Nope sadly it can’t anymore: Perhaps it is just apathy? Or is everybody really happy about the way things are now?
This article titled “I was Paloma Faith’s support act – but politics can’t reach the parts music can” was written by Owen Jones, for The Guardian on Wednesday 1st April 2015 06.00 UTCMusic can inspire, move, even devastate, like few cultural forms. Its functions and roles differ: making that morning jogor an afternoon of exam revision bearable, the backdrop to millions of unforgettable nights out, the comfort blanket after the traumatic end of a relationship.
Music can date our lives like the rings of a tree trunk. We sometimes listen to a song because it conjures up a period of our lives. And because of its raw emotional power, music has the potential to make us contemplate social injustice more effectively than any column the likes of me can churn out. Yet this function has been neglected – partly by circumstance, partly by conspiracy.
When I told friends or acquaintances that I was going to be the Brit award-winning singer Paloma Faith’s support act, the response was a mixture of bafflement and concern that either my career or life was going to end in a volley of bottles at London’s O2 arena. I shared their nerves, though comforted myself with the positive response I received when I took to the stage at Glastonbury to rail against injustice and nuclear weapons in 2013. This audience would be rather different, it was pointed out. Faith was taking a risk, too, but her courage and strength inspired me. The daughter of a Spanish immigrant, fed up with the scapegoating of those at the bottom and the failure to hold those at the top to account, concerned that a disillusioned electorate would not use their hard-won democratic rights, she wanted to find new ways to engage her fans. But here’s what moved me: she wanted to rebuild a link between music and politics that was once strong, but which has been heavily eroded.
Politics and music once blossomed. When the US was convulsed by struggles over civil rights and the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 1970s, music reflected many of the contemporary traumas. Marvin Gaye’s anguish at the social ills of the era was voiced in songs such as What’s Going On. “Vietnam, police brutality, social conditions, a lot of stuff,” he said at the time. “With the world exploding around me, how am I supposed to keep singing love songs?” I remember singing Pete Seeger’s pained anti-war anthem Where Have All the Flowers Gone at primary school; little did I know how he and other politicised musicians such as Paul Robeson were hounded and persecuted by the McCarthyites for speaking out.
There was Bob Dylan, of course, capturing the upsurge in challenges to the US social order in 1964 with The Times they are a-Changin’. He was consciously allied to the insurgent struggles for emancipation, saying later: “The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time.” The blue-collar hero Bruce Springsteen was radicalised by Ronald Reagan, and – rather like Paloma Faith – railed against the demonisation of immigrants. Hip-hop is often portrayed as corrupted by hyper-commercialism and rampant individualism, but Public Enemy incited rebellion among US youth in the late 1980s.
The marriage of music and struggles against an unjust status quo is a global phenomenon, of course. Chile’s Victor Jara – Latin America’s very own Bob Dylan – was part of the movement that culminated in Salvador Allende’s election. Shot dead by August Pinochet’s henchmen, he penned a poem in his final hours: “Silence and screams are the end of my song”. From the struggle against Nigeria’s military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, Fela Kuti founded the entire musical genre of Afrobeat. As if to underline the potentially subversive power of music, the Russian authorities had Pussy Riot locked up in 2012 for singing against Putinism in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.
And then there’s the political music traditions of Britain too, of course. When Thatcherism stripped industry from swaths of the country, entire communities were left without work or hope. With despair growing, no wonder the Specials’ Ghost Town resonated in 1981. Red Wedge brought together musicians united against Thatcherism, including Billy Bragg, Madness and Paul Weller.
Yes, politicised musicians are still there, but all too often they are deprived of a mainstream platform. What happened? It’s complex, certainly. Like much of the media and popular culture generally, barriers have been erected that prevent those from non-privileged backgrounds from making it. From acting to journalism to music, it is those who can afford to live off the bank of Mum and Dad who are favoured: everything from the housing crisis to the benefit sanctioning regime help see off musical acts with limited financial means. The accelerated commercialisation of music hasn’t helped either: the big businesses dominating mainstream music are hardly sympathetic when it comes to musicians sticking it to the man. There’s fear: speak out, and the Daily Mail will retaliate with a series of hatchet-jobs on your personal life. And then there’s the general decline of the left: all those defeats under Thatcherism, the disappointments of the New Labour era, the unabashed free-market triumphalism of the post-Cold War era.
No era lasts forever, of course. That celebrities such as Paloma Faith, Russell Brand and Michael Sheen are speaking out about politics is symptomatic of a broader trend. There is a rich seam of disillusionment with Britain’s current social order, and it occasionally bubbles to the surface. It is often directionless, lacking a coherent alternative in which to invest hope and truth, and frequently contradictory. But it is there all the same.
The current election campaign will be marked by character assassinations, while the Britain of food banks, zero-hours, in-work poverty, housing crisis, job insecurity and young people facing a future bleaker than their parents will not be given the hearing it deserves. When I supported Paloma, no bottles were thrown: the crowd (some who I’m sure were pretty bemused) listened politely and cheered me at the end, no doubt with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
Let’s be honest, though; even well-intentioned commentators and politicians fail to stir popular emotions about the great causes of our time. Music, though, can reach us where modern formal politics often does not: our hearts. Love and loss always have their place in music. But there are other traditions, too, and maybe our musicians should start rediscovering them.
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