I am currently listening to the Rise Against album, which I picked up yesteday mainly for the ballad, "Swing Life Away". The album is good as modern punk goes, but their political content (which swings from expectedly naive to surprisingly thoughtful) got me to thinking about the state of poltical music in the world today and particularly about one of my favorite bands of my teenage years: Rage Against the Machine.
As a teenager, I was a predictably naive budding leftist, taken in by Michael Moore and the romantic ghost of 60s idealism. Rage was the perfect soundtrack for self-absorbed white middle-class youth trying to turn their natural youthful rebellion into a righteous fight for justice. Future sociologists looking for a defining moment of the death of the American left need look no further than Rage's set at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in which they flew a large featuring Che Guevera (Guevera, romantic symbol of rebellion to the American left, was in fact a huster and murderer whose communist rebellion in Cuba was sponsored by the same Chinese government that is oppressing Tibet).
Ironically, Rage broke up in 2000, a year before politics became important again to the average citizen. Since then, Zach de la Rocha has dropped off the face of the earth and the other members have formed the decidedly apolitica Audioslave (though Audioslave's concert in Cuba shows they haven't let their marxist leanings behind). I shudder to think what a Rage album would sound like today. 9/11 and the war in Iraq turned their brother-in-arms Michael Moore from a well-intentioned but misinformed nuisance into a hate-filled megalomaniac who depicts Saddam-controlled Iraq as Candyland while thanking the American poor in the military for giving their lives as "their gift to the rest of us" (i.e. upper-middle class white liberals who do not have to worry about their sons and daughters ever being sent to war). Yes, Rage broke up just in time to see their self-absorbed version of leftist politics be rendered completely irrelevant.
So what are we left with in today's politically charged world. Unfortunately, political music today is a perfect example of corporate america's destruction of rock's soul. Many rock bands have spoken out against Bush, but their radical chic posturing is just as idiotic and hollow as Alec Baldwin and the rest of FAG crowd (if you are offended by that last sentence, rent Team America: World Police. Right now). Meanwhile, on the right, we have Toby Keith and his ilk pandering to the red state crowd. On both sides, it is not protest, it is marketing. Their is nothing of the immediacy and and true emotion of Vietnam-era songs like "What's Going On" and "Fortunate Son" (or even, on the red state side, of "Okie from Muskogee"). Maybe that is because, more than ever, war is abstraction to these people. Neither they nor anyone they know will ever actually fight in one. In Conor Oberst's pathetic entry into the protest song genre, "Landlocked Blues", he sings "We made love on the living room floor. With the noise in the background from a televised war." I don't think he did it on purpose, but Oberst perfectly summed up the reaction from musicians and artists to the war in Iraq: fucking (or, more accurately, jacking off) while people they will never meet die on the other side of the world.
As a teenager, I was a predictably naive budding leftist, taken in by Michael Moore and the romantic ghost of 60s idealism. Rage was the perfect soundtrack for self-absorbed white middle-class youth trying to turn their natural youthful rebellion into a righteous fight for justice. Future sociologists looking for a defining moment of the death of the American left need look no further than Rage's set at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in which they flew a large featuring Che Guevera (Guevera, romantic symbol of rebellion to the American left, was in fact a huster and murderer whose communist rebellion in Cuba was sponsored by the same Chinese government that is oppressing Tibet).
Ironically, Rage broke up in 2000, a year before politics became important again to the average citizen. Since then, Zach de la Rocha has dropped off the face of the earth and the other members have formed the decidedly apolitica Audioslave (though Audioslave's concert in Cuba shows they haven't let their marxist leanings behind). I shudder to think what a Rage album would sound like today. 9/11 and the war in Iraq turned their brother-in-arms Michael Moore from a well-intentioned but misinformed nuisance into a hate-filled megalomaniac who depicts Saddam-controlled Iraq as Candyland while thanking the American poor in the military for giving their lives as "their gift to the rest of us" (i.e. upper-middle class white liberals who do not have to worry about their sons and daughters ever being sent to war). Yes, Rage broke up just in time to see their self-absorbed version of leftist politics be rendered completely irrelevant.
So what are we left with in today's politically charged world. Unfortunately, political music today is a perfect example of corporate america's destruction of rock's soul. Many rock bands have spoken out against Bush, but their radical chic posturing is just as idiotic and hollow as Alec Baldwin and the rest of FAG crowd (if you are offended by that last sentence, rent Team America: World Police. Right now). Meanwhile, on the right, we have Toby Keith and his ilk pandering to the red state crowd. On both sides, it is not protest, it is marketing. Their is nothing of the immediacy and and true emotion of Vietnam-era songs like "What's Going On" and "Fortunate Son" (or even, on the red state side, of "Okie from Muskogee"). Maybe that is because, more than ever, war is abstraction to these people. Neither they nor anyone they know will ever actually fight in one. In Conor Oberst's pathetic entry into the protest song genre, "Landlocked Blues", he sings "We made love on the living room floor. With the noise in the background from a televised war." I don't think he did it on purpose, but Oberst perfectly summed up the reaction from musicians and artists to the war in Iraq: fucking (or, more accurately, jacking off) while people they will never meet die on the other side of the world.