Music and the Affective Production of Violence in MMA

Abstract

As widespread physical pursuits and popular entertainment forms, combat sports inform and constrain social understandings of violence. Recent research has discussed martial artists’ positioning of their practice vis-à-vis violence and the production of ‘martial arts’ as a category referencing, but not defined exclusively by, violence. For combat sports—an overlapping, competition-oriented category—violence occupies a place of tension. They attract spectators through presentation as violent blood-sports, but competitors and spectators necessarily also understand them as regulated performances. Popular music plays an important role in contextualizing combat sports as conforming to a socially sanctioned model of violent spectacle through walkout music played prior to matches, a form that references other sportive and staged productions of violence for entertainment. Music simultaneously defines combat sports as violent spectacles and constrains them as sports, controlled abstractions of violence with aesthetic goals. Drawing on analysis of videos of walkouts at mixed martial arts events, this article details popular music’s roles in defining and constraining combat sports. The walkout is examined as an affective vibrational phenomenon that varies through specific iterations and media, acquiring, amplifying, negating, or altering sometimes contradictory meanings, and lending emotional weight to the ideologies represented. Throughout these transformations, the walkout serves to position the MMA match as a socially permissible sportive contest that draws on aesthetic references to an imagined model of unsanctioned violence.

Image: Haribhagirath, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons