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D:
To what extent do you feel that songs can be political? G:
To a great extent. I think that in the past they have been able to
homogenise an idea that a lot of people are thinking but are not sure
how to express. So they might hear it in a song and then rally around
that song. I think that's the function that it's had in the past.
I think it's a way for people to collectively organise their thoughts
on an issue. It's a positive thing and an important function of music. D:
Do you think that political songs can actually have an impact on people
in shaping their political consciousness or they just reaffirm existing
views and values. G:
Well I think they help people articulate existing views and values,
I think they're a way for people to simplify and be able to make their
own ideas more tangible. For example in the sixties on hearing a lot
of songs, like say Dylan's songs, people like my father and a lot
of people of that generation said 'yeah, this is what I'm feeling'
and were able to use that as a direct voice and a representation to
other people with other ideas. So I think that's really a very important
political function of those kinds of songs. D:
I can think of some songs that within my experience and lifetime,
changed people's behaviour, for example The Smiths 'Meat is Murder',
after that, a lot of friends of mine became vegetarian, also me, around
that time. Another example would be Minor Threat's 'Straight Edge',
which didn't affect anyone in my closer circle but I know there were
a lot of people who went along with that. Do you think that these
changes are symptomatic of the forming of an identity along with a
band like the way that people might have followed the fashions of
someone like David Bowie through his different phases, and it doesn't
matter that it's anything political or do they show that there is
a possibility of making small changes to people's political consiousness? G:
I think it's great when a song brings people to question their own
practices, to answer honestly and say I want to do this and I don't
want to do that, but I'm not sure that that's always the case with
things like straight edge and vegetarianism, I think that a lot of
times it becomes fashionable. Where I grew up in the eighties there
was a huge straight edge scene and I'm not sure how much of it was
out of people's concern for the environment or for their bodies, I
think it was more about being a part of something. So that's always
a sad thing when those beliefs are taken over by fad or something,
which I think happens a lot. But on the other hand, if there's music
that really gets people to practice their behaviour... with the example
of The Smiths, maybe a lot of people said 'well, here's a group of
people who have already made a decision that I want to make which
is not to eat meat' and so therefore the song is a way to pose the
question to themselves and question their own practices and I think
that's great. I think that's a really great function. I think it's
a rare thing though. Those two examples are really rare considering
how much music is made. D:
have you ever considered that strategy in your own work? G:
No, I could never do it. I don't know that much about The Smiths but
Ian (Mackaye - from Minor Threat/Fugazi) has an incredibly strong
personality and very polarised opinions about things. I don't have
those things and I think it takes a certain kind of performer or composer
to represent things as being that polarised. I don't think that my
music or the way that I approach music is conducive to that at all.
My music is more something that might present a situation and present
more of a question than present a didactic message or something. D:
Can you think of any of your own songs that are more political than
others? G:
Yeah, songs like 'Ice or Ground' (on 'Some Boots', Oct 2002) or there's
a lot of songs on the new record that would be considered by genre
political with a capital P. D:
I remember on the last tour there was a song about a ride with a truck
driver... G:
Yeah, that's on the new record. It's a song about a true story of
when my car broke down and I got picked up by a guy who was driving
a tow truck and he expressed his intolerant views about people coming
to America to me to the point where we got into an arguement about
it. So those songs are really directly political, so the idea of political
and personal, that dichotomy, I don't think is always true. There's
a lot of songs like maybe love songs that actually have a political
effect of bringing a lot of people who have similar feelings or similar
ways of dealing with things together, that's what the word political
means, homogenising a group of people around an idea. So, I think
a lot my songs are not political in the sense of a Crass song, I'm
not the type of person who sits up there and preaches or condemns
something point blank, I think I try to present a situation and raise
a question that people may not have thought of or present a scenario
that maybe people didn't think of. D:
One contributor to the 'protest songbook' project suggested that there
was something essentially political in the act of young people deciding
to pick up guitars and do something, grouping together to form a band,
because then in a sense you're moving from being a consumer of culture
to being a producer of your own culture. G:
Sure, I think that's true to an extent. It's true in a vacuum. I think
that now that there's so many bands and so many people making music
that there's also an idea of consumption within a band because you're
consuming this idea of living a commodified rock star type of lifestyle.
