The Comment Factory

Zach de la Rocha, of Rage Against the Machine

I spend a lot of my time thinking about the position of politicized music in what has become an extremely commercial and competitive market, the unfortunate yet inevitable fate of any art form that has a mass appeal. I like to think that in today’s political climate a greater number of rising musicians will take interest in some of the issues affecting our society, and our culture will more accurately reflect our generation.

As well as the commercialized nature of the industry, a major problem inhibiting the progression of popular politicized music is the unprecedented generic diversity of contemporary music. This is in many ways a brilliant development but makes it even harder for music from the underground to gain any kind of limelight. When punk found itself in vogue, the musical preference of the generation was not nearly as factionalized as today’s and this combination of accessible music with a relatable and politicized overtone was enough to create a movement.

Likewise, when Nirvana headed a youth movement grounded in hopelessly-conditioned apathy, the overriding sentiment was enough to unite a huge number of people. A minority of grunge bands were explicitly political yet the movement reflected a large proportion of the generation’s lack of ambition and was therefore extremely important in an indirectly political way. It brought into the limelight certain sidelined members of society and highlighted a widespread and unaddressed disaffection. Establishing identity is an enormously important step on the way to generational unity.

It is an unchangeable reality that success in music is impossible without mass appeal, which can be naively reduced to certain formulaic techniques applied to songwriting, but it is in fact an amalgam of many contributory factors. Packaged pop more often than not is the product of expertly calculated marketing techniques, always with the demographic in mind, always with designs to expand that demographic. If you were to rank the factors in terms of importance, lyrical intent would trail very far behind.

Politically-minded music is exactly the same in terms of certain factors being intrinsic to success, there is just a massive shift in terms of the hierarchy of importance. Catchiness will still top the list, and image still has a fairly big part to play, but timing is of monumental importance and the success is massively more dependent on the talent of the individual. Musicians these days, the ones who are identifies as political, rarely get it right. It takes a very rare psychological make up to be able to juggle the necessary pop element with a clear and, most importantly, effective political intention.

The tradition of social protest in music stretches back for decades and I won’t dwell on the obvious and outdated as their relevance has been mostly lost to time. One of the most recent examples and the band that most affected me is Rage Against the Machine. I grew pretty obsessed as a young adolescent, learned all the songs on guitar (as best I could) and even picked up some Chomsky book from the local library (not that I understood much of it). It still took me years after this initial obsession to really appreciate where they were coming from and more importantly to be able to objectively analyze their success relative to their political stance. They are quite a phenomenon — an overtly politicized and extremely vitriolic/anti-establishment group reaching that level of global success is relatively unheard of.

So RATM have been undeniably successful in musical terms but I wonder if they were ever satisfied with their success in political matters. I saw them at Reading earlier this year and Zack de la Rocha, their lead singer, was on about putting Blair/Bush on trial and how the government is afraid of our potential. I appreciate the sentiment but it held no weight for me in that context. OK, so it is still better than nothing if even a handful of people leave the gig feeling empowered and have a newfound energy for political activism but I think that the overwhelming majority identify solely with the anger, not the cause. With Rage I think it is brilliant that you can easily look into the causes they support and that their lyrics promote awareness of various important issues but it is incredibly hard to establish a balance between pro-active preaching and passivity. Rage though are not a very relevant example as they are the product of a very rare combination of factors, which defy most of what I have said previously.

Hip-hop is one of the best examples and certainly the most contemporary of an underground musical movement becoming a dominant force within the industry. Although its political importance is often addressed I think it is hugely understated. Nearly all genres can be equally categorized into various segments — innovative, political, pop, progressive etc. The most popular in every case is of course the pop category and the explicitly political group is always comparatively minute. The difference with hip-hop is that every category is extremely enlightening on a socio-political level. Artists like Immortal Technique and Non-Phixion alight on themes that are apparent in the music of far more successful acts like Jay-Z and 50 Cent, just far more explicitly.

What is readily dismissed by the narrow-minded as simply materialistic sentiment is in fact a very revealing insight into the culture from which most hip hop is born. Although this has become commercialized and by its very success extracted from its context, it underpins very real and severe social problems within the U.S. Though just because this is the case doesn’t mean anybody will take notice. Once again the dominant commercial proportion of the genre overpowers the efforts of the artists inclined towards progression and movement. But this can be overcome in a rapidly changing political climate and there can be a shift from the current spectrum where the divisions of popular/political become more blurred and audiences become more interested in what artists have to say, not just how they say it.

The optimist in me pins my hopes on a cultural revolution following the cyclical patterns of the past. We are surely set up to be one of the most politicized generations for a long time in the face of the monumental and unavoidable issues we face. Let’s just hope that apathy will loosen its hold and we can breathe life and unity into a fractured culture. All art needs to be reclaimed from commercial interests, which dictate its course and suffocate its artistic freedom. Generic boundaries need to be overcome and politicized sentiment needs to become a prevalent aspect of the mainstream. The only way people will start to listen is if there is something worth listening to, which is both accessible and relatable. This can lead to the rebirth of the tradition of social protest in music and it can once again be seen as culturally important and once again provide us with identity.

Ralph is currently singer in The Civics, a Bristol-based band. You can listen at their Myspace page.