Ms Dynamite's new album underlines a truth about pop music - it is usually women, not men, who inject the politics of protest and anger, says Lynsey Hanley
Lynsey Hanley Sunday August 21 2005 The Observer
When Ms Dynamite came out of hiding to perform at Live8's Hyde Park centrepiece, three years after selling 500,000 copies of her debut album, she did it in characteristically tub-thumping style. 'We as a nation have robbed, killed, stolen and tortured the Third World,' she announced, following her pungent observation with a performance of Bob Marley's 'Redemption Song' that, for many, was the highlight of the whole shebang.
The title of that reggae classic is echoed in Ms Dynamite's forthcoming album, Judgement Days, which is as relentless in its mission to harangue and provoke as A Little Deeper, its Mercury Prize-winning predecessor. In a month's time, 'Judgement Day', her first single in more than two years, may will dislodge the slurpy nonsense of James Blunt, McFly and the Crazy Frog with something altogether more substantial.
Because it is women in music, most notably, those working in hip hop and R&B, who are making the most of their chances to be heard by writing and recording songs with explicitly political lyrics. Ms Dynamite's new album includes songs about domestic violence, gun crime, low aspiration, war and poverty, while Sri Lankan-British artist M.I.A, among the favourites to win this year's Mercury, has sold more than 100,000 copies of her class- and culture-conscious debut Arular, itself named after songwriter Maya Arulpragasam's Tamil activist father.
Ex-Fugee Lauryn Hill, who has been away from the charts for long enough to be considered a spiritual godmother to them both, used her confusing, erratic performance at the London Coliseum last month to read out reams of angry protest poetry, berating late capitalist society for its essential pointlessness. Granted, none of her rants seemed yet to come allied with tunes, but her heart was in it, giving fans a shred of hope that she would return to the form of her blazing, 1998 solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Arulpragasam takes a similarly scattergun approach to her feelings about world events, with lyrics that occasionally jar with bien-pensant listeners. 'Sunshowers' contains this queasy line: 'You wanna win a war? Like the PLO, don't surrender.' Elsewhere on Arular, however, she's a blast of fresh air, ripping merrily into lame stereotypes - she came to Britain as a refugee, living on a council estate before blagging her way into St Martin's College in London to study art and film-making - and portraying war-enforced immigration as at once a grinding misfortune and a brilliant way of mashing up cultures. Despite vigorous back-up from M.I.A. and MC and singer Estelle, Ms Dynamite is still seen as the woman to bring plain-speaking political lyricism to the masses, despite her protest that she simply writes, then sings, what she thinks. Also known by her real name, Niomi McLean-Daley, she is more wary in person than in her lyrics.
'I don't feel like I purposely put politics in,' she says of her songs. 'It's just how I feel.' Her spirited mouth-off at Live8 suggests that she feels political much of the time, particularly since the birth of her son, Shavaar, two years ago. 'People interpret that as a political opinion or political view, but I don't really think that myself.'
McLean-Daley's reticence is at least partly understandable. Her impassioned responses to injustice and cruelty are as much from the heart as from the head, and yet, because of her partly invited, partly foisted-upon status as the voice of politically engaged young womanhood, she is trapped into setting herself up as a willing vanguard. Urban music, she feels, still relies too heavily on misogyny and machismo in its lyrical imagery, and doesn't offer enough positive options - male or female - to let her step off the soap box.
'The most popular women in hip hop are just as negative and sexually explicit as the men, to be honest,' she complains. 'Other than Eve and Missy Elliott, they are there through the use of talking about sex in a very derogatory way and using their bodies.' Fair enough, but it's not until their male counterparts stop smothering themselves in the acres of breasts that carpet endless, near-pornographic videos that more female acts will feel able to keep most of their clothes on and still sell records.
With her single, 'It Takes More', Ms Dynamite was the first UK artist to have a hit with a song wearing its anti-gun, anti-violence anti-bling theme on its sleeve. 'How many Africans died for the baguettes on your Rolex?' she sang, referring to the exploitation of diamond miners. It's taken another three years for a man to expand on this theme, and then only hesitantly, as US hip hop producer and rapper Kanye West belatedly changed the lyrics of his recent hit, 'Diamonds From Sierra Leone' to include a verse that includes the lines 'Over here, it's the drug trade, we die from drugs/ Over there, they die from what we buy from drugs.' When Diddy is lavishing time and money on the planet-quivering announcement that he is to drop the 'P' from his already risible name, that counts as revolutionary.
