The issue of whether politics has a place in music sparked lively debate on this site about a month back, a debate that reignited just over a week ago following Bruce Springsteen’s sudden cancellation of a North Carolina concert in protest at legislation limiting the rights of LGBT citizens. It has been interesting to participate in the comment thread and, like Carl earlier, I’ve been prompted to expand on my initial thoughts.
To my mind, two related questions seem to have arisen from all this discussion. The first is whether artists should use their music as a vehicle for expressing their own political beliefs, cognizant of the fact that fans out there may disagree (perhaps vehemently) with said beliefs. The second (triggered by the Springsteen announcement) is whether artists have an obligation as performers that overrides any issues of conscience.
Let’s start with the second question. Issues of conscience (or lack thereof) are nothing new when it comes to live performance. Artists such as Rod Stewart, Status Quo and (mostly infamously) Queen all played the Sun City resort in Bophuthatswana at the height of apartheid, earning themselves places on a U.N. blacklist as a result. Those artists, against the prevailing opinion of the time, decided for whatever reason that politics (or, more accurately, issues of human rights) should not dictate where they chose to play. Springsteen, however, has taken the opposite view.
Was Bruce right to cancel? Some have argued that, besides disappointing many thousands of ticketholders, he also missed an opportunity to express his views from the stage. But that message would have reached only those thousands. By cancelling the show, he made it news, putting the issue in the minds of a hundred times as many. It’s clearly something he cares passionately about – and passion is something we want in our music-makers. Passion can be the fuel for great music.
Of course, it’s one thing to cancel a concert, quite another to write songs that express your deeply-held political beliefs. A concert’s an ephemeral thing but a song, once recorded and released, is out there forever. Prog exacerbates this by giving artists the freedom to write longer songs that promote their world view in much greater detail. It’s inevitable that this will cause friction with a certain section of the fan base.
Part of the problem is that we all have different ideas on where the dividing line is between mere expression of a differing opinion and prosyletizing. For example, Bryan Morey notes in the comment thread of his original article that he respects Andy Tillison’s social critique despite their differing political viewpoints, yet that same social critique also inspired a sarcastic savaging of Le Sacre du Travail by one embittered DPRP reviewer (scroll to the end of that page to read it, if you can bear to).
In a sense, it doesn’t really matter what we think as listeners, because we don’t get to vote on this. We’re not dealing with a commercial transaction here. Of course, money changes hands (in most cases), so that the artist is able to pay the bills and carry on making art, but that isn’t the most important feature of the relationship. We are not ‘consumers’ in the business sense, and we do not have consumers’ rights. An artist communicates their thoughts and feelings to us through their music: their thoughts and feelings, which may align with or contradict our own. As listeners, we are free to accept or reject the message, but we don’t get to decide its contents.
I guess I’ve listened to music from a thousand artists, and I doubt that any of them see the world in quite the same way as I do. I’ve experienced moments of discomfort when a lyric makes it clear that an artist has very different views, and I can’t pretend that it hasn’t affected my opinion of that artist, or the frequency with which I listen to their music. Neal Morse is a case in point. Much as I respect Neal for his work with Spock’s Beard and for the sense of purpose that drives his solo career, I’ll freely admit that I’m put off listening to his solo work by its overtly religious nature. But that’s my problem rather than Neal’s.
It can be valuable to hear those differing views, nonetheless. When it’s done well (I’m thinking of you here, Mr Peart!), it can shed new light and make you think about issues from a different perspective. Let’s face it, we could all benefit from standing in another’s shoes from time to time…
So, no, I don’t want anyone to ‘keep their politics out of my prog’. I don’t want our world to be a place where Marillion would think twice about writing Gaza, where Neal Morse would hesitate to profess his belief in song or where a musician wouldn’t dare to release a concept album supporting Donald Trump (a riff on Floyd’s The Wall, perhaps? :). I want all of that passion to be pure and unfettered, even if it makes me uncomfortable from time to time.
Manuel Göttsching was the guitarist for Ash Ra Tempel, a formative krautrock space jam band based in Berlin that included Klaus Schulze (post-Tangerine Dream/pre-solo) and Hartmut Enke. Göttsching made E2-E4 in 1981, years after Ash Ra’s heyday, as something to listen to on a plane trip. It became, upon its release in 1984, a classic of electronic house/dance and trance music, and is the natural descendant of Göttsching’s Inventions for Electric Guitar (1975). The piece is divided into tracks on CD but plays seemlessly across an hour as an integrated suite. Göttsching holds off on soloing for over 30 minutes, and when he let’s go it’s with the restraint of a jazz player. I’ve listened to this record maybe a dozen times over the last 20 years, so not a lot, but would never relinquish it. I have an idea that music like this (what Julian Cope might term “motorik”), when it’s at its best, can work like noise-cancelling headphones, as if by tapping into the wavelength of your brain’s “always on” subchannel it can then mirror and bring the mind’s noise to zero sum, creating a kind of peace not to be had elsewhere. Perhaps that’s a stretch, but, being in the deep with E2 E4, the background of the morning takes on a different kind of flow and light. Now, perhaps, a game of chess….
Damian Wilson and Adam Wakeman. Their most recent album, All That You Fear Is Gone, has been released to rave reviews, including 
Progarchy 