“What disappoints me is that there isn’t any protest music anymore.”
This was a comment made around the dinner table. It was a valid point.
Kind of.
If you turn on the radio today, you’ll hear idiots. Music is overwrought with idiots (and I was one of them) who only sang about love and loss and the oh-god-I-just-want-to-fall-in-love typology of lyrical irrelevance, there is a definite lack of content on the airwaves regarding the bigger picture. Politics is ignored by bands today (and yesterday, in my case).
A world ago.
Music served, to me, as a precursory lesson in politics before I understood how much our day to day lives depended on policy; in a time where I was young and way too self-absorbed to realize that a microphone had a certain power to it and should be used as such, and not just be a way to alleviate pain on a personal level.
I used to both joke about and fight my band mates’ positions on inserting politics in music. It was for a realistic reason: Politics doesn’t sell. Teen angst does. I was a screwed up teenager at first and jaded quarter-lifer at the end, and I sang about what I knew. And even when I wrote about frustrations regarding the music industry – this giant monopolistic profit machine that killed creativity and replaced it with Britney Spears – I didn’t realize that what I was agonizing over was, at its core, innately political.
But, the way I saw it, politics served as a death knell to a good melody. Rage Against the Machine was awesome, but how many people actually got their message, and how many people were just pissed off and identified with the angry tone? How many people just really liked that they used the F-word a lot (me!)? The reality was that the most repeated songs always consisted of lyrics that involved tragic break ups, unrequited love, and stress over failed relationships. Those are themes that every human being identifies with, and you run zero risk of alienating any portion of your fan base.
Ironically, their are ties to the tea party’s popularity there. The tea party is a populist chorus responding to a big, dumb, lovable, nonthreatening hook. They don’t care about the lyrics, but they love the hook. It just sounds so good.
I’m more about the whole song.
My time in the music industry was spent playing into the musical equivalent to lazy journalism. I had a hot microphone. But even as I was running around from city to city, watching clubs shut down and hearing stories about lost jobs, lower wages, un-affordable health care, and misery in the Middle East – what I would later realize was the beginning signs of the economic collapse – I didn’t make the connection. And, even if I had, I didn’t know enough about anything to argue a valid point.
I did what teenagers do: Sound angry and act accordingly. Again; echoes of the tea party.
The fact is that we need protest music. It builds movements; fuels revolutions. One only has to look
at history to see the Wobblies in the 1920s, singing for union workers’ rights, or Marc Blitzsteins’ The Cradle Will Rock (which paved the way for an amazing movie adaption; one of my favorites) in the 30′s. The 40′s introduced us to the likes of Woodie Guthrie and The Weavers.
And then the sixties and seventies branded music as a social media tool. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, James Brown, Jimmy Hendrix – to name a small few surfers in a tidal wave of uprisings – afforded us a connection that wasn’t as easily accessed as facebook, but was hundreds of times more personal, more connected, and more efficient.
Facebook may link us together, but those genius musical minds turned our voices into chords. Into harmonies. Modern day social media is a phone line; music is an instrument.
The frustration prevails today that the trend of music leading the debate has failed. It has died.
I partially agree. The role Clear Channel Radio has played to the music industry is akin to what the Citizens United case has done to our dimming democracy. Condense power, condense control, restrict diversity. As old friends of mine in a band named Fingertight aptly labeled it, the result was “Blah Blah Radio.” (Ironically, they ended up getting screwed by Columbia Records.)
But to those who complain about the last couple of generations failing to produce protest music, I would offer the simple thought that what we hear on the radio is the equivalent of what we hear from politicians on Morning Joe or Fox News. It’s not reality, it’s just a filtered, concocted perception of reality.
The good stuff is out there, it’s just not mainstream. Hell, sometimes mainstream efforts even slip through; Lady Gaga and Green Day are blazing examples. And I can’t stomach listening to the Dixie Chicks, but my respect for them is etched in stone. But, largely, Mainstream wants to sell us Justin Beiber and Lil Wayne and Adele and oh-my-god-please-stop-my-ears-are-bleeding. But good music is out there, waiting to be found; waiting desperately to be noticed.
Protest music is alive and, uh, not well, but struggling and surviving. But my biggest concern is that it is terming out. The bands that survived the dumbing down of pop music and the consolidation of the music industry – NOFX, Bad Religion, Pearl Jam, U2, Rancid, to name a few – aren’t being propped up by newer bands taking on the mantle. And we may end up succumbing to Guitar Hero and allowing protest music to become the next dead romance language.
There are a few, though their numbers are dwindling and they have the roughest go of it, as they fight a repressive corporate machine while attempting to pack substance into our soundbyte, two minutes and thirty seconds, verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-chorus culture.
Bands like Strung Out, Flogging Molly, Dropkick Murphys, Thrice… I know I’d be lost in the wilderness without them.
As evidence of how great things happen under the radar, and in the vein of my recent posts, I implore you to take this in and pass it on. This is a band that bucks the trend.
And this might be the most powerful music video I’ve ever seen. Learn about it.
i disagree we have way too many liberal musicians, it makes me nauseated.
I think the lesson for politics for the mainstream kids is very limited in Anchorage. When the student government at East High only plans pep assemblies and the prom, kids don’t get experience with larger world view issues. The school administration argues that planning pep assemblies is student government, but having graduated during the Vietnam War era, I am frustrate
Sorry, it blipped on me.
My statement should have been that it is frustrating, as a parent, that kids in Anchorage, don’t even get to address social issues in schools.
Gloria
http://ananchorage.wordpress.com/
Wow, you used an enormous amount of space to demonstrate how dull you are. Maybe protest music is lacking and weak because so many young people engage with the world from their living rooms, coffee houses and climate-controlled book stores via electronic media. Then they join the blogosphere to spout off about things they can’t possibly remember or that they clearly only understand at the most superficial level. Step away from your keyboard and instead of sitting down over lattes with your vacuous pseudo liberal friends, sit down with a single mom holding down two jobs or with a guy who’s been laid off for two years and who’s trying to find ways to keep his three kids in shoes and food. Everybody’s an analyst these days. Shock the world and pick up a broom.