I think that a lot of people get into that. All these bands that sound
like Gang of Four, The Cure or whatever, there's a hundred bands that
just jump into that every year and get this preconceived thing going,
become famous and then break up and the next year there's another
band that's exactly like them. I would question whether that's at
all political. I think that producing music like that, it's now commercial
music and I think it's a form of consumption, regurgitating these
same aesthetic ideas over and over again. But I think there's also
a lot of bands that are doing something that's genuinely concerned
with the music, that's their primary concern and they're pushing music
forward in a new way and people who are really interested in music
and not fashion will gather around those bands. D:
Quite often bands that don't have a particularly political content
to their lyrics or music, when they become quite successful and they're
in a position where they can command a great audience will use that
position to make a statement. I'm thing for example of Michael Stipe
or Bono or the singer of Blur who was making some big statements before
the anti-war rally in London. Do you think there's a value in that? G:
Certainly, there's a responsibility for people who have that kind
of voice to use it in a constructive way, especially if there's something
going on that's polarising people already, it's really important to
do that. I think if you have the chance to speak to half a million
people, you should say something constructive. You should say something
that's going to help people to find their own opinions or to be active
in society, so I definitely respect those things, as long as they're
real human, political ideas and not just jumping up and down and cheering
nationionalistic ideas or something. Crowd consciousness can also
be a really fascist kind of thing, to get everybody to think the exact
same thought or something. D:
What do you think about the role of traditional protest songs in relation
to contemporary pop music. I'm thinking of the old style of protest
song being like Dylan, Woody Guthrie or even Lennon's 'Give Peace
a Chance', so, sloganistic, anthemic songs that can be sung with an
acoustic guitar at protest rallies. There's not so much of that around
these days, maybe that's a result of music having changed to being
a lot more complex technically, relying on sampled sounds or elaborate
electronic beats, and so being more difficult to reproduce spontaneously
at a protest. Do you think there's a comparison to be made between
today's music scene and its politicisation with the previous generation? G:
I don't know. Personally, to me, the idea of chanting sloganistic
songs is not really a very powerful or interesting form of being political
as an artist because I think that any kind of fanaticism is a little
scary. I guess I really question any kind of large group of people
who are chanting the exact same thing and I don't see political action
now as being the same as it was in the sixties or in the twenties
or something. I think it's more important to get people to think critically
about their own ideas, and they might not always be the same but they
might be able to come together at a certain point. So as for the role
of music, I guess I question the musical value of a lot of that stuff
from the sixties. I think it had much more political value. I don't
know that you put it on and listen to it as a piece of art, it's value
is more as a folk practice than as music. But there's other examples.
Dylan's 'Tears of Rage' for example is an incredible song that questions
a devotion to America and asks why isn't the flag here to protect
me when I was there for my country. And it does it in a very subtle,
complex way. It's not just chanting 'no war', it's done in a way that
the lyrics have a lot of depth and as a song it's a beautiful song.
It tells a story and it has a narrative, and those kinds of songs,
regardless of what they're about stand up artistically and musically
but they also function as a rallying piece of art or rallying piece
of music. I think that Dylan was a master of putting these ideas into
narratives. Personally I have a lot more interest in those kinds of
songs than Lennon's 'Give Peace a Chance' which I think is just basically
a protest marching kind of thing. D:
After the violence at the protests against the G8 summit in Genova
in 2001, that whole movement was in a crisis over how to proceed because
there were fears about the escalation of violence at future demonstrations
and questions about the effectiveness of that as a strategy. In Italy,
the creative group of the Torino Disobbedienti decided to take a strategy
of creating a carnival like atmosphere at protests and dressing up
in bright colours, playing drums and using samba music. Instead of
the 'black bloc' they used the idea of the 'pink bloc', so had lots
of girls doing formation dancing, dressed in frilly pink clothes and
others playing on drums made out of plastic tubs or big tins. They
went to the wall of an immigrant detention centre in Torino and then
painted the grey wall with bright colours. Elio Gilardi from that
group was talking about the use of samba music as something that would
unite people in a way that wasn't didactic in terms of a slogan, so
then it avoided this scary thing that you were talking about where
lots of people are chanting the same words, but still it created a
collectivity. G:
That's really interesting. That sounds like a good strategy. D:
Have you been able to think of a song that you could mention for the
'protest songbook'? G:
Sure, a lot of songs. Definitely that Dylan song 'Tears of Rage' that
I already mentioned. There was a band when I was growing up called
Beefeater that were a really big influence on me. They appropriated
from a lot of different genres of music, they weren't just a punk
band. Almost all their songs were political but they were very much
about a certain situation or a certain context but they were very
simple and very much from a gut level for example, there was a song
called 'Need a Job' that was about Tamas the singer needing a job
essentially. Some of the lyrics were like 'I have to eat refrigerator
frost because I don't have any food left' and these type of things.
But it was also from a gut level, there was probably a lot of people
on the street who could identify with this real base kind of frustrtation
without making any overarching political statement about it. It just
describes a simple situation. That can be a powerful thing. A lot
of minutemen songs were really influential on me as a songwriter and
musician. We're actually doing an 'In the Fishtank' session up in
Holland in a couple of weeks and the idea for our project is to cover
a lot of political songs that are critical of America and were influential
on us. So, everything from 'Strange Fruit', the old Billie Holiday
song about race relations to some Minutemen songs and some Beefeater
songs and some newer stuff. We're also doing 'Tears of Rage', the
Dylan song. So those songs are in my head right now. One of the songs
we're doing is called 'Jerusalem', it's by Mark Hollis. It's hard
to even call it a political song, it's a very abstract commentary
on some abstract situation dealing with Israel and America's relationship
with Israel and it's criticism is really more implicit, it's really
more of an abstract portrait of that situation. D:
Why did you choose to do this project? G;
Well, we wanted to give some formal structure to it and part of it
was that living in America we've become more and more critical of
our country and certainly I've written more political songs recently
than I have in the past and I think it's something that's just interested
me personally and I just wanted to go back to some of these great
songs that had an influence on me and were really critical of America
in what I think are smart ways. Some of them are amazing, like the
Minutemen songs, they could have been written yesterday. One of the
lyrics, (of 'Colors') is 'Saw some military hardware today, all the
drab has changed to brown, yellow and grey' and it's just completely
applicable to America's role in the Middle-East right now. We're doing
'Colors', 'The Only Minority', 'Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs'
and a couple more. It'll be fun. They're super-fast and really fun
to play. D:
Sounds great, when will that be released? G:
We're recording it in a couple of weeks so I'd say it'll probably
be out in the fall. D:
So, before the election. G:
I hope so. It was really enlightening when we got to pick these songs,
because I could have written these songs yesterday, that's how applicable
they are to America today, but they were all written before 1990.
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