The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature by Daniel J. Levitin

to random mutation), at some point recognized the power of drum music to incapacitate the enemy, to sap their resolve and simultaneously impassion their own warriors. Each drum tuned slightly differently, skins stretched over wooden stumps, sticks, and rocks knocked together; shells and beads banged, hit, struck, scraped, and shaken: the sound of a well-coordinated, well-practiced single mind. If these invaders could synchronize so tightly to something as nonvital as drumming, that same synchronization put into the service of killing would be so relentless and merciless as to crush even the most formidable resistance.
    When Joshua fit de battle of Jericho, it was not melody that made the walls come tumbling down, according to one rabbinic midrash, it was the rhythms of the Hebrew army drum corps. And it was the terrified Jerichoans who themselves opened the walls to the invaders, realizing the futility of putting up a fight, hoping that their conciliatory gesture would eke out a trace of compassion. (It didn’t.) At the foot of Balin’s tomb in The Lord of the Rings, surrounded by dozens of skeletons, Gandalf reads the last entry from the watchman’s logbook: “The ground shakes. Drums . . . drums in the deep. We cannot get out. A shadow lurks in the dark. We can not get out . . . they are coming.”
     
     
    II . It is 7:45 A.M. on a November morning at a high school in Kansas City, Missouri, fifteen minutes before the first period bell rings. Out in back of the school, near the Dumpsters and an abandoned basketball court, a group of students smoke cigarettes. For some it’s the first of the day, for others their third. They are not the good students, the star athletes, members of the chess club, glee club, or drama club. They aren’t the worst students either, the ones who are being threatened with expulsion or who are being evaluated by a stream of head-scratching school psychologists. These are average students who would otherwise go completely unrecognized and unnoticed by the rest of the school except that they come here several times a day. Most have been in trouble with their teachers or the principal for breaking one rule or another, but nothing serious—being in the hall without a pass, tardiness, late homework—crimes of laxity and neglect, not of violence. The alley where the municipal garbage trucks come has been named Tobacco Road by generations of students at the school. The morning cigarette ritual is followed by the ten o’clock mid-morning recess, lunchtime, and afternoon recess cigarette breaks. They blow smoke rings; they spit. The boys talk about cars they know they’ll never own, and Bruce Lee movies they’ve memorized. The girls talk about older siblings who don’t come home at night, with mind-numbing jobs and boyfriends.
    None of them has much money, and with the cost of cigarettes approaching fifty cents each, they share a daily concern about where the money for the next pack will come from. But they are generous to anyone who shows up without a cigarette, sharing among one another what they have. When a stranger asks to bum a cigarette, several of the teens offer the outsider the hospitality of a shared nicotine rush. The group are alternately chatty and reflective as the chemicals simultaneously rouse their frontal lobes and calm their limbic systems.
    Most of them have beat-up iPods or early MP3 players, but when they’re smoking together, the earbuds hang at their sides, and they listen to a boom box or portable player with a speaker built in. “The fidelity is whack,” says one, “but least this way we can all hear it together.” They tap their feet to 50 Cent—some of them raising the back of their heel and pounding it down on the pavement in time with the bass drum. They sing along with all the words to Ludacris, and when Christina Aguilera comes on, the girls do some steps, cop some poses, as the boys try unsuccessfully to feign disinterest. But it’s when an old song from