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April 2, 2002
Robert Fisk
Farce and Terror
in Ramallah
Steve
Perry
Let's
Roll! ®:
The Marketing of Lisa Beamer
April 1, 2002
Stanton / Madsen
America's War Inc.
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Peace
and Nuclear Disarmament: a Call to Action
Bahour / Dahan
Bloodshed in Palestine:
A Way Out
Molly
Secours
Tennessee's
Kangaroo Court
Phyllis Pollack
The Making of Exile
on Main Street
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's
Top 10 CDs
Francis Boyle
The Big Lie:
Palestine, Palestinians
and International Law
March 31, 2002
Jordan
Flaherty
Last
Night the Israeli
Military Tried to Kill Me
Kristen Schurr
Live from Bethlehem
Maha Sbitani
The
Israeli Army Took Over My House
Robert Fisk
Lies Leaders Tell When
They Want to Go to War
March 24/30, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The Year
of the Yellow Notepad:
Plagiarism and History
Rep. Ron Paul
Slavery and the Draft
Fidel
Castro
A
Better World is Possible
Edward Said
What Price Oslo?
José
Saramago
Justice
and Democracy Denied
Azmi Bishara
Talking to Tanks
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Clearcutting
Montana
Alexander Cockburn
50 Years of James Bond
Wilhelm
Reich
Gethsemane
Claud Cockburn
The Horror of It All
Dave Marsh
What's
Playing at My Houe
David Vest
Remembering Tammy Wynette
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Waylon
Jennings:
an Honest Outlaw
March 23, 2002
Mokhiber/Weissman
A
Corporate Lawyer
Speaks Out
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
Resources:
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About 9/11
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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April 2, 2002
Is Protest Music Dead?
Music
used to be the dominant voice against war. Now it's easier to
shut up and get paid. What's really going on?
By Jeff Chang
Ever since John Lennon and Yoko Ono led a raucous
crowd of flower-toting, peasant-bloused hippies in a pot-hazy
chorus of "Give
Peace a Chance," it seems to have been a pop axiom:
When the United States goes to war, the musicians begin calling
for peace.
Opposing war hasn't always been a popular
position, but it has created some great music. During the Vietnam
era, songs like Edwin
Starr's "War," Jimi Hendrix's cover of "All
Along the Watchtower," Funkadelic's "Maggot
Brain" and "Wars
of Armageddon," Jimmy Cliff's "Vietnam,"
Country Joe and the Fish's "Fixing
to Die Rag," Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad
Moon Rising" and "Have
You Ever Seen the Rain?" and Marvin Gaye's "What's
Going On" turned defiance into a raging, soaring,
brave and melancholic gestures of community.
Even our allegedly apathetic post-Lennonist
generation has extended the tradition. When Bush Senior sent
troops to Kuwait in 1991, rappers Ice Cube and Paris trained
their verbal guns on the White House in "I
Wanna Kill Sam" and "Bush Killa," while
Bad
Religion and Noam Chomsky split a 7-inch into a no-war-for-oil
seminar. Antiwar music has become a time-honored balance to "bomb
'em all and let God sort 'em out" fervor. So why, since
Sept. 11, have we heard so little new music protesting Bush Junior's
war on evil?
Artists who were once outspoken peaceniks
seem to have lost their certainty, or even switched their position.
For years, U2 led crowds in chants of "No more war!"
during their concerts. But during their surrealistic Super Bowl
half-time performance this past January, they offered deep ambivalence--a
stark display of the names of Sept. 11 victims set to "Beautiful
Day."
Neil Young's "Ohio" memorialized
Kent State University's murdered antiwar protesters of 1970;
his "Cortez the Killer" condemned imperialism. Now
we find him on his post-Sept. 11 cut, "Let's Roll,"
singing, "Let's roll for freedom; let's roll for love, going
after Satan on the wings of a dove."
