ISH Magazine Article

This is an article I wrote for ISH (Irish Scene and Heard) Magazine, back in 2003.

A Volatile Mix

Michael Synnott maintains that music and politics don’t always go together like hand and glove.


Let’s try a little thought experiment. Picture yourself sitting in your living room, flicking through the satellite TV music channels. Got the image? OK, now imagine you stumble across a live gig by your favourite band. Result! You settle back in your chair, crank up the volume and rock out.

Now picture yourself listlessly surfing through the other channels. Through some horrid twist of fate you happen across Prime Minister’s Question Time or the televised coverage of the Dáil sessions. What do you do? Well, if you’re anything like me, you switch channels as quickly as your tired surfing-thumb will allow and thank your lucky stars you didn’t see anything that might have polluted your delicate artistic mind.

Now, how did these two scenarios make you feel? Again, if you’re anything like me the answers are ‘elated’ and ‘detached’, respectively. Music and politics: subjects at opposite ends of the social spectrum, diametrically opposed belief systems, freedom versus control, lifestyles never to be mixed. Or are they?

As long as there has been political intrigue, there has been music supporting, condemning or ridiculing it. But how do we feel about musicians crossing the boundary from entertainer to politician, or at least to political commentator? After all, the politicians rarely cross the line in the opposite direction, with the exception of Bill Clinton, who was an aficionado of ‘oral sax’ and numerous Irish politicians who, judging by their characters, have never been averse to twanging out the occasional solo tune on the ol’ one-string banjo.

Here’s another thought experiment: think of as many outspoken musical artists as you can. Off you go. Done? OK, even without knowing your age and political views, I bet I can name at least two of those you came up with:

Bob Dylan, Eminem, Joan Baez, Zach de la Rocha, Frank Zappa, Madonna, Bono, The Wolfe Tones, Stiff Little Fingers, Ice-T, The Dixie Chicks, John Lennon, errmm …. Well, there are shitloads more, but you get the idea. Now, let’s take two of these people, Bono and Eminem, and do a little compare and contrast.

Ask twenty U2 fans how they feel about Bono’s outspoken political views and lyrics and you’ll probably get half of them saying he’s a champion of the people and the other half saying they wish he wouldn’t bother and that he should get on with the business of making rock music. Ask twenty Eminem fans the same question and, notwithstanding the obvious demographic differences, most, if not all, of them will say ‘Yeah, he’s bang on.’

So what’s the difference here? Those of us who saw ‘Self Aid’ in 1986 remember the shock, embarrassment and disdain we felt as U2 played ‘Maggie’s Farm’ and Bono fell around the stage, using his microphone lead as a tourniquet as he mimed the act of shooting a syringe full of smack into his arm. ‘He’s lost the plot’, we said, and we prematurely predicted his demise as an Irish rock icon. Yet, we now watch Marshall Mathers lurching around the stage like a demented Quasimodo, spitting vitriol at a world he hates yet has to live in, and we nod our heads in approval—at the message if not the music. What’s going on here?

It’s an honesty thing. We understand someone like Marshall Mathers, for whom politics and the message are his entire raison d’être. He burst onto the scene with an in-your-face delivery and a lyric sheet that reads like the court transcript of a pub argument, and he was political from the get-go. We scoff at the likes of U2, who came from privileged backgrounds and seemed to jump on the political bandwagon to sell a few records. I know it’s a harsh judgement, and anyone who has listened to ‘Boy’ will know that Bono’s political sensibilities were present in his art from the outset, but nonetheless, it is the prevailing attitude. We seem to be mentally categorising politically-outspoken musical artists depending on their backgrounds and adjusting our tolerance levels accordingly. To reinforce this point, go back to your mental list of outspoken musical artists and divide them into ‘always political’ and ‘occasionally political’ camps. You’ll be surprised how your attitude to the members of each differs.

Not since Vietnam have people been more divided politically than they were over the Second Gulf War, or the recent illegal invasion of Iraq, depending on your viewpoint. The fair-weather politicos in the music industry came out of the woodwork like cockroaches, and it became, quite frankly, boring.

“Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” So said Natalie Maines, proud Texan and member of The Dixie Chicks, at a concert in London during the invasion. She recanted after stations boycotted their records and 76% of listeners to Atlanta station KICKS 101.5 said they would return their Dixie Chicks CDs if they could. Hmm… ten-out-of-ten for effort, Love, but you certainly won’t make a successful politician with this propensity towards career-destroying public comments.

On the other hand, System of a Down got out in the streets, joined an anti-war protest and released the song “Boom!”—a sensible approach to protest, I have to say. Zach del la Rocha of Rage against the Machine and his ilk, totally vindicated, looked on quietly, shaking their heads and saying ‘I told you so.’

But what happens when politics encroaches on music? The most memorable example of recent times is the infamous PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center), founded by Tipper Gore in reaction to hearing the lyrics to Prince’s “Darling Nikki”, from the album Purple Rain which she had bought for her 12-year-old daughter Karenna. The PMRC claimed that ‘virgin minds’ were being poisoned by “hidden messages and backward masking” but quite how the notion of a sexually self-assured woman ‘masturbating with a magazine’ would poison the mind of any 12-year-old remains a mystery. The PMRC, or ‘The Washington Wives’—so called because their husbands were prominent politicians—appeared before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on September 19, 1985 with a list of outrageous demands designed to censor the music industry. Every time you see that ‘Parental Advisory’ sticker on an album or wonder why Kerrang TV has specific late-night slots for certain videos, you can thank Tipper Gore and the PMRC. Protecting children or the most blatant contravention of the First Amendment ever seen? The jury’s still out.

But the PMRC didn’t get it all its own way. Frank Zappa and Dee Snider vigorously defended free speech and Zappa famously declared, “Censorship here would be like using decapitation to deal with dandruff.” He went on to warn that censorship “opens the door to an endless parade of moral quality-control programs based on Things Certain Christians Don’t Like. What if the next bunch of Washington Wives demands a large yellow ‘J’ on material written or performed by Jews?”

Now, these are the kinds of musicians we need in politics. Unfortunately, the good guys like Frank and Sonny Bono seem to die off prematurely.

Where does that leave us? Well, in exactly the same place we came in: there will always be politics in music and there will always be musicians in politics. It’s our duty to support those who deserve to be there and to ridicule those who don’t.

2003-12-16