Band Aid, politics and pop music

I was discussing the re-recording of the Band Aid single with someone yesterday. Rather than objecting to the flimsy nature of the song or the impossibility of repeating moments of creative action with those of contrivance, they pointed out that to record a song about an old humanitarian crisis when quite different ones were currently going on was actually somewhat misleading and misled. Having trouble with not linking absolutely everything back to pop music history, I then started to wonder if it is actually possible to write a contemporary sounding pop record about specific political issues and create something that wasn't terrifyingly bad art.

As pop music has progressed since the arbitrary cut off point of the birth of rock & roll, it has become clumsily entangled in the many strands of its past. Overt awareness of tradition has gradually mutated into a rock & roll rule book. Whether this is something as seemingly trivial as the fourth single from the album is a ballad law for the expansion of record sales, it is part of an implicit and haphazardly formulated code of conduct which exerts a stranglehold over the entire medium and the way it is created and presented. An art form which briefly engaged in, reacted to and even sometimes set the agenda for society around it has become torn away from from it, dangling now only from the tattered thread of fashion. It is now a medium which looks backwards and inwards, the opposite directions to those needed for a response to the world around it.

This need to feed of rock's past has also made its creators cripplingly aware of the ghastly taste errors made by luminaries of yore through their constant regurgitation in print and on TV. In fact this awareness is almost a psychotic desperation not to be judged unfashionable in the future. In the last five years, this has led to a movement in production to values of classic simplicity and overall to a desire to be as little related to the surrounding times as possible so as not to run the risk of becoming dated (not that What's Going On, for example, a record indelibly marked by its historical context, has dated too badly). Even those artists keen to reflect their world  attempt to fracture and encode those references  in a willfully cool fashion which actually resembles gaucheness (sadly even Radiohead are an example of this phenomenon).

Or perhaps it's not pop's fault. Maybe it's hard to squeeze a decent chorus out of  the current global political themes. Maybe it's easier to get films out of say American cultural imperialism than it is records (though this is of course a hilarious example seeing as rock & roll is American cultural imperialism). Taking a deliberately obvious comparison, the unpopularity of war in Iraq drew far fewer reactions within the medium than the Vietnam war. Perhaps, with far more information available to those interested in following what could broadly be described as political events, the songwriter is either overburdened with information, or stuck for hours in front of hundreds of news sources weighing up their opinions and hence somewhat distracted from putting pen to paper about it - at least for a song. After all, as the Band Aid recording that sparked this chain of thoughts shows, it is not for a want of political interest from contemporary musicians that there is a dearth of interesting political music. There is a reluctance for this concern to appear too noticeably in their art however. Yes Chris Martin has had a stab or two at saying something vaguely political in song, but he's not exactly a linear narrative listen to every word I say type of lyricist.

Overall though it might be the age of the medium itself. It's fifty now - middle aged, plump and not that interested in being very radical anymore. It's not ashamed that it used to dress like The Clash and go on rallies, but these days it prefers to stay indoors, do the garden and give to charity at Christmas.

 

Comments

[Le Poulet Noir]

I had hoped to write something on my own blog about the top five most gauche song lyrics, inspired by the Band Aid song's line: "And the Christmas bells that ring are the clanging chimes of doom."

Unfortunately I got stuck shortly after Snap's "I'm as serious as cancer/ When I say 'Rhythm is a dancer'".

Ah well. More relevantly, I think the reason the Vietnam War was more productive, musically, than Gulf War 2 is because it lasted longer and generated more opposition in America, which is the country that really counts when it comes to rock 'n' roll. Wonderful though Johnny Halliday and Serge Gainsbourg are, the French music industry lacks a certain je ne sais quoi when it comes to producing memorable protest pop albums.

A fair number of American bands might be anti-war pinkos, but the groundswell of support required for a pop culture phenomenon is not there.

[Peter]

Now this isn't quite on the subject, but I thought it might be of interest, in the context of music tackling serious issues and being an instructive medium:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1353957,00.html

My favourite line: 'while studying his first album'.

[Le_Poulet_Noir]

I especially like the point that, contrary to Sting's claim in Don't Stand So Close to Me, Humbert Humbert never shook or coughed in "that book by Nabokov".

[NotaLitoFoult]

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