I Want My MTV
On my chosen subject of politics, Twitter is replete with the most intellectual idiots you can imagine. There are whole crowds of “moderate” Republicans walking (tweeting?) around just shocked- SHOCKED, I say – that there is depravity in their institution. “We never saw it coming!” “Trump corrupted the GOP!” Which is all foolishness of course. In my own experience I can trace all of today’s conservative cancer through at least Newt Gingrich’s ‘Contract On America”, but it’s not even as complicated as that. My vantage point for the Fall of the West wasn’t CNN but KROQ.
Facts were on the news, but reality was on the radio. The glowy box is sterile without a narrative, but maneuvering the news into a narrative can be deceitful. Music on the other hand had the depth of the world behind it and all the energy they could convert to digital. The actions of conservatism were being described on the news, its impact was being propelled on the airwaves. As crusty as Bruce Springfield or Bono have kinda always been, ‘Glory Days’ and ‘Joshua Tree’ alike will move you in ways that Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper never will.
There’s a handful of songs/albums that heavily informed my feel of politics and the personalities involved. Politically-oriented music is not new in any way, but each aspect or moment in time is rendered in its own way by each new voice. Certainly there’s an argument to be made that the protest rock of the 60’s was speaking to the same madness that more recent artists bemoan, but I discount those relics here because the boomers that were protesting then only grew up, did a complete 180, and turned the control knobs up to 11. Most of the music I was listening to during those years was coming out of Europe, so I was hearing 1) voices other than Michael Jackson or Madonna, and 2) vibes from countries like Italy or England that were already getting turbulent, and already personally familiar with worst-case scenarios.
Shriekback’s ‘Hammerheads’ put conservatism into a contemporary archetype, and painted a picture of the core MAGA missionaries (this is our mission, to be the darlings of God) years before they learned to be so dumb. The relentlessness of the rhythm, the intensity and constant cadence of the delivery, the controlled anger (shove, push, Hammerheads!) of the chorus, the determined malleability of the messenger (we are big and clever and we don’t know anything!), for better or worse the story here is one I accepted as illustrative not only of the determined anger and ignorance of the Right, but also the danger- that rhythm is a march. And once you let them in, now they’re everywhere.
Dead Kennedys’ ‘Holiday in Cambodia’. I can’t help it. It’s racist-tropey as hell but this song is such subversive fun. They skewer both capitalist privilege and fascist utility without your even realizing it because the ‘holiday’ chorus has so much energy that you’re confused into thinking it’s supposed to be weird fun. And it is fun! “Now you can go where people are one, now you can go where they get things done” is some pretty sly satire for low-budget punk. But if you listen there’s a serious striking of both entitlement and control.
Living Color’s ‘Cult of Personality’. Black guys in spandex singing a serious rock tune about political demagogues. There is NOTHING not cool about that. So wow, that’s a video you kinda want to see. And they go right there with the flying dreads, Kennedy, Mussolini (really there’s not enough music about Il Duce), “when a leader speaks, that leader dies”. It’s inherently paternalist of me to still be surprised by the production and I get that, but it’s seriously with the greatest of respect. These guys with this one song out-rocked U2 on Bono’s best day.
Pearl Jam’s ‘Glorified G’ is right up there with Hammerheads. They kick the glorification of both guns and religion, with such simple elegance. “Got a gun, fact I got two. That’s OK man, ’cause I love God”. Vedder’s inborn angst adds such depth to the foolishness, it’s like capturing the intensity with which that armed crowd feels such trivial things.
PWEI is my RATM. Rage is okay, I just don’t want to spend an entire album getting pissed off. I want to enjoy the music. Pop Will Eat Itself fit that bill. They’re British, not fans of the royals, and between This is This and Dos Dedos Mis Amigos (albums) there’s a band that goes from talking about politics to feeling them. Their anger began as commentary, but on a level not usually set to music. A dance track dedicated to Italian porn political Cicciolina showed their comfort level with European politics, and Def.Con.One. described their familiarity with American madness (How sick is Dick, how gone is Ron?).
But sometime between 1990 and ’94, they got angry and it got pretty awesome. I remember listing to the radio on my way to work one day, it was the afternoon so it was probably Jed the Fish talking. I’d already heard the album and liked it, and Jed was cueing up ‘Everything’s Cool’ by chuckling at how “these guys just get angrier and angrier”. But the point is more that he played the song. PWEI’s previous airtime was more mainstream. Even MTV’s ‘120 Minutes’ tended to stick with ‘X, Y, and Zee’ (off of Cure for Sanity). But ‘Everything’s Cool’s broad anger was saved for the end of Dos Dedos Mis Amigos, and that was fine because everything leading up to it was so sharp. The very first track goes in headfirst “when they come to ethnically cleanse me, will you rise up, will you defend me?”, and then hypothesizes a public overthrow of the royal family. They’re reasonably nice to Lady Di though.
