liberation

The politics of Amanda Palmer

The musician, and sometimes-political activist, Amanda Palmer is in New Zealand for three gigs over the next week. Palmer is one of most interesting artists around at the moment. Combining ‘theatrical rock, punk cabaret, manic-musical, neo-glam-torch’ together, she normally works as the lead singer and pianist in the duo of the Dresden Dolls, but at the moment she's doing other solo and collaborative work. Amanda Palmer’s songs are described in the press release for her latest New Zealand tour as ‘astute, witty world observations’, which is almost an understatement. Elsewhere Palmer’s songs have been described as dealing with ‘the often brutal emotional and sexual lives of a diverse cast of misfits, crazies, compulsives, and sociopaths’. One song, ‘Night Reconnaissance’, from her last album expresses her sympathy with teen socialist rebels plotting revenge against tormentors ‘from good homes’. [Read more below]

The politics of Chris Knox

The news that New Zealand artist and social commentator Chris Knox has suffered a serious stroke is incredibly sad to hear. As a sort of tribute to Knox, I thought I’d post the responses that he wrote to a political questionnaire that I asked him to fill in about 15 years ago for a leftwing magazine. The content is a bit dated now, of course, but gives a good idea as to the interesting politics of this important leftwing New Zealander. Although in recent years, Knox has been rather soft on the Labour Party, his answers to the questionnaire indicate a rather critical and politically sophisticated punk. [Read more below]

The politics of Rage Against the Machine

The highly political metal-rap band Rage Against the Machine (RATM) has just played the Big Day Out in Auckland. Unfortunately this performance showed that their politics still have a lot more bombast than substance, which is disappointing because RATM continue to be one of the most successful political artists of modern times. Fortunately, at the Big Day out, the band’s guitarist Tom Morello also played his own set of acoustic political music under his alter ego moniker of the Nightwatchman, and this turned out to be much more sophisticated and relevant. [Read more]

“It’s a Bitter Way with Labour” by Chris Knox

Chris Knox must be having a laugh. He’s just been commissioned and paid to write and perform a lightweight party political jingle for the Labour Party entitled “It’s a Better Way with Labour”. Knowing that Chris has some sort of decent political background, I’m hoping that he’s pulled the wool over the Government's eyes, and is about to publicly release the real version: “It’s a Bitter Way with Labour”. [Read more below]

Working class heroes mix punk and politics?

The pop-punk band Green Day has covered John Lennon’s Working Class Hero as part of the Amnesty International album of Lennon covers entitled Instant Karma: The Campaign To Save Darfur. (See the emotive and powerful black and white video here. Or Lennon’s original here). Working Class Hero is a classic of Lennon’s and is considered his most caustic and political song, with its themes of class and alienation. [Read more below]

A bouquet for Neil Finn

The arts and culture industry has become rather sycophantic towards Helen Clark and the Labour Party, and it's an unhealthy relationship based on very little. So it's good to see musician Neil Finn showing some dissent. He's been reported as speaking out in a 'blistering attack' on the PM who is also the Arts and Culture Minister. He says 'It sort of sickens me to see Helen Clark getting up at the music awards and taking bows', and that a false idea exists that 'It's like New Zealand music is taking over the world and it's all because of Helen'. No doubt Finn's anger towards her is based partly on Clark's effective sinking of the project that Finn was pushing to create a non-commercial youth radio network. Private radio feared the competition, so Clark dumped it. Finn should be happy to receiving the Chorus of disapproval from the conservative music industry 'spokespeople' like Howard Morrison ('I'm so bloody mad') and Ray Columbus ('God help Kiwi music when she retires... in my book she can take as much credit as she likes'). I'll write a future post on the topic - but essentially Clark has been attempting to leave a legacy or an association with cultural and national identity, in lieu of doing much else for the country.

Hot Country Singer Has Message for the Troops

The Dixie Chicks finally have some competition from another political country singer. Sandy Belle is 'a buxom lass with big hair and small shorts', and her Message for the Troops is a well crafted song that getting lots of views on Youtube. The lyrics are pretty funny. They start off innocently enough: "This here song is goin' out to my men in the service/ Y'all been away so long that it's startin' to make me nervous." Which is nice - however it quickly descends into extreme sexual innuendo, climaxing with the full-on lines: "Home of the brave, let's misbehave/ We'll be gettin' freaky like in Abu Ghraib." Of course it's a parody. Sandy Belle is a comedian with New York group The Dregs. There are multiple versions of the song about. This less-viewed one is actually probably better. But if you want to see a 'real' patriotic country song about Iraq, check out Bumper of My SUV. It's all further evidence of the power of 'new politics' on the web.

The Politics of Paul Weller

Paul Weller, the solo artist and ex-Jam and ex-Style Council frontman, has recently been reported as creating disturbances in the increasingly polite world of rock. According to the Mirror newspaper he gobbed on a framed picture of Sting at a cancer charity event, said to a magazine that Sting is 'a fucking horrible man', and told Bob Geldof to 'fuck off'. Is the so-called 'godfather of britpop' just a yob, or a rebellious working class politico? [Read more below]

The Politics of Bright Eyes

Bright Eyes is the alt-folk/country vehicle for American singer-songwriter Conor Oberst, who has recently been becoming the poster boy for a new generation of political activists and alternatives. Many of their songs are social commentaries on the state of affairs in modern America, sometimes dripping in sarcasm. Songs like the brilliant When the President Talks to God are scathing in their rebuke of their subjects. [Read more below]

Bono's project RED succeeds and fails

It is being reported that Bono's corporate 'radical' RED project - previously reported on here - has been been somewhat of a failure for the poor, even if it's been a huge success for the re-branding of the corporates involved. So far the 52m pound marketing campaign has only netted 9m pounds for the third world.

