Politics in Music a.k.a. Oil in Water or Vice Versa?
Oftentimes, we move in life like a consumer looking for the next fix, when we suddenly receive a jolt, not exactly a wake up call but something that makes you stop and wonder or (dare I say) even ruminate a bit… I would like to believe I had a similar experience last night… Manu and I met up the evening and we got around to discussing the influences of contemporary social and political tapestry on the western music of today… It started when Manu mentioned that, over the last 3-4 years, Rolling Stone magazine had acquired a decidedly leftist and highly liberal bent of mind, evidenced by the content of most of the articles they put out, just check out http://www.rollingstone.com/politics and you’ll see probably understand I am saying…
I observed that music is shaped by the way in which it is used and can thereby be a neutral form of dissemination for ideologies… I reflected on this for a moment and noted to myself that various genres of music had evolved over the last 30 years or so but this underlying theme still continues to be a strong driver for the lyrical content of many songs even today… Interestingly, the majority of political popular music has an anti-establishment or left-wing perspective; right-wing musicians have tended to be condemned by mainstream audiences due to the racist stance of many of these performers…
In 1831, E. A. Poe when setting the stage for the “Fall of the House of Usher” wrote, “Music without an idea is simply music. Without music or an intriguing idea, color becomes pallor, man becomes carcass, home becomes catacomb, and the dead are but for a moment motionless”… I kept thinking of the central line there, “Music without an idea…”, political or otherwise…
Let’s look at the one great tragedy of the 20th century and a reference to the band that sang about them… Pink Floyd, one of the earliest musical influences on my life, and their album from 1983, “The Final Cut” a.k.a. “A Requiem For The Post War Dream” comes to mind… Waters published a poetic perspective of British politics dating back to the second World War and Gilmour and the other lads set the underlying musical arrangement… Those of us who’ve seen “The Wall” may also remember Pink’s slow descent into madness in the midst of his physical and social isolation from everyone, his growing sense of fascination with and absolute distance from the father he’d never seen, as well as the vivid segues of WW2, especially the ME109 bearing down on the British… The lyrics for the Final Cut include a biting commentary on British politics during the office of Margaret Thatcher as well as chilling perspectives on some of the unseen events of World War II… Go buy this album and listen to it in case you do not have it already… It will enhance and enrich your musical boundaries (and I am also hoping that someone at http://www.pinkfloyd.co.uk/ or Columbia Records will read this and pay me something for covertly assisting in album sales, HAHAHAHAHA)…
“It can’t be much fun for them beneath the rising sun with all their kids committing suicide
What have we done Maggie what have we done?
What have we done to England?
Should we shout, should we scream, “What happened to the post war dream?”
Oh Maggie what have we done?”
I distinctly remember listening to this in a semi comatose state in a friend’s apartment in Madras in 1990-91 (my final year of college), abetted by the inebriation inducing agent, ethyl alcohol and being almost slowly guided into a condition of angst against the “system”… Well, Rage Against The Machine’s definitely on my list here…
Next up on my list of music inspired by politics would be the multifarious references to the Vietnam War and the scores of sheet music that’s been written and sung about expediency and the politics thereof… My personal pick from all of that would be Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”… Gaye essentially sang about what had happened to the American dream of the past — as it related to urban decay, environmental woes, military turbulence, police brutality, unemployment, and poverty… These feelings were bubbling slowly within (was this the misplaced cauldron of “Bitches Brew”?) during a time when he felt increasingly caged by Motown’s behind-the-times hit machine… Gaye’s belief that he was being restrained from expressing himself through his music ultimately led to “What’s Going On”, originally conceived as a statement coming through the tinted glasses of the Vietnam vet, the backdrop being that Gaye’s brother had just returned from a three-year stint in 1967… The song itself was not the question of a soldier returning home to a strange place… I read somewhere in a write-up about this one that “the missing question mark in the title certainly was not a typo”… Gaye’s album reflects deeply on the climate of the early ’70s, rife with civil unrest, drug abuse, abandoned children and the specter of riots in the near past, a nearly sublime expression of an artist’s hope, anger, and concern recorded for posterity…
The Woodstock and the 70s era have more than seen their fair share of artists who’ve all written music influenced by the contemporaneous life and political fabric, with or without the aid of alcohol (a.k.a ethanol), marijuana (a Spanish Mary Jane, of the genus classified by herbologists as “Lotus Eaterus”), acid (not the vitriolic oil or azotic kind), tabs (not the key on the PeeCee), ‘shrooms (the non-Shitake type)… Someone’s been smoking the drapes for sure… My favorite “political” songs from these eras included Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner”, Jackson Browne’s “Lawyers in Love” and “Lives in the Balance”, Ritchie Havens’ “Handsome Johnny”, Billy Joel’s “Goodnight Saigon”, Edwin Starr’s “War”, Rush’s “Trees”, Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and Neil Young’s “Ohio”, among others…
Anyways, inspired by our discussions of the evening, I went back home and picked out Rage Against The Machine… More so because I had not heard them in a long while and I am still quite fascinated by their early self titled album… Their influences range from “Malcolm X to Led Zeppelin, from Che Guevara to Martin Luther King Jr., from Public Enemy to the Clash”… And folks, they are totally leftist, just try reading some of their lyrics… The music is punk inspired rock and politically influenced hip hop… I voted out the soundtrack for one number, “Wake Up” particularly since its arrangement and the lyrics stood out…
“Come on, although ya try to discredit, Ya still never read it
The needle, I’ll thread it, Radically poetic
Standin’ with the fury that they had in ’66; And like E-Double I’m mad
Still knee-deep in the system’s shit; Hoover, he was a body remover
I’ll give ya a dose; But it can never come close
To the rage built up inside of me; Fist in the air, in the land of hypocrisy…
Movements come and movements go; Leaders speak, movements cease
When their heads are flown’ Cause all these punks got bullets in their heads
Departments of police, the judges, the feds; Networks at work, keepin’ people calm
You know they went after King; When he spoke out on Vietnam
He turned the power to the have-nots; And then came the shot…
WAKE UP, WAKE UP… “
Afterthought: Like oil in water, politics being less denser just floats on top… and given their differing dipole strengths, there’s no hope of it ever dissolving in music either!!!
Peace
S