On Mon, 30 May 2011, Doug Henwood wrote:
> I was thinking of doing a radio show on political music - why so much of
> it sucks, and what makes the good stuff, like Gil Scott-Heron, not suck.
> Any ideas, either for substance or guests?
One idea that keeps occuring to me is that most famous political music was selected out because it served a purpose. It was for integrating crowds, making them feel not like strangers but part of a common endeavor, and perking up their morale during long boring vigils -- walking pickets, occupying demonstrating. And to do this, it had to be singable by the crowd -- at least the chorus. And I'm guess that most of the elements of what you consider suckiness is a function of this: lower musical complexity, slower tempos, simpler words, and a general folkiness.
Folk clearly isn't our medium these days. But the problem with most more sophisticated music is that it's not something the crowd can sing. It's easy to make much better songs than the famous political songs. Gang of Four's Entertainment is one brilliant political song after another. But nothing a crowd can sing. Which means they will never be identified with a movement. And thus never make it onto those lists of "great political songs."
I guess you could simply stop there and say great music should be great music and fuck getting people at political actions to sing along because that's not your thing -- that that whole project of using music to make strangers feel part of an instant whole is not one you care for.
Which, if so, I think would kind of answer the question.
But, if you're open to the idea there is a role for at least some political music that animates a crowd, and where the crowd can join in feel that pleasure and power of being in sync (which you can get even from successfully singing even the hokiest choral music), then another option would be to consider how musicians could reinvent the wheel to suit our present tastes.
Pete Seegar pretty much consciously invented and popularized the sing-along for the express purpose of making folk forms work for people who had never grown up in folk music cultures and knew none of the tunes. The chorus came in simple lines, and there's be a bridge where he told you what to sing while the music approached it. The crowd was rewarded with this big sound that they made that sounded good enough. This wasn't a natural protest music. It was created.
It occurred to me last week that maybe an analogous form for modern times would be the call-and-response motifs of rap and funk forms. The few concerts of this stuff I've gone to, while cool as hell, often seemed oddly homologous to pep rallies -- like egging on one side of the room to yell louder than the other. Which is essentially perfect for the purpose of firing up a crowd. Fight the Power comes to mind as one of the few famous modern political songs you can easily get a crowd to sing and respond to.
Anyway, this thought occurred to me when I saw the attached video, which, for all its nerdity, I thought rocked -- a very profane, very funny 2 minute rant on climate change stupidity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFTddFk6zb8
And I thought, nerdy as that is, I could it being used to fire up a real crowd if we ever had a climate change movement. Even just watching at home by the end I started joining in on the "Noooooo!" And if you did that with 10,000 people, you'd get the same feeling of massed power you get with those hymns tunes -- but better, because more tuned to our tastes, and more faster, louder and profaner.
Also it's fascinating how you can pack 2 two minutes of rap with an absolutely astonishing amount of information. Which, given modern portability, every nerd would memorize.
Anyway, that's my two cents worth of reflection.
Michael