Rock + Politics = Crap

FOAD.

You mean to say there was a time when punk WASN'T political?

I'll say this to what will probably be mad flames in my direction, but some of my favorite bands/musos ever have had some strong political leanings...

Operation Ivy, the Clash, Fishbone, Bad Brains, Rage Against the Machine, Jimi Hendrix, Gang of Four, Mos Def, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, etc, etc.

Ya first have to define punk, then ask what the difference is between being political and politicized...

Yeah, they totally ruined politics.

I tend to agree.

1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. See also YHBT. 2. n. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." Compare kook. 3. n. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring that lab policies are followed. Probably so-called because it involves lurking in dark cavelike corners.

Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter.

The use of `troll' in either sense is a live metaphor that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed the troll" as part of a followup to troll postings.

-- The Jargon File

Cuz I say thee NAY! There are numerous musical acts who have addressed politics without hysterics or empty sloganeering (ex: Gil Scot-Heron, early Dylan, the Groundhogs), and there are numerous musicians who have set personal examples and proffered solutions (ex: CRASS, Black Flag, Fela Kuti, Victor Jara).

This shit rocks. What crack are you on?

What crack are YOU on?

I hate love songs in rock almost as much

Yes, punk was not always political

Posting the definition of troll is not witty, and usually very stupid.

Maybe it's kind of hypocritical that I like Gang of Four.

Yes. i set up a thread called "Should Bands have something to Say?" which featured this extract from an NME review of MBV's "Loveless".

"The frustrating thing is that they have no obvious information - political or otherwise - to impart. Kevin Shields and Bilinda are too busy serenading each other about private matters to let the world in on their sometimes love-lorn, sometimes suicidal, always sick words. You just hear echoes of words buried beneath monilithic obelisks of noises and silences, melodies and pummelled rhythms...in times when children of conscientious objectors are forced to wear burning rubber tyres in black-on-black struggles in South Africa, when unionisation - which was hard sweated and fought for - is being outlawed in humane Britain, My Bloody Valentine are vaguely saying fuck all and encouraging others to follow suit. They may be supreme poets of sound, the most inspired venturers beyond the precipice since Sonic Youth, but they still make you feel the same apprehension most people feel when their plane takes off, the same emptiness."

This review takes the opposite stand (ie, it says "Bands SHOULD have a political agenda"). If I remember rightly, the consensus was that it was ludicrous to attack a band for not taking political stands, but if they did it needn't detract from them either.

Political music can be good, but the artist risks sounding preachy and didactic (Manics) or completely out of their depth (Primal Scream). So David Allen has a point of sorts.

Can music & politics mix to produce great music? Sure, because "the government is evil" or "there are lots of innocent people dying" are extreme gut reactions (much like "I love you!", "you betrayed me!", "I hate you!", "I hate my life!", etc, etc, etc) and extreme gut reactions are wonderful as far as art is concerned. Simple political lyrics are great because they're catchy and vaguely omnious, while the music gets to be all scary and menacing-like: "The Lunatics (Have Taken Over The Asylum)", "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and "Freddie's Dead" are great examples here.

(Positive political songs suffer from the same problems positive love songs have- it's much harder to sound impressive when you're happy than it is when you're feeling rotten.)

Can music & politics mix to make great politics? Discarding what musicians do outside of their art, I'd say political songs serve mainly to alert listeners to issues they might not be aware of, not to actually provide a good thesis on them. It should serve as a gateway- i.e., kid listens to political band, gets interested in issues, starts reading real books on the song's subject matter, watches the news, forms his views from there. If kid only listens to political music and gets all his opinions from it, of course, he's screwed.

For those of us already interested in politics, political songs serve mainly as an odd sort of escapism- for three minutes, we can just pretend that YES, it's all black and white, we are RIGHT and THEY are WRONG and Evil. Then we jump around in our living room and yell at the injustice of it all- not very constructive, no, but neither are love songs to relationships.

i guess the ans. will be 'no', but then y'can give yr political opinion through axioms - but I'm not sure how useful songs are for promulgation of argument

but the "argument in the song" is certainly sketchy, and has to be filled in by the listener (in other words, happen in the listener's head), and also ambivalent, given that some of it must be carried in the non-word realms of the song: of course, i wd also argue that music which DOESN'T cause an argument in a listener's head (assuming said listener allows themselves to engage at least a bit with the song in itself) *can't* be political, which is why *i'd* excise a lot of activist monologues containing apparent political content from the "political music" category, and happily include *include* instrumentals (unless they were by fishbone obv) (that's a joke) (kind of)

re: Mark S and Nitsuh's point, we need to define what constitutes political content to take this any further. The original question seemed to be directed at the discussion of political issues within rock - and by political issues I took that to mean issues of socio-economic power structures, governments, social causes, etc. BUT, I am more than happy to allow that what constitutes politics is quite broader than that (so yes, Madonna *could* be considered more political than Gang of Four in some ways), it's just that I didn't think that was really in the scope of the question.

