Is
Protest Music Dead?
by Jeff
Chang, April 16, 2002
Ever
since John Lennon and Yoko Ono led a raucous crowd of flower-toting,
peasant-bloused hippies in a pot-hazy chorus of "Give Peace
a Chance," it seems to have been a pop axiom: When the
United States goes to war, the musicians begin calling for peace.
Opposing
war hasn't always been a popular position, but it has created
some great music. During the Vietnam era, songs like Edwin Starr's
"War," Jimi Hendrix's cover of "All Along the
Watchtower," Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain" and
"Wars of Armageddon," Jimmy Cliff's "Vietnam,"
Country Joe and the Fish's "Fixing to Die Rag," Creedence
Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising" and "Have
You Ever Seen the Rain?" and Marvin Gaye's "What's
Going On" turned defiance into a raging, soaring, brave
and melancholic gestures of community.
Even
our allegedly apathetic post-Lennonist generation has extended
the tradition. When Bush Senior sent troops to Kuwait in 1991,
rappers Ice Cube and Paris trained their verbal guns on the
White House in "I Wanna Kill Sam" and "Bush Killa,"
while Bad Religion and Noam Chomsky split a 7-inch into a no-war-for-oil
seminar. Antiwar music has become a time-honored balance to
"bomb 'em all and let God sort 'em out" fervor. So
why, since Sept. 11, have we heard so little new music protesting
Bush Junior's war on evil?
Artists
who were once outspoken peaceniks seem to have lost their certainty,
or even switched their position. For years, U2 led crowds in
chants of "No more war!" during their concerts. But
during their surrealistic Super Bowl half-time performance this
past January, they offered deep ambivalence -- a stark display
of the names of Sept. 11 victims set to "Beautiful Day."
Neil
Young's "Ohio" memorialized Kent State University's
murdered antiwar protesters of 1970; his "Cortez the Killer"
condemned imperialism. Now we find him on his post-Sept. 11
cut, "Let's Roll," singing, "Let's roll for freedom;
let's roll for love, going after Satan on the wings of a dove."
Young
wrote the song to honor the heroes of Flight 93, who subdued
their hijackers and paid the ultimate price. But if you believe
"Let's Roll" -- with its Bush-reduced ideas of "evil"
and "Satan" -- is a cry for peace, you've probably
already cleaned out your bomb shelter and reviewed your duck-and-cover
manual.
As
Leslie Nuchow, a Brooklyn-based folk singer who has been touring
the country, says, "Speaking on or singing anything that's
critical of this country at this time is more difficult than
it was a year ago."
We've
seen dozens of acts quietly bury their edgier songs. We've seen
radio playlists rewritten so as not to "offend listeners."
And we've seen Republican officials and the entertainment industry
-- long divided over "traditional values" issues such
as violent content and parental advisory stickering -- bury
the hatchet. White House Senior Adviser Karl Rove has been meeting
regularly with entertainment industry officials to discuss how
they can help the war on terrorism.
The
result? Not unlike the network news, there's been what a media
wonk might call a narrowing of content choice. Think eagle-
and flag-adorned anthologies of patriotic music, prefab benefit
shows screaming CONSUMER EVENT, Alan Jackson's "Where Were
You (When the World Stopped Turning)" and Paul McCartney's
"Freedom." Perhaps this may all be good for the record
business, no small thing for an industry that found itself shrinking
by 3 percent -- about $300 million in revenues -- last year.
But it's hardly the stuff of great art.
A
Twisted Sense Of God
Where
are the alternative voices? Let's start with hip-hop, the most
socially important music of our time and, until recently, the
most successful. Hip-hop's sales led the plunge last year --
by 20 percent, according to Def Jam founder and rap industry
leader Russell Simmons.
And
so did its vision. While Congress debated the Patriot Act and
air strikes left Afghan cities in ruins and untold innocents
dead, Jay-Z and Nas declared their own dirty little war for
the pockets (if not exactly the minds) of the younger generation.
Jay-Z's
dis of Nas, "The Takeover," was based on a sample
from the Doors' "Five to One," an anti-Vietnam War
song released during 1968's long hot summer whose title supposedly
alluded to a demographic menace: five times as many people under
the age of 21 as over.
Here's
Jim Morrison's original: "The old get old/ And the young
get stronger/May take a week/ And it may take longer/ They got
the guns/ But we got the numbers/ Gonna win, yeah/ We're taking
over!" Here's J-Hova's slice: "Gonna win, yeah!"
Released on Sept. 11, his album, The Blueprint, sold 465,000
copies.
Nas
came back with Stillmatic, an album seemingly conceived from
a marketing blueprint. Over a decade ago, Nas debuted during
the height of hip-hop's social consciousness. To appease these
aging fans, he included songs on Stillmatic like the decidedly
non-flag-waving "My Country" and "Rule,"
which bravely ask Bush Junior and the secret bunker crew to
"call a truce, world peace, stop acting like savages".
