2006

12/6

Uncategorized

Political Rock

by | Print
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There is more to music than song and dance. Abhijit Nath looks at the serious side of music.

Through millennia, music has always been a catalyst for social change. In medieval India, for instance, much of the flight from orthodox Hinduism towards the Bhakti movement came about as a result of the wandering Bhakti saints and their ecstasy-inducing devotional music. The same could be said about the spread of the sufi movement, where too the tool of dissemination was music.

Black Emancipation

In the recent past as well, musical freedom has been a precursor to political or social freedom. The blues, possibly the most important musical form to emerge from the West in the twentieth century and the fountainhead of all modern music, gained parlance as black slaves across America began to be emancipated. As Lawrence Levine says, “There was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the popularity of Booker T. Washington’s teachings, and the rise of the blues. Psychologically, socially, and economically, Negroes were being acculturated in a way that would have been impossible during slavery, and it is hardly surprising that their secular music reflected this as much as their religious music did."

Intermingling

This process of assimilation continued in one form or another through the bop jazz era, with white and black artists mingling freely as musicians. (This reminds me of an interesting anecdote about how racism is perceived differently across cultures. Black trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie was on a visit to Pakistan where he was staying at an extremely swanky hotel. There was a snake charmer outside the hotel who Gillespie heard and wanted to invite in and jam with. The hotel staff was horrified and refused to let him in until Gillespie came up with the unanswerable argument, ‘Why not? The man’s a musician, isn’t he?’).

The assimilative process continued with Chuck Berry, who crossed over to a white rock’n’roll audience in the 1950s with hits like ‘Johnny B. Goode’.

The Dust Bowl

The most important seeds for the birth of music as a protest art form in America, however, were sown in the 1940s, with the commercial success of Dust Bowl Ballads by Woodie Guthrie (which included a song called ‘Tom Joad’ after the lead character of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath), an album about the hardships of ‘Okies’ in the Great Depression. Folk music began to increasingly be the idiom for protest music, basing its musical roots in black gospel music and its lyrical content on fighting against racism and economic inequality in the Deep South. Artists such as Pete Seeger began to gain prominence, with songs such as ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ (made famous by The Byrds) and “We Shall Overcome” (a reworking of a 1900s gospel song).

Bob Dylan
The epicenter for folk music moved further North in the 1960s. The Beat Generation’s base was Greenwich Village in Manhattan, and the folk music scene slowly moved there as well. Possibly the most important musician-poet of the 20th century, Bob Dylan, came to prominence here.

Dylan’s influence on the 60s and popular music in general needs no introduction. He was very influenced by Guthrie’s music and by 1963, was a very public face of the civil rights movement, accompanying Martin Luther King on the March to Washington and writing scathing indictments of the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evans (‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’) and of a black barmaid by a socialite (‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’).

Gradually, while Dylan grew disillusioned by being seen as a poster boy of the movement and distanced himself from it, other folk artists such as his one-time girlfriend Joan Baez continued the movement. Baez later supported other causes, setting up her own organization, Humanitas International and supporting gay and lesbian rights.

Flower Power

Dylan and Baez became linked to the growing hippie movement, which had begun as an offshoot of the Greenwich movement and crystallized in the ‘Summer of Love’ at Haight-Ashbury. The movement also gained a liberal political voice towards the end of the decade, most notably supporting the anti-Vietnam war movement. This culminated in the famous Woodstock Music and Art Festival in 1969, which, despite the somewhat inconsistent musical standards (possibly due to the incredibly substance-fuelled atmosphere) is probably the most important youth protest event of the 20th century after Tiananmen Square.

Nevermind The Bollocks

The 70s were a reasonably barren period in the US in terms of social relevance, with stadium rock subsuming some of the style but none of the substance of the hippy movement and consequently, ruling the charts. Across the Atlantic, however, an explosive force was taking shape. Though more sch(l)ock value than genuine social change, the Sex Pistols’ iconic debut album, Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, signaled a change in Britain’s lingua franca from a public-school driven, upper class milieu to a more vernacular,  beer’n’Cockney class.

The 1980s

The public soon tired of extremely angry young men shouting atonally to whoever would listen (and many who didn’t want to!) about the problems of the world, and the escapism of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (Iron Maiden, Saxon, Def Leppard) gained their fancy.