I doubt David Allen was annoyed at Madonna's self-empowering displays or masturbation onstage, or considered them a political statement on a par with, say, a simple slogan like "Stop Apartheid".

anything combined with politics is part crap

I know this is rock + politics and it seems to be abt lyrical content but lets widen this: can we hear the politics of a composer in his/her music.

for instance: wagner was an anti-semite (was he a leftie early on tho') but we only know abt it through his writings (i haven't heard much wagner so i don't whether he made any thinly diguised statements in his works). say IF IF IF his writings were burned would you be able to see something of his politics in his music. in the notes and chords.

the question above is badly put because i don't know the facts (or too much abt politics etc) but these are things i wonder abt...help!

adorno is ultimately poor on jazz and pop primarily bcz he did not know how to listen for the politics sedimented into the notes, chords and rhythms of jazz or pop — the residue of struggle, argument, hope, compromise, whatever — and thus kind of assumed that the only politics therein came from the economic organisation of the music's production and distribution (which to be frank he also did not study very deeply): he is terrific on the tensions latent in the composed music of his own era, from wagner via the massed viennese through to stockhausen!! (who he knew and argued a lot with...)

though actually i think philosophy of modern music is not that great: his insight-idiocy ratio with stravinsky is a bit of a disaster

I did read an article on the new yorker abt him. there's quite a bit on stravinsky. the writer rubbishes a lot of his stuff on beethoven too (but since he didn't finish the book...).

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15769

-- Julio Desouza (julio@d...), November 9th, 2002

In music alone, I doubt it. Unless he titled his songs like, "The only good Jew is a dead one" or "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out".

Then, do we really need to know his politics anyway?

Yeah, that should never be dealt with in music...

A lyric rocks if the singer sounds like they mean it and the audience can relate with that emotion (double good if they can relate to the specifics of the situation). The reason for the shitty political songs is that few people mean it as much as, say, Morrissey wants to be luh-huuuved or Puddle Of Mudd wants to tell that beeyatch to WATCH OUT!

Yes! Third Puddle Of Mudd reference of the day!

See, this is what's bugging me: what usually gets called "political" is actually the mid-ground between actual policy discussion and the potential life-politics of flat-out pop -- in other words, songs just like Madonna songs except including words you might find in an issue of the Nation. This strikes me as a lose-lose place to put the "political" tag. "Political" lyrics should either be restricted to stuff like:

I support Proposition Eight,
oh yeah baby cause it's just too late
to build new schools on tax referendums
so clearly regressive that you can't defend 'em.

and

C'mon, yeah, your FDA is a sham
We need more inspections of beef and ham!
Because according to a study by Dennis Mitchell
At Texas A&M Univers - i - ty
A 15% greater budgetary allocation for spot inspections
Would reduce loss of productivity due to illness caused by trychonosis bacteria
More than compensating for the administrative expenditure
Ooh yeah touch me there.

Or "political" lyrics should include anything. I think we get caught up in the content being addressed -- "talking about a party is non-political, talking about a war is inherently political" -- and forget that a better definition is as a style of rhetoric: either it's advancing a specific argument, which hardly anything does, or it's implying one, which everything seems to do fairly equally.

I'm stealing those lyrics.

(Watch it, Roman! I'll pick the threads!)

Is it ok to still be political now that the war is over if you want?

Political music that is NOT specific, that speaks to universals and perhaps in that sense cannot even be called expressly political, is always classic, as long as it's good music. Case in point, Fugazi. Their music is intensely political but doesn't namedrop places and players like, say, Rage against the Machine. It may be fun to listen to "March of Death" a decade from now, but nowhere near as "consciousness-expanding" (if you get that sort of thing out of your music; I do) as listening to Fugazi.

So maybe that's what Madonna is trying to do now...

So why am I listening to Jimmy Cliff's "Vietnam" as i type this?

Siegbran you are brilliant, but Madonna I think is not. To build such a wonderful empire ... and then let it go to waste ... and put us all through a decade's worth of bad publicity stunts ... none of it can revive her I am sorry to say.

"What about Mission of Burma playing with a "No New McCarthy Era" sign? "
-- Sterling Clover

Here you go Sterling:

Mc Carthy hearing documents released today.

May 26, 1953

McCarthy: Now, Mr. Copland, have you ever been a Communist?

Aaron Copland: No, I have not been a Communist in the past and I am not now a Communist.

McCarthy: Have you ever been a Communist sympathizer?

Copland: I am not sure that I would be able to say what you mean by the word ``sympathizer.'' From my impression of it I have never thought of myself as a Communist sympathizer.

-- BurmaKitty

Isn't that Copland the Communist symphonyzer?

BTW, what is this Mission of Burma you speak of? Is it the heroin smuggling operation of Khun Sa?

shout!

oh ... and i think the above mention of le tigre's "what's your take on cassevettes?" is because the song presents both sides of the argument... genius? mysogynist? etc...

"what's your man got to do with me?"

might we find some arguing in the duets of love or nancy sinatra and lee hazelwood? i wonder if there's other examples that extend away from personal politics?

m.

that's somewhat of a political statement when coming from public figure even if it's not overt.
m.

You can mix music and politics. You can mix music and anger, or love, or arsenic, or old lace. It makes nary one turd what you mix music with, because once you play a song about something, the song always ceases to be about whatever you intended for it to be about, and becomes about the way you feel about what you wanted the song to be about. (Go ahead, read that sentence again. I promise it makes sense.)

Music requires inspiration, and sometimes even subject matter, but good music transcends its starting point and becomes only about itself.

So mix away. Write a song about putting your thumb up your butt, for all I care. Just make sure that's something you care about.