Fundamental listening

Daniel J. Levitin on punk ethics, evolutionary
biology and saving the llamas for later

by JULIET WATERS

In his McGill office on Dr. Penfield, Daniel J. Levitin is pretty far from his roots in San Francisco, playing for the punk band the Mortals. Best known these days for his best seller This Is Your Brain on Music, in other circles Levitin is also known for producing “Here Come the Cops” by The Afflicted, and for not signing M.C. Hammer when he had the chance as V.P. of A&R for 415 Records.

Now he’s a renowned cognitive psychologist who argues in his latest book, The World in Six Songs, that music is not only a fundamental force in human evolution, it’s even more fundamental than language. Music has forged six categories of meaning: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love. Surrounded by messy stacks of books, framed CDs and pictures of himself with Sting and Oliver Sacks, we chatted about his life and his theory.

Mirror: Why did you leave the music industry for academia?

Daniel J. Levitin: By 1992, the record business was already falling apart; the writing was on the wall. Everybody that I knew was looking for a way out. Some people took early retirement, and I thought about that too. I spent about six weeks looking for a llama farm in Northern California. I was just going to retire to Humboldt County.

I found a farm I liked and some llamas and a breeder; but I changed plans over the course of several conversations I had with a friend who was a professor at the University of Oregon and with Jim Adams, a mechanical engineering professor at Stanford. They convinced me I ought to give university life another try, that I might like taking courses, and I might like being around smart people. I’d been a dropout [from M.I.T and the Berklee College of Music]. They convinced me I could always get my llama ranch later.

M: Someone raised on punk rock might not see music in only positive evolutionary terms. In your book, there’s a lot in here about how music is used for violence, anarchy, things that don’t seem to fit into those six categories. You open the chapter on friendship, for instance, with how music is used for war.

DL: Punks who tear things down are tearing things down together. The six categories are expressed as positives but of course the negatives are included in there. They’re two ends of the same continuum. Although I do think any song can fit into these categories, that’s not the point of the book anymore than Jared Diamond was intending with Guns, Germs and Steel that they are the only three things that matter.

Rather, he was saying that if you want to understand why some parts of the world have all the resources and others don’t, why some are rich and others are not, and where the flow of intellectual ideas and prosperity has gone, those three things—where the guns are, the germs are and the steel is—can inform a lot of the story. So I would say the same things about the six categories. They’re a window into our cultural, evolutionary and social history.

In a way, The World in Six Songs is a companion to This Is Your Brain on Music, in that This Is Your Brain on Music tried to explain neuroscience to the average person using music. This tries to explain evolutionary biology to the average person using music.

M: Did you write this book for the music lover or the scientific community?

DL: Well I hope I’m writing for both. I’ve heard of several biology departments that are teaching the book for undergraduate evolution seminars, including Stanford. So it’s meant to be for both. Artists should be able to take what they like and scientists should be able to take what they like. They won’t be distracted by the other stuff, if I did my job.

THE WORLD IN SIX SONGS BY DANIEL
J. LEVITIN, VIKING CANADA,
323 PP, $32