The emphasis on PWEI though comes as much from the progression as any individual song. They went from singing about a world that caused bemusement, to singing about a world that caused pain. At the time though, Dos Dedos was during the Clinton years, and America was still in the bemusement phase. Things weren’t great, but ok. That PWEI was being provoked into great anger – four years after bemusement and with respect for their political chops – there was a suggestion made that their anger, that the dystopia they were seeing might be OUR future, delayed by the transatlantic crossing or the slower movement of American politics.
And it has. We’ve reached essentially the point PWEI saw their world at back in ’94. They totally called it.
Midnight Oil is an Aussie U2. The personalities they wrote about – Truganini, Kosciuszko – are foreign to me, but when they go off on behalf of Aboriginals, they’re a voice our own Natives never got. Recovering from colonialism is an opportunity for shared growth from nations around the globe, so the songs work everywhere. ‘Dead Heart’s aboriginal perspective cuts right to the heart of a core identity divide, while ‘One Country’ is unironically hopeful and uplifting. It might be unintentional, but a lesson is that solutions to fundamental divisions are not only possible, but possibly transformative. Not by finding God, but by finding community.*
From ’90 to ’05 or so, the Pet Shop Boys were my jam. ‘Behaviour’ was a soundtrack to my senior year, I remember listening on the bus over my Aiwa tape deck. That was probably their first outwardly ‘out’ record, and the music becomes an example of tone. These were contemplative and sometimes painful lyrics, but set to such lush melodies and with enough of their humor that the album as a whole is a generally peaceful experience. Peaceful enough to serve as an escape from being 17. But from a perspective that was painted politically as “deviant”. Cognitive dissonance, anyone? Deviance isn’t anywhere near as welcoming a body of music as ‘Behaviour’ was.
Green Day’s American Idiot was a watershed moment in recent political rock, and was an anthem altogether with few equals, ever. But the themes they produced had been developed long before their frustration with Bush II. It was just with W that our homegrown chaos began to catch up with the damage being done elsewhere. There were narratives of Americana (‘Jesus of Suburbia) as compelling as any of Springsteen’s, and attacks (‘Holiday’) as pointed as Bono’s. Come to think of it, in terms of tone, U2’s Rattle and Hum has a very similar vibe to it, putting together a larger story through the lens of different characters. And from Green Day. No one saw that coming.
As everyone started to wrap their heads around Trump back in ’16, I stumbled on a foolishly pretentious tweet that suggested a call of some sort should be put out to the artists of the world, to use their voices in protest. Which was simply goofy because 1) any actual artist doesn’t need Twitter’s help for inspiration and 2) that’s exactly what talented artists had been doing all along. Green Day didn’t need Twitter’s blessing or bidding to write American Idiot and more than Twisted Sister needed Al Gore’s blessing to write Stay Hungry.
…Which was over FORTY YEARS AGO now. Dee Snider is a respected elder, his anger is ages old. But that anger has been floating around in the air all around our heads for our entire lives, his and everyone else’s. Right there, every note and every word within your reach, kept mute by nothing but the choice to turn the dial to “simple”.
Except I don’t buy it. I simply cannot accept that such nominally intelligent people as “educated conservative strategists” could have spent their lives escaping every last note NOT out of Nashville. I simply cannot accept that they never heard Peral Jam on the radio any more than they never heard Springsteen talking shit about Reagan. These smart people, they made a choice to ignore that data. They made a CHOICE to prefer their own pocketbooks. And now they’re stuck in a paradox where their smartest defense is to play dumb, because they’re smart enough to KNOW there was precious little actual intelligence in their choices worth defending. Mike Madrid, Steve Schmidt, George Conway, the whole Lincoln Project crowd, all are doing valuable work today in the name of course correction. But every last one of them is also an amoral human defect who can kinda rot in hell, because they’ll never be able to undo the damage they volunteered to do for the lowest bid.
Former Illinois rep Joe Walsh is one of these petty “shocked” snowflakes who pretends to be on a “listening” tour today to help heal the wounds he was busy twisting knives in when he was voting for Trump. He records these podcasts with opposing individuals and props himself up as some model of open-mindedness in a desperate attempt to get his poison soul into political heaven. But he only shows the congenital fallibility of the conservative ear- he still loves guns, still hates poor people, and still wants to control women. The exact same “conservative” behavior I’m talking about being laid in real-time by this one pandering clown.
The truth is out there. You can dance to it.
Or you can hide from it.
*But still, get off my lawn.
About The Author
davetwsprocket
Dave didn't get the memo until, like, just now. He is capable with arranging words, but only just getting started at getting those words to actually do anything. He is motivated by a disrespect for authority, and towards finally doing what's right. He's good with people, but that's a learned skill- his natural inclination is to be far, far away. He's a Leo.