With great power comes great responsibility.
- Spider-Man
Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of debate about whether or not music should be political: whether someone like Bruce Springsteen actually has the right to sing about the war in Iraq, or to tell people how to vote. Personally, I think it’s a non-issue: people have the right to sing about whatever they want to, and just because someone is a musician doesn’t mean they’re automatically precluded from knowing anything about politics.
One question that’s been raised which I think is more interesting is whether or not superstar musicians actually have a responsibility to get political, to use their music as a platform to try and make a difference to the way people think and act. It’s kind of an extension of the idea of ‘social responsibility’… The idea that everyone, especially ones that might be able to affect and persuade people, have at least some responsibility to try to make the world a better place.
Well, I don’t think anyone would really disagree with that, but really that whole thing depends on the idea that ‘musicians making a difference’ actually, y’know, makes a difference! Or a positive one, anyway… And I’m not sure that it really does.
Political music can certainly raise awareness of a certain issue, that’s true: just look at the Special AKA song ‘Free Nelson Maldela’,which played a big part in making Mandela’s plight a popular cause. But there are also some downsides to this: for one thing, people have a tendancy to confuse ‘raising awareness’ of an issue with actually doing something about the issue itself. This is particularly glaring for stuff like Live Earth: it didn’t particularly motivate people into action, and it definitely didn’t actually do anything to help the environment (all those jets saw to that), and environmentalism is a fairly well-known movement in the first place, so what’s the point? It can even raise a bigger problem, that of promoting worthless armchair activism: people who return from something like that thinking ‘Well, I did MY part!’ and not trying to do anything further.
There’s also a tendancy to oversimplify and even trivialise important, complex issues… Just look at all those anti-Bush songs and benefit concerts: yeah, man, impeach Bush, he’s an idiot, he can’t even pronounce ‘nuclear’ properly, ha ha! Let’s not talk about the gaping flaws and problems in the entire political system that led to that whole fucking debacle in the first place, let’s just boil the whole thing down to an extended ‘Bush is dumb’ joke, reel off some trite slogan or other, and make out own side look like petty, smug little douchebags in the process. There’s also fairly obvious problems in trying to boil down complex issues to three-minute pop songs, especially when they generally make an appeal to emotion instead of reason.
That brings me to the next point, that these endorsements can actually damage the causes they support. Just as atheism’s biggest problem is the smug 13-year-old with a Richard Dawkins book under his arm, and just as the anti-war movement was set back immeasurably by Sean Penn, so too can worthy causes be destroyed by an association with irritating people. It doesn’t matter how much good work your charity has done, once Johnny Borrell (or whatever his fucking name is) steps in and starts namechecking it, then the whole thing is going to be denounced as just another worthless ego-stroking Fad Of The Week.
So, yeah. All that being said, do I think it’s impossible for musicians to make some sort of difference through their music? Of course not! Just look at someone like Bob Dylan or Billy Bragg or whoever… But the idea that all musicians have a responsibility to try and change the world is a bad one, because firstly they're not particularly qualified, and secondly because I think that passing the buck on to other people (and to fucking musicians, of all things) is a kind of cheap and lazy way to avoid taking some sort of personal responsibility in political problems and such.
So, yeah. Do you think that popular bands have a responsibility to make political music?