JEFF CHANG
IS PROTEST MUSIC DEAD?
Ever
since John Lennon and Yoko Ono led a raucous crowd of flower-toting,
peasant-bloused hippies in a pot-hazy chorus of "Give Peace a
Chance," it seems to have been a pop axiom: When the United States goes to
war, the musicians begin calling for peace.
Opposing war hasn't always been a popular position, but it has created some
great music. During the Vietnam era, songs like Edwin Starr's "War," Jimi Hendrix's cover of "All Along the
Watchtower," Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain"
and "Wars of Armageddon," Jimmy Cliff's "Vietnam," Country
Joe and the Fish's "Fixing to Die Rag," Creedence
Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising" and "Have You Ever Seen
the Rain?" and Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" turned defiance
into a raging, soaring, brave and melancholic gestures of community.
Even our allegedly apathetic post-Lennonist
generation has extended the tradition. When Bush Senior sent troops to Kuwait
in 1991, rappers Ice Cube and Paris trained their verbal guns on the White
House in "I Wanna Kill Sam" and "Bush Killa," while Bad Religion and Noam Chomsky split a
7-inch into a no-war-for-oil seminar. Antiwar music has become a time-honored
balance to "bomb 'em all and let God sort 'em out" fervor. So why, since Sept. 11, have we heard
so little new music protesting Bush Junior's war on evil?
Artists who were once outspoken peaceniks seem to have lost their certainty, or
even switched their position. For years, U2 led crowds in chants of "No
more war!" during their concerts. But during their surrealistic Super Bowl
half-time performance this past January, they offered deep ambivalence –– a
stark display of the names of Sept. 11 victims set to "Beautiful
Day."
Neil Young's "Ohio" memorialized Kent State University's murdered
antiwar protesters of 1970; his "Cortez the Killer" condemned
imperialism. Now we find him on his post-Sept. 11 cut, "Let's Roll,"
singing, "Let's roll for freedom; let's roll for love, going after Satan
on the wings of a dove."
Young wrote the song to honor the heroes of Flight 93, who subdued their
hijackers and paid the ultimate price. But if you believe "Let's
Roll" –– with its Bush-reduced ideas of "evil" and
"Satan" –– is a cry for peace, you've probably already cleaned out
your bomb shelter and reviewed your duck-and-cover manual.
As Leslie Nuchow, a Brooklyn-based folk singer who
has been touring the country, says, "Speaking on or singing anything
that's critical of this country at this time is more difficult than it was a
year ago."
We've seen dozens of acts quietly bury their edgier songs. We've seen radio
playlists rewritten so as not to "offend listeners." And we've seen
Republican officials and the entertainment industry –– long divided over
"traditional values" issues such as violent content and parental
advisory stickering –– bury the hatchet. White House
Senior Adviser Karl Rove has been meeting regularly with entertainment industry
officials to discuss how they can help the war on terrorism.
The result? Not unlike the network news, there's been what a media wonk might
call a narrowing of content choice. Think eagle- and flag-adorned anthologies
of patriotic music, prefab benefit shows screaming CONSUMER EVENT, Alan
Jackson's "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)" and Paul
McCartney's "Freedom." Perhaps this may all be good for the record
business, no small thing for an industry that found itself shrinking by 3
percent –– about $300 million in revenues –– last year. But it's hardly the
stuff of great art.
A Twisted Sense Of God
Where are the alternative voices? Let's start with hip-hop, the most socially
important music of our time and, until recently, the most successful. Hip-hop's
sales led the plunge last year –– by 20 percent, according to Def Jam founder
and rap industry leader Russell Simmons.
And so did its vision. While Congress debated the Patriot Act and air strikes
left Afghan cities in ruins and untold innocents dead, Jay-Z and Nas declared their own dirty little war for the pockets (if
not exactly the minds) of the younger generation.
Jay-Z's dis of Nas,
"The Takeover," was based on a sample from the Doors' "Five to
One," an anti-Vietnam War song released during 1968's long hot summer
whose title supposedly alluded to a demographic menace: five times as many
people under the age of 21 as over.
Here's Jim Morrison's original: "The old get old/ And
the young get stronger/ May take a week/ And it may take longer/ They got the
guns/ But we got the numbers/ Gonna win, yeah/ We're
taking over!" Here's J-Hova's slice: "Gonna win, yeah!" Released on Sept. 11, his album, The
Blueprint, sold 465,000 copies.