Young wrote the song to honor the heroes
of Flight 93, who subdued their hijackers and paid the ultimate
price. But if you believe "Let's Roll"--with its Bush-reduced
ideas of "evil" and "Satan"--is a cry for
peace, you've probably already cleaned out your bomb shelter
and reviewed your duck-and-cover manual.
As Leslie
Nuchow, a Brooklyn-based folk singer who has been touring
the country, says, "Speaking on or singing anything that's
critical of this country at this time is more difficult than
it was a year ago."
We've seen dozens of acts quietly bury
their edgier songs. We've seen radio playlists rewritten so as
not to "offend listeners." And we've seen Republican
officials and the entertainment industry--long divided over "traditional
values" issues such as violent content and parental advisory
stickering--bury the hatchet. White House Senior Adviser Karl
Rove has been meeting regularly with entertainment industry officials
to discuss how they can help the war on terrorism.
The result? Not unlike the network news,
there's been what a media wonk might call a narrowing of content
choice. Think eagle- and flag-adorned anthologies of patriotic
music, prefab benefit shows screaming CONSUMER EVENT, Alan Jackson's
"Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)" and
Paul McCartney's "Freedom." Perhaps this may all be
good for the record business, no small thing for an industry
that found itself shrinking by 3 percent--about $300 million
in revenues--last year. But it's hardly the stuff of great art.
A Twisted Sense
of God
Where are the alternative voices? Let's
start with hip-hop, the most socially important music of our
time and, until recently, the most successful. Hip-hop's sales
led the plunge last year--by 20 percent, according to Def Jam
founder and rap industry leader Russell Simmons.
And so did its vision. While Congress
debated the Patriot Act and air strikes left Afghan cities in
ruins and untold innocents dead, Jay-Z and Nas declared their
own dirty little war for the pockets (if not exactly the minds)
of the younger generation.
Jay-Z's dis of Nas, "The
Takeover," was based on a sample from the Doors'
"Five
to One," an anti-Vietnam War song released during
1968's long hot summer whose title supposedly alluded to a demographic
menace: five times as many people under the age of 21 as over.
Here's Jim Morrison's original:
The old get old
And the young get stronger
May take a week
And it may take longer
They got the guns
But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah
We're taking over!
Here's J-Hova's slice: "Gonna win,
yeah!" Released on Sept. 11, his album, The Blueprint, sold
465,000 copies.
Nas came back with Stillmatic,
an album seemingly conceived from a marketing blueprint. Over
a decade ago, Nas debuted during the height of hip-hop's social
consciousness. To appease these aging fans, he included songs
on Stillmatic like the decidedly non-flag-waving "My Country"
and "Rule," which bravely ask Bush Junior and the secret
bunker crew to "call a truce, world peace, stop acting like
savages". But kids love that shit-talking, so there's "Ether,"
dissing "Gay-Z and Cock-a-Fella Records." Guess which
of these songs gets the most rewinds?
In fact, many musicians are commenting
on the war, they just aren't being heard. On a new album for
Fine Arts Militia called We Are Gathered Here ..., Public Enemy's
Chuck D has set scathing spoken-word "lectures" to
rockish beats by Brian Hardgroove. Chuck takes apart the war-mobilization
effort and condemns the arrogance of the president's foreign
policy on "A Twisted Sense of God." But while the song
will be available as an MP3 on his website--www.slamjamz.com--the
album has found no distributor yet.
He says, "You got five corporations
that control retail. You got four who are the record labels.
Then you got three radio outlets who own all the stations. You
got two television networks that will actually let us get some
of this across. And you got one video outlet. I call it 5-4-3-2-1.
Boom!"
When the World
Ends
Message music is being pinched off by
an increasingly monopolized media industry suddenly eager to
please the White House. At least two of the nation's largest
radio networks--Clear Channel and Citadel Communications--removed
songs from the air in the wake of the attacks. Songs like Drowning
Pool's "Bodies" and John
Lennon's "Imagine" were confined to MP3 sites
and mix tapes. And while pressure to maintain "blacklists"
has eased recently, the detente between Capitol Hill, New York
and Hollywood--unseen since World War II--has tangible consequences.
