside of music can have an impact. And again, they might make connections because of their platform, or they’re on stage and somebody comes up and says, ‘Hey! This is something I’ve experienced. Like, man, your music was really good and I really liked watching you play,’ and as you talk they ask you ‘Well, what you do?’ and you say, ‘Well, I’m actually a grad student. This is what I study.’ And it’s like, ‘How else would we have been connected if not for that conversation?’ So that can be a space to enact social change, as well. Just one conversation at a time.”
Needless to say I gained a wealth of insights from Jake about the interconnectedness of music, communication studies, and social change. That was the whole goal of the interview, after all. I do think there is a sense of internal irony in the interview I conducted. One main takeaway from the interview I came away with was how communication is inherent in everything we do on this beautiful blue and green marble we call home. Every action, reaction and interaction is spearheaded by either a conscious or unconscious act of communication. I now like to think of it similarly to the Force in Star Wars. Much like how in the fictional universe of Star Wars the Force is in every living being and—to quote my favorite philosopher of all time, Obi-Wan Kenobi—“surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.” We use communication in a very similar way in our universe. We use it to speak to each other, to love each other, build relationships and forge alliances, and navigate our world. How we wield communication—much like a Jedi or Sith wielding the force—can influence the rest of the world around us, for better or for worse. And there are many ways one can ‘wield’ communication in order to impact the world and bring about change. One of those methods of communication wielding is music. Jake Watson, I am glad to have had the opportunity to be your Padawan Learner for the hour I got to be on the phone with you. And I hope that you, dear reader, learned a great deal about the interconnectedness of music, social change and communication theory as I did from this article.