What do you think about MUSIC, POLITICS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS?

It's harder to strike this conversation up at DU, than it is if I'm just communicating face to face with some college sudents. But even for those a bit more old and jaded, this issue should be clearly RELEVENT. We COULD have as powerful and groovy an anti-war undeground today as existed in 1970, we have the internet along with jammin' shows to help take us there, but so far not enough people have channeled their energy in that direction. Young people are ready for it, and they are the ones with the most future to lose in all this, but it's hard to even bring the issue up among DU'rs who graduated long ago.

I put up some of my thoughts along with a playlist of very expressive examples at http://www.artistlaunch.com/artist8.asp?artistid=7635
There's no reason why this should only interest current college students--we all have future's to lose if we don't mobilize in powerful grooves right now!

The 60s and 70s were certainly groovy.

The Man couldn't stop our music -- or our revolutionary politics. So once Vietnam was over, we stopped it ourselves. All political action ceased. Polyester and then the Leisure Suit were invented by the CIA. Cocaine replaced LSD. People went to "singles bars" for lots of drunken, drugged sex. Five years later, they were telling people in my age range not to have sex at all, so we turned to punk rock to show our elders that The Man Can't Stop Our Safety Pins.

Now, we buy "The Greatest Hits of the 60s/70s/80s" collections.

Movement music is fine, but somehow, two generations' worth of radicals have become convinced that we need to "mobilize in powerful grooves". It certainly helps, but it's also completely secondary to the political work that needs to be done.

This isn't to say that there should be no music, or no movement music. Just that you shouldn't be deceived by the 1960s. The Social Democrats in pre-WW2 Europe are probably better role models. A little Jazz, a little petting, and after their movement was broken by the Fascists (and the Communists), many of them went to prison, not to singles' bars.

The stakes were higher, and the price higher still. That's probably what we face today.

So strike up the band -- but tell the doorman to keep an eye open for the cops.

--p!
Older. Sadder. Wiser. More sarcastic. Far more paranoid.

For me, the "good old days" was 2000, when I found hundreds of thousands of international fans for my mp3.com stations!

But I can identify with history well enough to realize that by 1930's and 1940's, music was quite well mobilized toward political change. But it doesn't seem to have been mobilized in such a powerful Earth-wide way as happened in the 1960's and 1970's. The media was slower and less universal in it's reach than what came in with '60's and '70's .

Now the communication channel that's most universal in it's reach is the internet. As a music promoter I wish more Africans were in a position to upload music now. But already, the internet gives an expressive outlet to a much broader range of people than the Clear Channel radio station chain does! The WWW is where the new grooves and consciouness will have to come together!

Esperanto opened the door for me in 1971, when I was 13 years of age. It had no real connection to "the 60s", but it introduced me to a world that was far bigger than America. All of the sudden, I had a pen-pal in Yugoslavia, who knew very little English -- and I didn't know a word of Serbocroatian.

I love America. But I also love the world, a love that was inspired by something as trivial as a quirky international language. My appreciation of that world grew far beyond the million or so people who are conversant in Esperanto.

Music, language, any cultural or artistic endeavor at all, can open the world up. And, of course, so does technology, from the invention of language itself, to the invention of the telegraph, the radio, cinema, TV, computers, the Internet and encoded music (like MP3s and similar files).

The Internet will eventually open up Africa, too. Mark Shuttlesworth, a white South African who has long been working to empower all Africans, started the Ubuntu Linux project to promote Linux on his continent and across the world. The MIT media lab recently designed a cheap Linux computer for third-world kids. Shuttlesworth got rich as an early Internet entrepreneur, and is motivated to "give back", as are many others like him.

People like Bono, Kepa Junkera, Shakira, Milton Nascimento, Miriam Makeba, and Hugh Masekela -- six musicians representing four different generations from around the world -- have taken the first steps. We've traditionally ignored them -- but we were idiots.

But music (or art or culture, etc.) can't do it alone, which is what we learned at great price between 1963 and just recently. Nor can business. This current generation of politically-aware musicians has got to realize that; to learn from the mistakes of the dinosaurs of my age and somewhat older and younger. Our mistakes made "revolutionary music" into a bad, sad, joke. And we also forgot that music had often been used by tyrants for propaganda purposes. We lost control of our own mojo. The price has been high, and is being extracted by people from the RIAA to the international criminal underworld. If technology gives us another chance, we can't forget that the politics and popular control of the law will have to come along whole, not as a hopeful outgrowth of good music.

--p!

and the 15 year olds.. There IS political music out there.. but it's off MY radar screen, and that's as it should be. Green Day's American Idiot comes to mind because that one broke out of the ipods onto the airwaves....

Big corporations won't allow peace music on the air. We need an AirAmerica for music.

Even the Dixie Chicks were banished from corporate radio because they were to pro-peace!

Artist Launch has many progressive tune stations, for example:
http://www.artistlaunch.com/stations.asp

A lot of radical dance music and so on has been gathered together by the Peace Not War organization based in London:
http://www.peace-not-war.org/

Hours and hours of free radical music for you there!
:yourock:

And neither would I, but I'm temporarily without wheels to cruise the loop.

Green Day is definately cool. They've done a number of benefits for great political causes too.

I wouldn't take "what crosses over to the airwaves" as meaning anything at all anymore. In a large urban area or just a large college town, you have a pretty good shot at finding one hip cutting edge station that hasn't been muzzeled by the FCC yet. The internet is where the new music REALLY comes together from all over the planet. Jammin' live shows are also important...that much hastn't changed since the '70's. What connects these shows within a global scene is now websites, not radio stations.

is currently featuring Rolling Stone Magazine's "Mavericks of '05". Bright Eyes, System of a Down,
Jagger, and Billy Joe Armstrong were named for their anti-war or anti-bush music.

At this point in my life, I don't listen to music so heavy all the time...but SOD are some interesting dudes!

yeah

That was a natural starting point for my station playlist. :yourock:

There's somethin' happenin' here ...