Bay area artist Michael
Franti and Spearhead were invited last November to play
The Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn. Franti obliged with a
new song, "Bomb Da World." Yet the song's chorus--"You
can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't bomb it into peace"--was
apparently too much for the show's producers. Months later, and
only after a Billboard magazine article exposed the story, the
clip finally aired.
"It's funny," Franti says.
"In the past, I'd hear some folksingers singing folksongs
or 'Give Peace a Chance' and think, God, this is really corny.
But then you realize, in a time of war, it's a really radical
message."
Little wonder that artists have quietly
censored themselves. The Strokes pulled a song called "New
York Cops" from their album, and Dave Matthews decided not
to release "When the World Ends" as a single. It's
easier to do an industry-sponsored benefit or to simply shut
up and go along, than to fight for a message and find it pigeonholed.
As monopolies segment music into narrower
and narrower genre markets to be exploited, protest music becomes
the square peg. Perhaps the question isn't only whether protest
music can survive the war but whether protest music can also
survive niche-marketing.
Take KRS-One's new album, Spiritually
Minded. In part a reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks, the
album reconciles Christian spirituality with a radical notion
of diversity--putting together Bronx beats, Cantopop, biblical
chapter and verse, and the words "peace" and "As-Salaam
Alaikum" in the same song.
"We live in a Christian nation,"
he says. "I can only give the public that which it can digest.
So I put this album out. The door swings open. Christians are
like, 'Yeah, wow, KRS! He finally came over.' Now I'm over. Now
let's talk."
But if this is his most subtle effort
yet to promote a message of peace and unity, it is still a record
that needs to be marketed. So while Spiritual Minded has been
a dud in the hip-hop world, it topped the less lucrative Gospel
charts earlier this year.
Even indie labels no longer provide an
alternative, says Joel Schalit, the Bay Area-based editor of
Punk Planet and a member of dub-funk band Elders of Zion. Schalit's
new book, Jerusalem
Calling (Akashic Books), features a chapter that indicts
the indie-punk scene, a movement which began as a highly charged
reaction to Reaganism and major labels and ended up a calcifying,
apolitical, "petit bourgeois" feeder-system for the
same majors.
"I think our generation has started
to move in the direction of formulating its own distinct progressive
political positions, but in many respects, I think that the trauma
that was Sept. 11 has thus far stopped them from doing anything
new," he says. "There haven't been people rushing out
to print 7-inch singles attacking American foreign policy like
there was during the Gulf War."
He adds, "A lot of label owners,
especially on the independent level, are very concerned that
promoting ideology is not the same as promoting art."
If that sounds reasonable at first glance,
consider the question that Bay Area anti-prison activist and
Freedom Fighter Music co-producer Ying-Sun Ho asks in reference
to rap: "You don't think a song that talks about nothing
but how much your jewelry shines has a political content to it?"
Acts like Jay-Z are seen as artists with
universal appeal, while niche-marketing lumps together acts that
have little in common. The subcategory of "conscious rappers,"
for instance, has been used to sell Levi's jeans and Gap clothing
to college-educated, disposable-income-spending hip-hop fans.
In this logic, it's not the rappers' message that brings the
audience together, it's what their audience wears that brings
the rappers together.
Part of the recent wave of "conscious
rap" acts promoted by major labels, Dead Prez disdains the
entire category. Positivity isn't politics, rapper M-1 argues.
Hip-hop has not yet produced much antiwar music because a lot
of "conscious rappers" were never clear about their
political positions in the first place, he believes, and Sept.
11 revealed their basic lack of depth.
"There's a lifestyle that goes with
not being aligned with the politics of U.S. imperialism. It's
not just a one-day protest," he says, while working in Brooklyn
on Walk Like a Warrior, the follow-up to Let's Get Free. "We're
in a new period. A lot of people are not seeing what has to be
and are looking at it from just a red, white and blue angle."