Rock and indie bands, dominated by all-male line-ups, remain even more frustratingly oblique in their lyrics. Bloc Party's platinum-selling album, Silent Alarm, does contain one song whose theme, after careful reading of the lyric sheet, can just about be traced to the intractable, oil-driven conflicts of the Middle East. But the message contained within 'The Price of Gas' is so well-concealed as to be virtually invisible. It's as though approaching testy subjects with anything other than featherlight subtlety will turn an intelligently written song into an agit-prop rant that will only put the fans off.
Similarly, Coldplay, like Ms Dynamite, were one of the hits of Live8, but Chris Martin's pronouncements on record are unerringly vague. You'd no sooner hear him foghorn his way through an unambiguously political lyric than you would expect to see his hands free of Biro-written fair trade slogans. Coldplay's second album even had a song on it called 'Politik', but I'd be hard-pressed to give you a good idea of what it's actually about: 'Give me one, 'cos one is best/ and in confusion, confidence.'
It is not that every guitar band should suddenly start writing their own version of 'Give Peace A Chance' (heaven help us if they did); simply, there is a sense that issues are being avoided or, at best, obfuscated by a fear of sounding too shouty, too snarly. Rock, now dominated by terribly sensible people capable of seeing both sides in every argument, is more polite than it once was, while hip hop and rap, as Ms Dynamite protests, are genres that seem condemned to ignore the life-and-death issues behind the fetish for material goods and the objectification of women.
A decisive return to rock songwriting as mass consciousness-raising can't quite - yet - be ruled out, though. The Rolling Stones, never knowingly political, if we don't count 'Let's Work', Mick Jagger's hideous mid-1980s attempt at out-Norman Tebbitting Norman Tebbit, have re-emerged with the 'Sweet Neocon', a hate song apparently directed at George W Bush, to the bemusement of a rock world expecting their forthcoming album to be full of lechery and little else. Dubya may have been the target for endless ridicule on this side of the pond since his mysterious ascension in 2000, but in America all hints of anti-President rhetoric were hosed down by supporters with the power to change radio playlists.
All-female Texan country trio the Dixie Chicks didn't even go as far as to write lyrics comparable to those of 'Sweet Neocon': 'You call yourself Christian, I call you a hypocrite/ You call yourself a patriot, well I think you're full of shit.' Their onstage comments two years ago, in which they expressed shame at coming from the same state as the President, still managed to send their careers into a temporary nose-dive.
The Stones have even been rehearsing another Bob Marley standard, 'Get Up, Stand Up', for their new world tour, starting tonight, suggesting that Mick'n'Keef's entry into the world of the free bus pass has given them pause to consider the effects of rampant economic inequality. However, the true test of the Rolling Stones's newly politicised stance will come when A Bigger Bang, their latest - and, given their age, possibly final - album, with its well-publicised missive to Bush, Rice, Cheney and the haw kish massive, is released in the US.
'Where was he before the last election?' asked an American friend when I told him about Jagger's lyrical about-face. The Dixie Chicks, the women who spoke their minds and paid with their careers, might well be asking the same thing.
Tracks of protest
'How could you beat your woman till you see tears/ Got your children living in fear/ How you gonna wash the blood from your hands?' Ms Dynamite, 'Judgement Day'
'I thought my Jesus piece was so harmless/ Till I seen a picture of a shorty armless, and here's the conflict/ It's in the black person's soul, to rock that gold/ Spend your whole life tryin' to get that ice/ On a polo rugby you look so nice/ How could something so wrong make me feel so right?' Kanye West, 'Diamonds From Sierra Leone'
'It's liberty for all, democracy's our style, unless you are against us, then it's prison without trial.' Rolling Stones, 'Sweet Neocon'
Judgement Days (Polydor) is released on 3 October -------------------------------------------------------------- Please Note: Due to Florida's very broad public records law, most written communications to or from College employees regarding College business are public records, available to the public and media upon request. Therefore, this e-mail communication may be subject to public disclosure.