Nas came back with Stillmatic, an album seemingly
conceived from a marketing blueprint. Over a decade ago, Nas
debuted during the height of hip-hop's social consciousness. To appease these
aging fans, he included songs on Stillmatic like the decidedly non-flag-waving "My
Country" and "Rule," which bravely ask Bush Junior and the
secret bunker crew to "call a truce, world peace, stop acting like
savages". But kids love that shit-talking, so
there's "Ether," dissing "Gay-Z and
Cock-a-Fella Records." Guess which of these
songs gets the most rewinds?
In fact, many musicians are commenting on the war, they just aren't being
heard. On a new album for Fine Arts Militia called We Are Gathered Here ...
, Public Enemy's Chuck D has set scathing spoken-word
"lectures" to rockish beats by Brian Hardgroove. Chuck takes apart the war-mobilization effort
and condemns the arrogance of the president's foreign policy on "A Twisted
Sense of God." But while the song will be available as an MP3 on his
website -- slamjamz.com -- the album has
found no distributor yet.
He says, "You got five corporations that control retail. You got four who
are the record labels. Then you got three radio outlets who
own all the stations. You got two television networks that will actually let us
get some of this across. And you got one video outlet. I call it 5-4-3-2-1.
Boom!"
When the World Ends
Message music is being pinched off by an increasingly monopolized media
industry suddenly eager to please the White House. At least two of the nation's
largest radio networks –– Clear Channel and Citadel Communications –– removed
songs from the air in the wake of the attacks. Songs like Drowning Pool's
"Bodies" and John Lennon's "Imagine" were confined to MP3
sites and mix tapes. And while pressure to maintain "blacklists" has
eased recently, the détente between Capitol Hill, New York and Hollywood –– unseen
since World War II –– has tangible consequences.
Bay area artist Michael Franti and Spearhead were
invited last November to play The Late Late Show With
Craig Kilborn. Franti
obliged with a new song, "Bomb Da World."
Yet the song's chorus -- "You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't
bomb it into peace" –– was apparently too much for the show's producers.
Months later, and only after a Billboard magazine article exposed the story,
the clip finally aired.
"It's funny," Franti says. "In the
past, I'd hear some folksingers singing folksongs or 'Give Peace a Chance' and
think, God, this is really corny. But then you realize, in a time of war, it's
a really radical message."
Little wonder that artists have quietly censored
themselves. The Strokes pulled a song called "New York Cops" from
their album, and Dave Matthews decided not to release "When the World
Ends" as a single. It's easier to do an industry-sponsored benefit or to
simply shut up and go along, than to fight for a message and find it
pigeonholed.
As monopolies segment music into narrower and narrower genre markets to be
exploited, protest music becomes the square peg. Perhaps the question isn't
only whether protest music can survive the war but whether protest music can
also survive niche-marketing.
Take KRS-One's new album, Spiritual Minded. In part a reaction to the Sept. 11
attacks, the album reconciles Christian spirituality with a radical notion of
diversity –– putting together Bronx beats, Cantopop,
biblical chapter and verse, and the words "peace" and "As-Salaam
Alaikum" in the same song.
"We live in a Christian nation," he says. "I can only give the
public that which it can digest. So I put this album out. The door swings open.
Christians are like, 'Yeah, wow, KRS! He finally came over.' Now I'm over. Now
let's talk."
But if this is his most subtle effort yet to promote a message of peace and
unity, it is still a record that needs to be marketed. So while Spiritual
Minded has been a dud in the hip-hop world, it topped the less lucrative Gospel
charts earlier this year.
Even indie labels no longer provide an alternative, says Joel Schalit, the Bay Area-based editor of Punk Planet and a
member of dub-funk band Elders of Zion. Schalit's new
book, Jerusalem Calling (Akashic Books), features a
chapter that indicts the indie-punk scene, a movement which began as a highly
charged reaction to Reaganism and major labels and
ended up a calcifying, apolitical, "petit bourgeois" feeder-system
for the same majors.
"I think our generation has started to move in the direction of
formulating its own distinct progressive political positions, but in many
respects, I think that the trauma that was Sept. 11 has thus far stopped them
from doing anything new," he says. "There haven't been people rushing
out to print 7-inch singles attacking American foreign policy like there was
during the Gulf War."
He adds, "A lot of label owners, especially on the independent level, are
very concerned that promoting ideology is not the same as promoting art."
If that sounds reasonable at first glance, consider the question that Bay Area
anti-prison activist and Freedom Fighter Music co-producer Ying-Sun Ho asks in
reference to rap: "You don't think a song that talks about nothing but how
much your jewelry shines has a political content to it?"
Acts like Jay-Z are seen as artists with universal appeal, while niche-marketing lumps together acts that have little in
common. The subcategory of "conscious rappers," for instance, has
been used to sell Levi's jeans and Gap clothing to college-educated,
disposable-income-spending hip-hop fans. In this logic, it's not the rappers'
message that brings the audience together, it's what
their audience wears that brings the rappers together.