Just across the Firth Straits, though, U2 began to find their political voice, with songs like ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ (about the Northern Ireland struggle) and ‘Pride (In the Name of Love) (about Martin Luther King).

This (somewhat overblown) activism continues till today, with Bono on the threshold of a Nobel Peace Prize (it’s odd what the world is coming to, isn’t it?) In America, Bruce Springsteen came to the fore as the authentic voice of Americana, initially beginning with heartland stories of people struggling to make ends meet, but steadily including larger problems in ‘Born in the USA’ (anti-Vietnam sentiments), ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ (based on John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath) and ‘American Skin (41 Shots)’ (about the police shooting of Amodou Diallo).

Increasingly, though, musical activism was becoming corporatised, with artists taking the backseat to increasingly bombastic marketing extravaganzas. ‘Human Rights Now!’, ‘Live Aid’, etc. all suffered from this problem, where a string of high-profile artists were assembled who did not necessarily have strong political motivations themselves, but were willing to lend their talents for a cause.

Gangsta Rap

The late 1980s were also prominent in the resurgence of black music. Disenfranchised despite nominal emancipation in the 1960s, inner-city youth began to see salvation in making ghetto culture mainstream. Ice-T, the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur wrote songs of gang wars, drug binges and glorification of a sex, cars, drugs and guns lifestyle, until the idiom became a caricature of itself by the 21st century.

Free Tibet

The hot topic for the1990s was the Tibetan struggle, which frankly would have fizzled out without celebrity support. The Beastie Boys started the Tibetan Freedom Concert, with artists such as the Fugees, Pearl Jam and REM performing at the festival.

Rage Against The Machine

The most fervently politically band of the ‘90s, however, and one without whom this article would be incomplete, was Rage Against The Machine (whose debut album featured artwork of the famous 1963 immolation of Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc).

Marrying the ‘DJ with 6 strings’ guitar sound of Tom Morello (nephew of Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta) with the pissed-off rap musings of Zack de la Rocha, RATM marshaled controversial causes such as Black Panther Mumia-abu-Jamal, Native American activist Leonard Peltier. On the other hand the band raged against American capitalism and the Republican censorship organization PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center).

Although the band has been accused of hypocrisy for being left-wing while being signed on to media conglomerate Sony, Morello has this to say, “When you live in a capitalistic society, the currency of the dissemination of information goes through capitalistic channels. Would Noam Chomsky object to his works being sold at Barnes & Noble? No, because that’s where people buy their books. We’re not interested in preaching to just the converted. It’s great to play abandoned squats run by anarchists, but it’s also great to be able to reach people with a revolutionary message, people from Granada Hills to Stuttgart.”

The latest instalment of bands with political agenda is the slew of musicians against global punching bag George Bush. The list is obviously far too long to enumerate here, but includes Green Day (with the provocative ‘American Idiot) and Neil Young.

Why?

Why does protest music today not feel the same today as it did in the past? Why do bands no longer stir the youth’s conscience as much as they used to? While it is probably true that time and distance are seen through rose-coloured spectacles, the trouble in the recent past has been that it has become ‘cool’ to protest, as is easily seen with Livestrong wristbands and the inane new Bono-edited Independent issue.Why would you buy overpriced products like the Motorola RED for Rs. 20,000 (with a small percentage going to charity) when you can buy a cheap phone for Rs. 2,000 and donate the rest to charity?

The same idiocy is displayed by corporates, who spend crores on organising events to raise lakhs for a cause! It is obviously more important to be ‘seen’ as supporting liberal causes, than actually doing something about it. As a media commentator says, “The idea is ‘I am open to donating anonymously, as long as it is widely known that I am donating anonymously’.

Here’s to more genuine, non-media machine protest music in the future. The time is ripe.

[Abhijit Nath is an alumnus of IIM, Ahmedabad and works for a private equity firm. He is a fanatic for any technically challenging music (jazz, classical music, prog-rock and black metal).He knows that this is a terrible bore and that he needs a life, but it seems like he’s living three already (with apologies to Terry Pratchett). He harbours dreams of playing for a jazz-rock band someday. It is for this very reason that he has opted to rent a house on the Harbour Line.]