But kids love that shit-talking, so there's "Ether,"
dissing "Gay-Z and Cock-a-Fella Records." Guess which
of these songs gets the most rewinds?
In
fact, many musicians are commenting on the war, they just aren't
being heard. On a new album for Fine Arts Militia called We
Are Gathered Here ..., Public Enemy's Chuck D has set scathing
spoken-word "lectures" to rockish beats by Brian Hardgroove.
Chuck takes apart the war-mobilization effort and condemns the
arrogance of the president's foreign policy on "A Twisted
Sense of God." But while the song will be available as
an MP3 on his website -- slamjamz.com -- the album has found
no distributor yet.
He
says, "You got five corporations that control retail. You
got four who are the record labels. Then you got three radio
outlets who own all the stations. You got two television networks
that will actually let us get some of this across. And you got
one video outlet. I call it 5-4-3-2-1. Boom!"
When
the World Ends
Message
music is being pinched off by an increasingly monopolized media
industry suddenly eager to please the White House. At least
two of the nation's largest radio networks -- Clear Channel
and Citadel Communications -- removed songs from the air in
the wake of the attacks. Songs like Drowning Pool's "Bodies"
and John Lennon's "Imagine" were confined to MP3 sites
and mix tapes. And while pressure to maintain "blacklists"
has eased recently, the détente between Capitol Hill,
New York and Hollywood --unseen since World War II -- has tangible
consequences.
Bay
area artist Michael Franti and Spearhead were invited last November
to play The Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn. Franti obliged
with a new song, "Bomb Da World." Yet the song's chorus
-- "You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't bomb
it into peace" -- was apparently too much for the show's
producers. Months later, and only after a Billboard magazine
article exposed the story, the clip finally aired.
"It's
funny," Franti says. "In the past, I'd hear some folksingers
singing folksongs or 'Give Peace a Chance' and think, God, this
is really corny. But then you realize, in a time of war, it's
a really radical message."
Little
wonder that artists have quietly censored themselves. The Strokes
pulled a song called "New York Cops" from their album,
and Dave Matthews decided not to release "When the World
Ends" as a single. It's easier to do an industry-sponsored
benefit or to simply shut up and go along, than to fight for
a message and find it pigeonholed.
As
monopolies segment music into narrower and narrower genre markets
to be exploited, protest music becomes the square peg. Perhaps
the question isn't only whether protest music can survive the
war but whether protest music can also survive niche-marketing.
Take
KRS-One's new album, Spiritual Minded. In part a reaction to
the Sept. 11 attacks, the album reconciles Christian spirituality
with a radical notion of diversity -- putting together Bronx
beats, Cantopop, biblical chapter and verse, and the words "peace"
and "As-Salaam Alaikum" in the same song.
"We
live in a Christian nation," he says. "I can only
give the public that which it can digest. So I put this album
out. The door swings open. Christians are like, 'Yeah, wow,
KRS! He finally came over.' Now I'm over. Now let's talk."
But
if this is his most subtle effort yet to promote a message of
peace and unity, it is still a record that needs to be marketed.
So while Spiritual Minded has been a dud in the hip-hop world,
it topped the less lucrative Gospel charts earlier this year.
Even
indie labels no longer provide an alternative, says Joel Schalit,
the Bay Area-based editor of Punk Planet and a member of dub-funk
band Elders of Zion. Schalit's new book, Jerusalem Calling (Akashic
Books), features a chapter that indicts the indie-punk scene,
a movement which began as a highly charged reaction to Reaganism
and major labels and ended up a calcifying, apolitical, "petit
bourgeois" feeder-system for the same majors.
"I
think our generation has started to move in the direction of
formulating its own distinct progressive political positions,
but in many respects, I think that the trauma that was Sept.
11 has thus far stopped them from doing anything new,"
he says. "There haven't been people rushing out to print
7-inch singles attacking American foreign policy like there
was during the Gulf War."
He
adds, "A lot of label owners, especially on the independent
level, are very concerned that promoting ideology is not the
same as promoting art."
If
that sounds reasonable at first glance, consider the question
that Bay Area anti-prison activist and Freedom Fighter Music
co-producer Ying-Sun Ho asks in reference to rap: "You
don't think a song that talks about nothing but how much your
jewelry shines has a political content to it?"
Acts
like Jay-Z are seen as artists with universal appeal, while
niche-marketing lumps together acts that have little in common.
The subcategory of "conscious rappers," for instance,
has been used to sell Levi's jeans and Gap clothing to college-educated,
disposable-income-spending hip-hop fans. In this logic, it's
not the rappers' message that brings the audience together,
it's what their audience wears that brings the rappers together.