Hard Rain Gonna
Fall
But perhaps, in this connected world,
we also possess accelerated expectations. History shows that
radical ideas don't take hold overnight. World War II's hit parade
featured sentimental escapism like Bing Crosby's "White
Christmas" and sugary patriotism like the Andrews' Sisters
"Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy."
During the '50s, a progressive folk movement
emerged, but it wasn't until Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Joan Baez
revived folk amid the early-'60s ferment of student organizing
that ideas of disarmament and racial justice began to take root.
As Craig Werner, professor of African
American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the
author of A
Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America
(Plume, 1999), tells me, "The foundation of the anti-Vietnam
War music was in the folk revival. It was almost as if there
were an antiwar movement that was in place that was doing the
groundwork. They'd been writing those kinds of songs for years
when Vietnam came around."
Werner dates the emergence of anti-Vietnam
War music to ex-folkie Barry McGuire's 1966 hit "Eve
of Destruction," a song that faced widespread censorship.
"I was growing up in Colorado Springs, which is a military
town. The week that 'Eve of Destruction' came out, it broke onto
the Top 20 charts on the local station at No. 1. And then was
never heard again."
That moment is not near in these early
days of the war on evil. In the long run, Nas' "My Country"
and "Rule," with their laser focus on cause and effect,
or Outkast's anti-recessionary global humanism on "The
Whole World" may prove to be more prophetic.
For now, confusion and flux and omnidirectional
rage carry the day. Bay Area rapper Paris recently addressed
the second Bush in "What Would You Do," a track on
his upcoming Sonic Jihad album "Now ask yourself who's the
one with the most to gain/Before 911 motherfuckas couldn't stand
his name/Now even niggas waiving flags like they lost they mind/Everybody
got opinions but don't know the time." Ghostface Killah
seems to have captured the moment on Wu-Tang
Clan's "Rules." Addressing Osama bin Laden
directly about the attacks on New York, he raps,
"No disrespect, that's where I rest
my head
I understand you gotta rest yours, too."
But since bin Laden has brought the bombs--"Nigga,
my people's dead!"--it's officially on: "Mister Bush,
sit down! We're in charge of the war."
Healing Force
Still, musicians must do what they do,
and the story is not yet over. Folkie Leslie Nuchow believes
in music's ability to transform the people who listen to it,
and she doesn't waste a lot of time worrying about who will distribute
it. Recently, she recorded the mesmerizing "An Eye for an
Eye (Will Leave the Whole World Blind)." Accompanied only
by piano, she elaborates on Gandhi's famous line mostly in a
tortured whisper. It's only available through her website www.slammusic.com.
Nuchow--who likes to point out that our
national anthem "glorifies war" but has agreed to sing
for U.N. troops stationed in Kosovo later this year--believes
music is not merely a product, it's a process. After watching
the Twin Towers collapse from her Brooklyn building, she spent
that evening agonizing over what to do next. "I kept on
saying to myself, what could my political action be?" Then
she realized, "I'm a musician. Ri-i-i-ight. Let me do music!"
She went to demonstrations and gatherings,
and handed out fliers inviting people to come and sing the next
morning. About 50 people showed up. They walked through the streets
singing "This Little Light of Mine," "America
the Beautiful" and "Dona Nobis Pacem (Give Us Peace)."
"We walked as close to ground zero
as we could get, and we sang for the firefighters," she
says. "We sang for the rescue workers and the firefighters.
We went up to the hospitals, and we sang for the doctors, and
we sang for the volunteers. And then--this was the hardest--we
went to sing for the families who were trying to find out what
happened to their loved ones."
Nuchow recalls that the music did exactly
what it was supposed to do. "People wept. Other people came
and joined us," she says. "And to me, that's action.
That's making a statement through music, using music as a healing
force."
And for now, perhaps, that's more than
enough.
Jeff Chang can be reached at: cantstopwontstop@mindspring.com
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