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2006

12/6

Uncategorized

Political Rock

by | Print
{mosimage}

There is more to music than song and dance. Abhijit Nath looks at the serious side of music.

Through millennia, music has always been a catalyst for social change. In medieval India, for instance, much of the flight from orthodox Hinduism towards the Bhakti movement came about as a result of the wandering Bhakti saints and their ecstasy-inducing devotional music. The same could be said about the spread of the sufi movement, where too the tool of dissemination was music.

Black Emancipation

In the recent past as well, musical freedom has been a precursor to political or social freedom. The blues, possibly the most important musical form to emerge from the West in the twentieth century and the fountainhead of all modern music, gained parlance as black slaves across America began to be emancipated. As Lawrence Levine says, “There was a direct relationship between the national ideological emphasis upon the individual, the popularity of Booker T. Washington’s teachings, and the rise of the blues. Psychologically, socially, and economically, Negroes were being acculturated in a way that would have been impossible during slavery, and it is hardly surprising that their secular music reflected this as much as their religious music did."

Intermingling

This process of assimilation continued in one form or another through the bop jazz era, with white and black artists mingling freely as musicians. (This reminds me of an interesting anecdote about how racism is perceived differently across cultures. Black trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie was on a visit to Pakistan where he was staying at an extremely swanky hotel. There was a snake charmer outside the hotel who Gillespie heard and wanted to invite in and jam with. The hotel staff was horrified and refused to let him in until Gillespie came up with the unanswerable argument, ‘Why not? The man’s a musician, isn’t he?’).

The assimilative process continued with Chuck Berry, who crossed over to a white rock’n’roll audience in the 1950s with hits like ‘Johnny B. Goode’.

The Dust Bowl

The most important seeds for the birth of music as a protest art form in America, however, were sown in the 1940s, with the commercial success of Dust Bowl Ballads by Woodie Guthrie (which included a song called ‘Tom Joad’ after the lead character of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath), an album about the hardships of ‘Okies’ in the Great Depression. Folk music began to increasingly be the idiom for protest music, basing its musical roots in black gospel music and its lyrical content on fighting against racism and economic inequality in the Deep South. Artists such as Pete Seeger began to gain prominence, with songs such as ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ (made famous by The Byrds) and “We Shall Overcome” (a reworking of a 1900s gospel song).

Bob Dylan
The epicenter for folk music moved further North in the 1960s. The Beat Generation’s base was Greenwich Village in Manhattan, and the folk music scene slowly moved there as well. Possibly the most important musician-poet of the 20th century, Bob Dylan, came to prominence here.

Dylan’s influence on the 60s and popular music in general needs no introduction. He was very influenced by Guthrie’s music and by 1963, was a very public face of the civil rights movement, accompanying Martin Luther King on the March to Washington and writing scathing indictments of the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evans (‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’) and of a black barmaid by a socialite (‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’).

Gradually, while Dylan grew disillusioned by being seen as a poster boy of the movement and distanced himself from it, other folk artists such as his one-time girlfriend Joan Baez continued the movement. Baez later supported other causes, setting up her own organization, Humanitas International and supporting gay and lesbian rights.

Flower Power

Dylan and Baez became linked to the growing hippie movement, which had begun as an offshoot of the Greenwich movement and crystallized in the ‘Summer of Love’ at Haight-Ashbury. The movement also gained a liberal political voice towards the end of the decade, most notably supporting the anti-Vietnam war movement. This culminated in the famous Woodstock Music and Art Festival in 1969, which, despite the somewhat inconsistent musical standards (possibly due to the incredibly substance-fuelled atmosphere) is probably the most important youth protest event of the 20th century after Tiananmen Square.

Nevermind The Bollocks

The 70s were a reasonably barren period in the US in terms of social relevance, with stadium rock subsuming some of the style but none of the substance of the hippy movement and consequently, ruling the charts. Across the Atlantic, however, an explosive force was taking shape. Though more sch(l)ock value than genuine social change, the Sex Pistols’ iconic debut album, Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, signaled a change in Britain’s lingua franca from a public-school driven, upper class milieu to a more vernacular,  beer’n’Cockney class.

The 1980s

The public soon tired of extremely angry young men shouting atonally to whoever would listen (and many who didn’t want to!) about the problems of the world, and the escapism of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (Iron Maiden, Saxon, Def Leppard) gained their fancy.