The Politics of Ry Cooder

Ry Cooder, the veteran American musician and man behind the popularity of the Buena Vista Social Club, has a new CD out: My Name Is Buddy. Reminiscent of 2005's Chavez Ravine, it apparently deals with workers who fled the Midwest of the US in the 1930s. The characters, according to Cooder, are 'Lefty, a left-wing mouse who's looking for a socialist utopia; blind Tom Toad, who has lost his religious faith, but is 'looking for a way out of darkness'; and Buddy himself, who 'being a cat, is looking for his next meal'. There's a Guardian interview with Cooder here.

According to the profile, Cooder has always been very political, and one of his first recordings was 'How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?'. And today he hates commercial and conventional music and politics. He was fined US$25,000 for breaking the reactionary blockade on Cuba. According to the Guardian article, Cooder is equally critical of both mainstream political parties in the US, saying 'Never mind the "RepubliKlans" - the Democrats today are "a bunch of cowards, chickenshit"'. He even criticises the role of Bill Clinton: 'he also ushered in the era of Nafta, the North American Free Trade Area, which made Juarez, Mexico, the murder capital of the world, with women raped for their pay cheques. That was another nail in the coffin of workers' lives.' Despite all his cynicalism, he's not a political defeatist: 'You can't just dismiss the world.... You have to say, "Well, I'm in it. Now I have to make sense of it."'

Anti-war song heads for top 10

UK anti-war protesters have recorded a cover of Edwin Starr's song War (What Is It Good For?) and it looks like it's heading for the Top 10. The group have called themselves Ugly Rumours - the same name as the Tony Blair's student band. You can watch the video on Youtube (and trailer)- and you'll see the band's performance on  a rooftop. The lead singer is a Tony Blair lookalike, who at the end is arrested by two police officers - played by the anti-war campaigners Lauren Booth (the sister-in-law of the prime minister) and MP George Galloway. It's a great concept, but a pity it's not a new, modern anthem.

Too many protest singers, not enough protest songs

The Guardian reports that 'there is a gaping hole for a new anti-war anthem that will capture the moment and the mood'. The anti-war movement lacks a defining anthem for modern times and has to rely on old 60s songs like Country Joe's Fixing to Die, Edwin Starr's War (What is it Good For?) and Dylan's Masters of War. The leader of the UK's Stop the War coalition says that there's not quite as much anti-war support from the musical fraternity as he would have hoped for. As far as I can see, it's a case of what Edwin Collins used to sing: 'Too many protest singers, not enough protest songs'.

The wisdom of Noel Gallagher

I'm often championing the relationship between arts and politics, as I like the music I listen to to be meaningful, and I think artists should be commenting on the world we live in. But of course there are lots of musicians who just shouldn't be political because they just say daft things, and they just end up as part of the morass of conformist irritating do-gooder liberal pop scene. I'm thinking here of Coldplay and U2 obviously.

A critique of this scene can be found epitomised in Oasis's Noel Gallagher, who isn't too political or sophisticated, but is scathing of conformist and do-gooding pop. There's a good profile on him on Spiked, which salutes him because 'in a world where rebellion has become just another gimmick, Gallagher’s antagonistic streak is refreshing'.

As you'll see in this article, Gallagher

• thinks Thom Yorke is po-faced and boring
• chastises 'arseholes' like Elton John and Robbie Williams for 'lock[ing] themselves off from humanity'
• thinks George Michael's attempts at social commentary are laughable
• criticises the British Labour Party for going into Iraq, but says 'I think the Labour Party’s crowning achievement is the death of politics. There’s nothing left to vote for.'
• criticises the miseralibilism of environmentalists: '‘Greens are fucking hippies with no place in the world'.
• says Live 8 was a naive waste of time.

The art of war

In recent years the art world have been fairly slow and uncertain about injecting political issues into their work that comment on the big issues of our time. Opposition to the war against Iraq was especially muted. One of the few British bands to show their opposition was Massive Attack, whose frontman, Robert Del Naja has recently spoken to the New Statesmen about how he was shocked that few musicians were willing to speak out: 'On the eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion, he and Damon Albarn tried to organise a group of similarly prominent musicians into an anti-war campaign, only to be greeted, he says, with a silence bordering on hostility.' [Read more below]

The politics of John Lennon

I've always been fascinated by the intersection between music and politics. And because I'm a fan of John Lennon, I look forward to the new documentary The US versus John Lennon. Although I'm a bit embarrassed to say that the first time I started to listen to Lennon seriously, was after I misheard my older sister when she had just started university say that 'the only person who truly understood Marxism was Lenin'. Anyhow, the new film will be interesting, and there's a review of it in the New Statesman which says that although Lennon saw himself as a radical, was anti-authority, and he loved to stir things up, he was no political animal. But they provide some good Lennon quotes - such as: 'Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives' - which I tend to agree with. And pondering Lennon's supposed influence on getting the US out of Vietnam, the review asks a good question: 'now we have another hated president and a pointless war, and it certainly makes one wonder: which living pop stars with radical leanings or strong spiritual values will lead us out of Iraq? Billy Bragg? Sting? Cliff Richard?'

Jarvis' political pop

I've just downloaded Jarvis Cocker's current single - 'Running the World', and I love it. Read more below.

The Politics of Morrissey

Morrissey has a new album out, Ringleader of the Tormentors, so it seems like an ideal time to examine the misunderstood but interesting politics of the artist. This article is published in the August edition of revolution magazine.