Part
of the recent wave of "conscious rap" acts promoted
by major labels, Dead Prez disdains the entire category. Positivity
isn't politics, rapper M-1 argues. Hip-hop has not yet produced
much antiwar music because a lot of "conscious rappers"
were never clear about their political positions in the first
place, he believes, and Sept. 11 revealed their basic lack of
depth.
"There's
a lifestyle that goes with not being aligned with the politics
of U.S. imperialism. It's not just a one-day protest,"
he says, while working in Brooklyn on Walk Like a Warrior, the
follow-up to Let's Get Free. "We're in a new period. A
lot of people are not seeing what has to be and are looking
at it from just a red, white and blue angle."
Hard
Rain Gonna Fall
But
perhaps, in this connected world, we also possess accelerated
expectations. History shows that radical ideas don't take hold
overnight. World War II's hit parade featured sentimental escapism
like Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" and sugary patriotism
like the Andrews' Sisters "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy."
During
the '50s, a progressive folk movement emerged, but it wasn't
until Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Joan Baez revived folk amid the
early-'60s ferment of student organizing that ideas of disarmament
and racial justice began to take root.
As
Craig Werner, professor of African American Studies at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of A Change Is Gonna Come:
Music, Race & the Soul of America (Plume, 1999), tells me,
"The foundation of the anti-Vietnam War music was in the
folk revival. It was almost as if there were an antiwar movement
that was in place that was doing the groundwork. They'd been
writing those kinds of songs for years when Vietnam came around."
Werner
dates the emergence of anti-Vietnam War music to ex-folkie Barry
McGuire's 1966 hit "Eve of Destruction," a song that
faced widespread censorship. "I was growing up in Colorado
Springs, which is a military town. The week that 'Eve of Destruction'
came out, it broke onto the Top 20 charts on the local station
at No. 1. And then was never heard again."
That
moment is not near in these early days of the war on evil. In
the long run, Nas' "My Country" and "Rule,"
with their laser focus on cause and effect, or Outkast's anti-recessionary
global humanism on "The Whole World" may prove to
be more prophetic.
For
now, confusion and flux and omnidirectional rage carry the day.
Bay Area rapper Paris recently addressed the second Bush in
"What Would You Do," a track on his upcoming Sonic
Jihad album "Now ask yourself who's the one with the most
to gain/Before 911 motherfuckas couldn't stand his name/Now
even niggas waiving flags like they lost they mind/Everybody
got opinions but don't know the time." Ghostface Killah
seems to have captured the moment on Wu-Tang Clan's "Rules."
Addressing Osama bin Laden directly about the attacks on New
York, he raps, "No disrespect, that's where I rest my head/
I understand you gotta rest yours, too." But since bin
Laden has brought the bombs -- "Nigga, my people's dead!"
-- it's officially on: "Mister Bush, sit down! We're in
charge of the war."
Healing
Force
Still,
musicians must do what they do, and the story is not yet over.
Folkie Leslie Nuchow believes in music's ability to transform
the people who listen to it, and she doesn't waste a lot of
time worrying about who will distribute it. Recently, she recorded
the mesmerizing "An Eye for an Eye (Will Leave the Whole
World Blind)." Accompanied only by piano, she elaborates
on Gandhi's famous line mostly in a tortured whisper. It's only
available through her website http://www.SlamMusic.com
Nuchow
-- who likes to point out that our national anthem "glorifies
war" but has agreed to sing for U.N. troops stationed in
Kosovo later this year --believes music is not merely a product,
it's a process. After watching the Twin Towers collapse from
her Brooklyn building, she spent that evening agonizing over
what to do next. "I kept on saying to myself, what could
my political action be?" Then she realized, "I'm a
musician. Ri-i-i-ight. Let me do music!"
She
went to demonstrations and gatherings, and handed out fliers
inviting people to come and sing the next morning. About 50
people showed up. They walked through the streets singing "This
Little Light of Mine," "America the Beautiful"
and "Dona Nobis Pacem (Give Us Peace)."
"We
walked as close to ground zero as we could get, and we sang
for the firefighters," she says. "We sang for the
rescue workers and the firefighters. We went up to the hospitals,
and we sang for the doctors, and we sang for the volunteers.
And then -- this was the hardest -- we went to sing for the
families who were trying to find out what happened to their
loved ones."
Nuchow
recalls that the music did exactly what it was supposed to do.
"People wept. Other people came and joined us," she
says. "And to me, that's action. That's making a statement
through music, using music as a healing force."
And
for now, perhaps, that's more than enough.
Jeff
Chang writes for numerous publications, including Colorlines,
the Source and
http://www.Wiretapmag.org
Source:
http://www.MetroActive.com
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