Yesterday a good friend and I were in my car with my music playing. The song was "Stay Human" by Michael Franti and Spearhead, a left-wing political hip-hop group. Said good friend, we'll call him Tuberculosis Boy, looks at the CD player and laughs. "I just love political music," he says. Which led into an argument about the purpose of political music and, more generally, political art. Okay, I'll admit, on TBB's side it was a calm, rational discussion. I was arguing. I tend to get passionate and defensive about my music.
TBB wondered if political music had ever done any good. I pointed out that the music of the sixties drove the peace movement, which certainly had an impact on American politics and culture. He agreed that that was the case, but then said that today's political music tends to just complain without offering solutions.
He might be right. I don't know. The artist in question, Michael Franti, points out that you can't bomb the world into peace and that television is the drug of the nation, but he doesn't offer many solutions more specific than the vague ideas that everyone deserves music and it's not about who you love but do you love. Franti does benefit concerts to help victims of bombings and he tours in Iraq and Palestine to bring music to people downtrodden by war, but he doesn't come out and say, "This is how George W. should resolve the huge mess we've made in Iraq."
I'm not sure TBB's assumption that responsible political art needs to offer answers, though. I believe there is value in asking questions, in drawing people's attention to the problems of the world. I also think there's personal value in expressing all sorts of emotion through art, including the emotion of pissedoffedness at incompetent commanders in chief who use their power poorly.
Part of the value I find in Michael Franti specifically is that he asks questions that go deeper than pop politics. As opposed to the play Saturday's Voyeur that I saw last week, whose sole purpose was to villify conservative Mormons while lauding the virtues of liberalism, Franti manages to look at his own hipocrisy. On the same album in which he compares then-California-governor Pete Wilson to Hitler, Franti stops thinking about music and politics for a moment to muse about "what an asshole I can be."
So in conclusion, Michael Franti is good. George W. is bad. And Tuberculosis Boy is well-intentioned, but wrong.
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4 comments:
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You know, I've been thinking about blogs lately because Lynsey has been keeping up with her friends who are scattered around these United States through their blogs and I have thought to myself: Huh. And now you have one and I've been to Jessie's and I've thought: Huh.
Blogging is such a ... new thing. The raw inner nudity of a diary published before the world. Or, a handy series of jokes.
The world is fast filling with content.
I haven't developed an opinion on that yet.
But you're right---
I certainly need more ways to waste time.
-----e-
Influencing political opinion through art has been around for almost as long as either politics or art individually. Think of the poets and playwrights of the Greek era.
I also disagree with the general fallacy that if you are not suggesting a solution to the problem that you are just complaining and not really participating politically. Many of today's political problems are too complex for us ordinary humans to suggest meaningful solutions to. I stress _meaningful_, because a lot of people, including politicians, tend to state the desired end result without really putting a plan together for achieving the end result. For instance, "Let's end the war in Iraq", isn't a meaningful solution, it's just a desired end result. However, most of us ordinary humans are able to "smell" when the current solution to the problem isn't working out quite right. Making the general public aware of the stench motivates them to elect or otherwise seek out more capable officials.
That being said, I feel like there are a lot of people out there who have turned political ranting into an art form in and of itself. If everything that they were complaining about were to be magically fixed overnight they would just move on and complain about something else. Being pissed off seems to give them purpose in an otherwise empty life.
Now on to the subject of contemporary political music... It's arguable that contemporary music is a bad medium for political messages. It's too easy to get lost in the music and disregard the political message or the lyrics altogether. On more than one occasion I've caught myself singing along to lyrics like, "If I was a rich girl...". Well, if I was a rich girl, it would the result of many hours of long and painful gender change surgery... I probably wouldn't be rich anymore by the time I was done. I've also caught my semi-conservative sister thoughtlessly singing along to what she might consider lude and lascivious lyrics that she would never repeat if they weren't set to a rhythm and a beat. The point is that music has a tendancy to make us not pay attention to what the artist is _really_ saying and to just get lost in the beat and rhythm.
Hi. Your mom is political. And it's not about being "right," as you recall, but about raising issues.
Because it's GOOD to ask questions...remember?
"All art is political. Otherwise it's just decoration." (Rhys Ifans as Edward deVere, 17th Earl of Oxford in the movie Anonymous)
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