News Mixing Pop And Politics

Since Beethoven first got pissy with Napoleon and renamed his third symphony from ‘Bonaparte’ to the infinitely catchier (and Manic Street Preacher-esque) ‘Heroic Symphony Composed To Celebrate The Memory Of A Great Man’, musicians have been busy mixing pop with politics. As much as we’re fond of the ‘boy meets girl, girl stomps on boy’s heart with the heel of her stiletto’ musical theme, after any band reaches a modicum of success, singing about their failures with the opposite sex/being a loser in general tends to wear thin; after all, you’re a rock star with no idea how much a pint of milk costs and an infinite queue of groupies outside your hotel room every night, so it’s almost a relief if they turn instead to social commentary. Even if the results are sometimes mixed.

All of which makes us a bit desensitised in a way, we’re so used to there being a message in our music. Punk was thirty years ago, and that’s probably the last time a nation was really shocked by ‘popolitics’. We expect Springsteen to use his music as a vehicle to really say something. There’s a reason why ‘Fight The Power ’ is almost certainly Public Enemy’s best known track; in the line “Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps”, Chuck D said more than most artists manage in their entire careers.

This week saw members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot appear in court, apparently held in some kind of cage, on charges of ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’ after the trio staged a performance in a Moscow Cathedral calling on the Virgin Mary to remove President Putin from power. And it’s heartening to see musicians such as Jarvis Cocker, Martha Wainwright and Neil Tennant banding together to try and raise awareness of the group’s plight. In a letter written to The Times, they state that they “believe firmly that it is the role of the artist to make legitimate political protest and fight of freedom of speech.”

Of course, Cocker is no stranger to staging the odd protest himself, albeit on a less political note, what with impulsively wiggling his arse at Michael Jackson during the Brits in ‘96 when Jackson, who had already faced allegations of child molestation, appeared on stage with loads of kids, arms splayed like a crucified messiah. Not to forget his own protest song, ‘Cunts Are Still Running The World’.

That sixteen years later, a band would find themselves facing seven years in jail for actually doing very little more than Cocker did himself that night at Earls Court seems quite insane. The thought has crossed my mind that they might have been better off had they used the medium of their music to get their point across, although in their incarceration they’ve certainly achieved more awareness of the regime that they’re protesting against than they would have by other means. Has a song ever really changed the world? Maybe not, but as a way of documenting the history of dissent, it’s one of the most valuable resources we have. Not to mention the gems that get turned out, without the protest song, we’d never have the wonder that is ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ by Gil Scott Heron, or Dylan’s ‘Maggie’s Farm’, or pretty much the entirety of The Clash’s back catalogue. Or indeed, Bright Eyes’ attack on George W Bush, ‘When The President Talks To God’, it doesn’t get any more direct or passionate than that.

For many years, I’ve always thought that the bands that I adore the most, I love partly because they were fronted by people who popular opinion might suggest cannot sing, Billy Bragg, The Smiths, Jarvis, Hefner. Despite not being virtuosos in their fields, that they were still doing it anyway must mean that they’re really, properly, driven to get up on that stage. But lately, I’ve wondered if I’m selling myself (and them) short, and there’s a little bit more to it than that. It’s that they have something to say. Those artists singing about our times, they’re providing a much better history lesson than any of my teachers ever did. Sorry Mr Sheldrake, but if you’d really wanted me to learn about the Falklands war, you’d have done much better to play me Robert Wyatt’s version of ‘Shipbuilding’. Now that would have been a history lesson.