Part of the recent wave of "conscious rap" acts promoted by major
labels, Dead Prez disdains the entire category.
Positivity isn't politics, rapper M-1 argues. Hip-hop has not yet produced much
antiwar music because a lot of "conscious rappers" were never clear
about their political positions in the first place, he believes, and Sept. 11
revealed their basic lack of depth.
"There's a lifestyle that goes with not being aligned with the politics of
U.S. imperialism. It's not just a one-day protest," he says, while working
in Brooklyn on Walk Like a Warrior,
the follow-up to Let's Get Free.
"We're in a new period. A lot of people are not seeing what has to be and
are looking at it from just a red, white and blue angle."
Hard Rain Gonna Fall
But perhaps, in this connected world, we also possess accelerated expectations.
History shows that radical ideas don't take hold overnight. World War II's hit parade featured sentimental escapism like Bing
Crosby's "White Christmas" and sugary patriotism like the Andrews'
Sisters "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy."
During the '50s, a progressive folk movement emerged, but it wasn't until Bob
Dylan, Phil Ochs and Joan Baez revived folk amid the early-'60s ferment of
student organizing that ideas of disarmament and racial justice began to take
root.
As Craig Werner, professor of African American Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and the author of A
Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of
America (Plume, 1999), tells me, "The foundation of the anti-Vietnam
War music was in the folk revival. It was almost as if there were an antiwar
movement that was in place that was doing the groundwork. They'd been writing
those kinds of songs for years when Vietnam came around."
Werner dates the emergence of anti-Vietnam War music to ex-folkie Barry
McGuire's 1966 hit "Eve of Destruction," a song that faced widespread
censorship. "I was growing up in Colorado Springs, which is a military
town. The week that 'Eve of Destruction' came out, it broke onto the Top 20
charts on the local station at No. 1. And then was never heard again."
That moment is not near in these early days of the war on evil. In the long
run, Nas' "My Country" and
"Rule," with their laser focus on cause and effect, or Outkast's anti-recessionary global humanism on "The
Whole World" may prove to be more prophetic.
For now, confusion and flux and omnidirectional rage
carry the day. Bay Area rapper Paris recently addressed the second Bush in
"What Would You Do," a track on his upcoming Sonic Jihad album: "Now ask yourself who's the one with the
most to gain/Before 911 motherfuckas couldn't stand
his name/Now even niggas waiving flags like they lost
they mind/Everybody got opinions but don't know the time." Ghostface Killah seems to have
captured the moment on Wu-Tang Clan's "Rules." Addressing Osama bin
Laden directly about the attacks on New York, he raps, "No disrespect,
that's where I rest my head/ I understand you gotta
rest yours, too." But since bin Laden has brought the bombs –– "Nigga, my people's dead!" –– it's officially on:
"Mister Bush, sit down! We're in charge of the war."
Healing Force
Still, musicians must do what they do, and the story is not yet over. Folkie
Leslie Nuchow believes in music's ability to
transform the people who listen to it, and she doesn't waste a lot of time
worrying about who will distribute it. Recently, she
recorded the mesmerizing "An Eye for an Eye (Will Leave the Whole World
Blind)." Accompanied only by piano, she elaborates on Gandhi's famous line
mostly in a tortured whisper. It's only available through her website slammusic.com.
Nuchow –– who likes to point out that our national
anthem "glorifies war" but has agreed to sing for U.N. troops
stationed in Kosovo later this year –– believes music is not
merely a product, it's a process. After
watching the Twin Towers collapse from her Brooklyn building, she spent that
evening agonizing over what to do next. "I kept on saying to myself, what
could my political action be?" Then she realized, "I'm a musician. Ri-i-i-ight. Let me do music!"
She went to demonstrations and gatherings, and handed out fliers inviting
people to come and sing the next morning. About 50 people showed up. They
walked through the streets singing "This Little Light of Mine,"
"America the Beautiful" and "Dona Nobis
Pacem (Give Us Peace)."
"We walked as close to ground zero as we could get, and we sang for the
firefighters," she says. "We sang for the rescue workers and the
firefighters. We went up to the hospitals, and we sang for the doctors, and we
sang for the volunteers. And then –– this was the hardest –– we went to sing
for the families who were trying to find out what happened to their loved
ones."
Nuchow recalls that the music did exactly what it was
supposed to do. "People wept. Other people came and joined us," she
says. "And to me, that's action. That's making a statement through music,
using music as a healing force."
And for now, perhaps, that's more than enough.
[April 16, 2002]