Just across the Firth Straits, though, U2 began to find their political voice, with songs like ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ (about the Northern Ireland struggle) and ‘Pride (In the Name of Love) (about Martin Luther King).

This (somewhat overblown) activism continues till today, with Bono on the threshold of a Nobel Peace Prize (it’s odd what the world is coming to, isn’t it?) In America, Bruce Springsteen came to the fore as the authentic voice of Americana, initially beginning with heartland stories of people struggling to make ends meet, but steadily including larger problems in ‘Born in the USA’ (anti-Vietnam sentiments), ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ (based on John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath) and ‘American Skin (41 Shots)’ (about the police shooting of Amodou Diallo).

Increasingly, though, musical activism was becoming corporatised, with artists taking the backseat to increasingly bombastic marketing extravaganzas. ‘Human Rights Now!’, ‘Live Aid’, etc. all suffered from this problem, where a string of high-profile artists were assembled who did not necessarily have strong political motivations themselves, but were willing to lend their talents for a cause.

Gangsta Rap

The late 1980s were also prominent in the resurgence of black music. Disenfranchised despite nominal emancipation in the 1960s, inner-city youth began to see salvation in making ghetto culture mainstream. Ice-T, the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur wrote songs of gang wars, drug binges and glorification of a sex, cars, drugs and guns lifestyle, until the idiom became a caricature of itself by the 21st century.

Free Tibet

The hot topic for the1990s was the Tibetan struggle, which frankly would have fizzled out without celebrity support. The Beastie Boys started the Tibetan Freedom Concert, with artists such as the Fugees, Pearl Jam and REM performing at the festival.

Rage Against The Machine

The most fervently politically band of the ‘90s, however, and one without whom this article would be incomplete, was Rage Against The Machine (whose debut album featured artwork of the famous 1963 immolation of Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc).

Marrying the ‘DJ with 6 strings’ guitar sound of Tom Morello (nephew of Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta) with the pissed-off rap musings of Zack de la Rocha, RATM marshaled controversial causes such as Black Panther Mumia-abu-Jamal, Native American activist Leonard Peltier. On the other hand the band raged against American capitalism and the Republican censorship organization PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center).

Although the band has been accused of hypocrisy for being left-wing while being signed on to media conglomerate Sony, Morello has this to say, “When you live in a capitalistic society, the currency of the dissemination of information goes through capitalistic channels. Would Noam Chomsky object to his works being sold at Barnes & Noble? No, because that’s where people buy their books. We’re not interested in preaching to just the converted. It’s great to play abandoned squats run by anarchists, but it’s also great to be able to reach people with a revolutionary message, people from Granada Hills to Stuttgart.”

The latest instalment of bands with political agenda is the slew of musicians against global punching bag George Bush. The list is obviously far too long to enumerate here, but includes Green Day (with the provocative ‘American Idiot) and Neil Young.

Why?

Why does protest music today not feel the same today as it did in the past? Why do bands no longer stir the youth’s conscience as much as they used to? While it is probably true that time and distance are seen through rose-coloured spectacles, the trouble in the recent past has been that it has become ‘cool’ to protest, as is easily seen with Livestrong wristbands and the inane new Bono-edited Independent issue.Why would you buy overpriced products like the Motorola RED for Rs. 20,000 (with a small percentage going to charity) when you can buy a cheap phone for Rs. 2,000 and donate the rest to charity?

The same idiocy is displayed by corporates, who spend crores on organising events to raise lakhs for a cause! It is obviously more important to be ‘seen’ as supporting liberal causes, than actually doing something about it. As a media commentator says, “The idea is ‘I am open to donating anonymously, as long as it is widely known that I am donating anonymously’.

Here’s to more genuine, non-media machine protest music in the future. The time is ripe.

[Abhijit Nath is an alumnus of IIM, Ahmedabad and works for a private equity firm. He is a fanatic for any technically challenging music (jazz, classical music, prog-rock and black metal).He knows that this is a terrible bore and that he needs a life, but it seems like he’s living three already (with apologies to Terry Pratchett). He harbours dreams of playing for a jazz-rock band someday. It is for this very reason that he has opted to rent a house on the Harbour Line.]

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