Face the music

I’m not sure about whether making convicted noisemakers listen to music they don’t like isn’t carrying “an eye for an eye” too far:

FORT LUPTON — Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs” may begin with the line, “I’ve been alive forever,’” but for noise ordinance violators, listening to Manilow may feel like forever.
Fort Lupton Municipal Judge Paul Sacco says his novel punishment of forcing noise violators to listen to music they don’t like for one hour has cut down on the number of repeat offenders in this northwestern Colorado prairie town.
About four times a year, those guilty of noise ordinance violations are required to sit in a room and listen to music from the likes of Manilow, Barney the Dinosaur, and The Platters’ crooning “Only You”
“These people should have to listen to music they don’t like,” said Judge Paul Sacco for a segment about the program that aired Friday on Denver’s KUSA-TV.
Sacco began the program years ago when he noticed that many of the repeat offenders simply showed up at his courtroom to pay their fine with cash.

When US special forces invaded Panama, one of the methods used to force Manuel Noriega to give up was by blasting him with loud and obnoxious music. The Vatican objected.
And might this technique backfire? I mean, suppose some of these miscreants are psychopaths, and they hate Barry Manilow so much that they get even with society by driving around blasting peaceful neighborhoods with “I write the songs”?
The problem with these things is that one man’s torment is another man’s joy. My favorite awful song of torment happens to be “Hamburger Lady” by Throbbing Gristle.
Seriously, it gives me the creeps to listen to it, even though I think it evokes a pretty accurate musical picture of the charbroiled woman the song is about.

The lyrics:

Hamburger Lady
Hamburger Lady
She’s dying,
She is burned from the waist up,
On her arm,
Her ear is burned,
Her eyelashes are burned,
She can’t hold things up,
And even with medical advances,
There’s no end in sight,
For hamburger lady,
She wants me to tell you of her claim mind,
From which the double play laying,
The proping chair,
Leave her,
She’s Burned from the waist down,
Has to eat her life through tubes,

Etc.
I think that if you played that at concert hall pitch for a manacled and hooded prisoner, it would be pretty upsetting.
Whether it would cure him of his exhibitionistic need to blast strangers, I don’t know.
I’m wondering whether a more fitting punishment might be to make them develop new and negative associations with the music they do like. You know, the way they wrecked Beethoven for Alex in “A Clockwork Orange”?

Judicially, I can’t tell whether the idea of forcing Manilow on the noisemakers is along the lines of an eye for an eye or a form of aversive therapy. It reminds me of the way parents in the old days would punish a kid they caught smoking by forcing him to smoke an entire cigar — a technique which apparently worked with golfing coach George Pinnell.
What about Barry Manilow? Has he any right to not have his music used as aversive therapy? Or does he only have a right to get the money from ASCAP from whoever plays it?
Years ago, some people who worked in a restaurant I frequented complained to me about gangster rap kids who would come in late at night and hang out at the bar without drinking and without ordering food, and who would blast the patrons with their music in the parking lot. They wondered what might discourage them, and they debated playing country music, but worried that the regulars they wanted to keep wouldn’t like it. I suggested playing the Grateful Dead, and to my amazement, they tried it and later told me it worked like a charm. The gangster rap kids looked more and more bored and eventually stopped hanging out there.
But these people were free to leave. I’m partial to the Dead and I’d never want anyone to be forced to listen to it as punishment.
As to John Lennon’s “Imagine,” that’s another matter.