MUSIC & POLITICS

Here are some interesting thoughts, comments and insights from Sam Smih, the Editor of The Progressive Review. Available at news@prorev.com. Thanks....................Scott

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MUSIC & POLITICS
The sound of change;
the power of changes

Sam Smith

[This was the chart used to riff some comments at a performance by the
punk rock group Blowback on March 10,2006 at the Club Asylum in DC's
Adams Morgan]

WHEN he was 25, Colin Wilson wrote The Outsider, a book about those who
see too deep and too much. I suspect some of you are here tonight.

Wilson tells of a Jean Paul Sartre character who lives alone in a hotel:
"There is his ordinary life, with its assumptions of meaning, purpose,
usefulness. And there are these revelations, or, rather, these attacks
of nausea, that knock the bottom out of his ordinary life. The reason is
not far to seek. He is too acute and honest an observer. . ."

"Of the café patron, he comments: 'When his place empties, his head
empties too.' The lives of these people are contingent on events. If
things stopped happening to them, they would stop being. Worse still are
the . . . pictures he can look at in the town's art gallery, these
eminent public men, so sure of themselves, so sure that life is theirs
and their existence is necessary to it. . .

A few days later he reflects that "the nausea is not inside me; I feel
it out there, in the wall . . . everywhere around me."

Here is a metaphor for our own time, living as we do so near to all
"these eminent public men, so sure of themselves, so sure that life is
theirs and their existence is necessary to it." And finding the nausea
out there in a war, an ecological crisis, and the collapse of
constitutional government.

I feel it. . . like an exile in my native town, a town partly occupied
by guards who demand I prove I am not a terrorist and partly filled with
people who seem just to be passing through the place as if it were the
world's largest Marriot Hotel lobby.

But then in Sartre's café somebody puts on a record, a woman singing
'Some of These Days'. The nausea disappears and Roquinten says: 'When
the voice was heard in the silence I felt my body harden and the nausea
vanish. . . I am in the music. Globes of fire turn in the mirrors,
encircled by rings of smoke.'"

Wilson calls it art once again giving order and logic to chaos.

I have been a journalist and I have been a musician and one of the
things I have learned is that there are times for words and then there
are times when words fail, except the kind that are put to music, a time
when music becomes the best politics.

For example, a few decades ago , a young boy named Andras was introduced
to rock music while living in Denmark: " I didn't know what the
underlying message was and I didn't care. I just thought this was
something that I had to embrace."

Then he returned to his native Hungary to live with his aunt and uncle,
who were conservative communists. And one night his uncle came in and
took away the radio. Andras apologized for playing it so loud but the
uncle said, ""The problem was not that it was loud. The problem was that
you were listening to a Western radio station. . .

"Still, you had to keep going . . . It kept us sane. . . . As we
listened to Radio Luxemburg, we were suddenly out of our bodies and our
soul was part of the free world. . .

Someone would find a record in a shop and they would buy it and then
make 500 copies. And Andras started a band. As he put it, "there was no
way to stop . . . the message of freedom through rock and roll. . .

Andras told that story a few years ago at the Rock and Roll Hall of
fame, but no longer as a young man, no longer a rocker but the Hungarian
ambassador to the United States.

Similarly, when the Czech leader Vaclav Havel met Lou Reed in 1990 he
told him, "Did you know that I am president because of you?" The Velvet
Underground's first record had become so popular in Prague it had given
the rebellion its name: "the Velvet Revolution."

In short, punk politics.

And then there was Rage Against the Machine: 1993. . . stands naked for
15 minutes without playing a note or singing in a protest against
censorship. . . 1997. . . Well before most college students knew about
the issue, Tom Morello is arrested during a protest against sweatshop
labor. . . 2000: the LA police close down a Rage concert seen as a
threat to the Democratic convention.

Or take traditional jazz, my music. During much of the 20th century jazz
clubs were among the few places that whites and blacks shared socially.
. . My own civil rights involvement had its roots in part in a music I
loved. Among my records as a student in an all white high school was a
Louis Armstrong song:

Even the mouse
Ran from your house
Laughed at you
And scorned you, too
What did I do
To be so black and blue?

Even earlier I had found a song in a book on my parents' piano:

I dreamt I saw Joe Hill last night
As live as you and me
But Joe, I said, you're ten years dead
I never died said he. I never died said he

The copper bosses shot you Joe,
The killed you Joe said I
What they forgot to kill, said Joe,
Went on to organize.

And years later, holding hands with those I knew only from their souls
singing:

Deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome
Some day

Or standing with tens of thousands on the Mall singing:

All we are saying is give peace a chance

Try it yourself. . .

You'll be amazed how much is in the MP3 playlist of your brain that has
been guiding and driving you forward.

But there's another side as well. . .

About two weeks ago Itunes downloaded its one billionth song. Its one
billionth reason for someone not to notice anything for awhile but to
walk indifferently down the streets of our collapsing republic. One
billion tunes and things are just getting worse.

It's a reminder that music can be a trap as well as a remedy, another
way the system can take our minds off what is happening. Like the café
patron, we can become contingent on events and if things stop happening,
so do we. The police state can come through sedation as well as
suppression.

But you can't stop playing. Billie Holiday could not have foreseen the
civil rights revolution when she sang 'Strange Fruit' nor Joe Hill the
modern labor movement. The human story gets better when people surrender
their telepathic presumptions and simply do the right thing anyway.

In February 1960, four black college students sat down at a white-only
Woolworths lunch counter in Greensboro, NC. Within two weeks, there were
sit-ins in fifteen cities in five southern states and within two months
they had spread to fifty four cities in nine states.

If that response had not occurred, would their sit-in have been without
purpose? Or just not blessed?

We can not control the future but we can control how we react to every
moment that passes by.

This is the lesson existentialism teaches us. We exist by our actions,
our words, our art, and our music, whom and how we love. Existentialism
has been called the philosophy that no one can take your shower for you.
Or, for that matter, determine how you are going to respond to Iraq, to
Bush, to the melting of the Antarctic. It is the philosophy that said
that even a condemned man has a choice of how to approach the gallows.
It is not a bad philosophy for our times.

Like a hit and run driver, America's elite has left the scene of the
accident. They have become like those of whom Fitzgerald wrote in The
Great Gatsby:

"They were careless people -- they smashed up things and creatures and
then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever
it was that kept them together. . . and let other people clean up the
mess they had made."

And through this all -- the unreal, the undemocratic, the cruel, the
crowded, the rushed, and the uncritical -- the American outsider walks
alone.

But its' always been like that. Behind every great social or political
change has been the outsider -- those willing to seek to understand and
alter what others just ward off with everything from religious
sophistry to pop sophorifics, from IBelieve to ITunes. Those who find
inspiration, globes of fire and rings of smoke in music rather than just
a way to kill an hour. Those whose existence becomes the event rather
than merely contingent upon the event. .

And if enough of us try hard enough and give our support to others who
are doing likewise maybe one day we'll have our own Velvet Revolution,
maybe we will find an asylum for our souls and our freedoms throughout
the land rather than only in a few place like a club on 18th street.

Meanwhile thank those around you for what they have dared to think,
thank the band for what it has dared to play, and thank yourself for
what you have dared to be.