Column:
The politics of music
Published Sept. 8, 2008
Almost all music written about politics displays no knowledge of actual political discourse whatsoever.
Green Day's American Idiot was, I think, supposed to be "political." But there seems to be nothing genuinely political about anything on that album, besides vague references to the president and the media.
Obviously there are exceptions - anyone from Creedence Clearwater Revival to the Arcade Fire - but ironically I find those exceptions to be the least politically intriguing.
Whether or not musicians touch on politics as a subject matter at all, entire genres inevitably align themselves with certain political parties. There is something inherently political about the act of making music, and almost no musicians are actively conscious of this in the works they produce.
The most obvious examples are rock and country music. In a very tangible sense, this is made apparent by the soundtracks to the Republican and Democratic campaigns for president right now.
The Decemberists, Superchunk and Wilco have all played benefit concerts for Barack Obama over the past few months. John Rich - half of country music duo Big & Rich - penned a song about John McCain, entitled "Raising McCain," which he performed at the Republican National Convention last week.
But it's not a matter of taste alone, nor is it something that came about by random chance. Country music is predominantly popular in the predominantly conservative South, which makes sense since it originates there. Rock music came of age during the strikingly liberal 1960s and '70s. Furthermore, rock is much more prevalent in large liberal-leaning cities than it is elsewhere, to the extent that there are probably more members of the band Broken Social Scene than there are people in the entire South that know who the hell they are.
While it may seem like country music is the most right-aligned genre of music in America, the similarities are almost purely aesthetic. As far as lifestyle is concerned, country musicians come nowhere near to embodying neoconservative Republican ideals the way that rappers do. I am absolutely convinced that rap music is more closely aligned with Republican social and economic policy than any other genre of music is to any other political doctrine.
Rap music established itself as a legitimate art form during the 1980s, a time when neoconservative arguments like trickle-down economics first entered the American bloodstream. Aspiring rappers at the time unconsciously acquired the values of that society and haven't let go since then.
Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps is the quintessential rap success story. Almost every successful mainstream rapper has multiple songs concerning this.
Rappers are wildly individualistic and almost always record as solo artists, though they collaborate for the sheer sake of economic prosperity for themselves and their colleagues. They value the concept of the self-made man to no end. They're pro-gun, pro-rugged individualism and anti-regulation. I guarantee you that most rappers would not be averse to downsizing the government.
Further, rappers are the only musicians to truly embrace large-scale entrepreneurial endeavors. Diddy, 50 Cent and Kanye West own more beverages, restaurants and clothing lines than any of us will ever be aware. Jay-Z even has his own color.
Just as our nation's wealthiest people typically lean toward Republican economic policies, so too do our nation's most financially savvy musicians.
I'm not sure what this means for the election this November, but if Barack Obama is the rock star candidate, I guess that makes John McCain a 72-year-old original gangsta.