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If I Can’t Dance…
by David Rovics
 Being an activist is a hard, relatively thankless, generally unpaid job. There are some really wonderful people who are going to be offended by this essay, and I apologize in advance if you’re one of them, but what I say here had to be said.
We’re all hopefully trying to make the world a better place, and sometimes that means having open disagreements.
I welcome any and all feedback, public or private, and of course feel free to post and distribute this essay wherever you see fit.
An Open Letter to the US Left on the Relevance of Culture
Last weekend I sang at an antiwar protest in downtown Portland,
Oregon, on the fifth anniversary of the ongoing slaughter in Iraq. In
both its good and bad aspects, the event downtown was not unusual.
Hard-working, unpaid activists from various organizations and networks
put in long hours organizing, doing publicity, and sitting through lots
of contentious meetings in the weeks and months leading up to the
event. On the day of the event, different groups set up tents to
network with the public and talk about matters of life and death. There
was a stage with talented musicians of various musical genres
performing throughout the day, and a rally with speakers in the
afternoon, followed by a march. Attendance was pathetically low. In
large part I’m sure this was due to the general sense of discouragement
most people in the US seem to feel about our ability to effect change
under the Bush regime. It was raining especially hard by west coast
standards, and that also didn’t help.
The crowd grew to it’s
peak size during the rally and march, but was almost nonexistent before
the 2 pm rally. There was only a trickle of people visiting the various
tents prior to the rally, and the musicians on the stage were playing
to a largely nonexistent audience. The musical program, scheduled to
happen from 10 am to 6 pm, was being billed as the World War None
Festival. The term “festival” was contentious, however, and Pdx Peace,
the local peace coalition responsible for the rally, couldn’t come to
consensus on using the term “festival.” In their publicity they
referred to the festival as an “action camp.” The vast majority of
people have no idea what an “action camp” is, including me, and I’ve
been actively involved in the progressive movement for my entire adult
life. The local media, of course, also had no idea what an “action
camp” was, and any publicity that could have been hoped for from them
did not happen. Word did not spread about the event to any significant
degree, at least in part because people didn’t know what they were
supposed to be spreading the word about. Everybody from all political,
social, class and ethnic backgrounds knows what a festival is, but
certain elements within Pdx Peace didn’t want to use the term to
describe what was quite obviously meant to be a festival (as well as a
rally and march). Anybody above the age of three can tell you that when
you have live music on a stage outdoors all day, that’s called a
festival. But not Pdx Peace.
Why? I wasn’t at the meetings --
thankfully, I’m just a professional performer, not an organizer of
anything other than my own concert tours, so I only know second-hand
about what was said. There’s no need to name the names of individuals
or the smaller groups involved with the coalition in this case -- the
patterns are so common and so well-established that the names just
don’t matter. Some people within the peace coalition were of the
opinion that the war in Iraq was too serious a matter to have a
festival connected to it. Because, I imagine, of some combination of
factors including the nature of consensus decision-making, sectarianism
on the part of a few, and muddled thinking on the part of some others,
those who thought that a festival should happen -- and should be called
a festival -- were overruled. My hat goes off to the World War None
Festival organizers (a largely separate entity from Pdx Peace), and to
those within Pdx Peace who tried and failed to call the festival what
it was, and to organize a well-attended event.
As to those who
succeeded in sabotaging the event, I ask, why is so much of the left in
the US so attached to being so dreadfully boring? Why do so many people
on the left apparently have no appreciation for the power and
importance of culture? And when organizers, progressive media and
others on the left do acknowledge culture, why is it usually kept on
the sidelines? What are we trying to accomplish here?
It wasn’t
always this way. Going back a hundred years, before we had a
significant middle class in this country, before we had a Social
Security system, Worker’s Compensation, Medicare, or anything
approximating the actual (not just on paper) right to free speech, when
most of the working class majority in this country were living in utter
destitution and generally working (when they could find work) in
extremely dangerous conditions for extremely long hours, often in jobs
that required them to be itinerant, required them to forego the
pleasure of having families that they might have a chance to see now
and then, out of these conditions the Industrial Workers of the World
was born.
The IWW at that time was a huge, militant union that
could bring industrial production in the US to a halt, and on various
regional levels, quite regularly did. It was a multi-ethnic union led
by women and men of a wide variety of backgrounds, from all over the
world. It’s most well-known member to this day was a singer-songwriter
named Joe Hill, and he was only one of many of the musician-organizers
that constituted both the leadership and membership of the IWW. While
starving, striking, or being attacked by police on the streets of
Seattle, Boston and everywhere in between, the IWW sang. Their
publications were filled with poems, lyrics and cartoons. Everybody
knew the songs and sung them daily. Some of the songs were instructive,
meant to educate workers in effective organizing techniques. Others
were battle cries of resistance, and still others celebrated victories
or lamented defeats. Their cause was nothing short of the physical
survival and spiritual dignity of the working class. They put their
bodies on the line and were often killed and maimed for it, but they
transformed this society profoundly, and they sang the whole way
through. Was their cause serious? As serious as serious can get. And to
this day, multitudes around the world remember the songs of Joe Hill,
Ralph Chaplin, and T-Bone Slim, long after their speeches and pamphlets
have been forgotten. Like many other singer-songwriters throughout the
history of the class war, Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad in
1916. Why? Exactly because he was so serious -- a serious threat to the
robber barons who ruled this country.
A very different, much
more rigidly ideological organization that rose to prominence during
the declining years of the IWW was the Communist Party. This is an
organization whose early years are within the living memory of close
friends of mine, such as my dear friend Bob Steck, who died last year
at the age of 95, and spent most of his life fighting for humanity. I
spent hundreds of hours over the course of many years interrogating Bob
about his life and times (at least ten hours of which are recorded for
posterity on cassettes somewhere). The Communist Party was very
different from the IWW in many ways, but in it’s heyday it was also a
huge, grassroots movement, whose leadership and membership took many
cards from the IWW’s deck, including their emphasis on the vital
importance of culture.
When Bob talked about the CP’s
orientation with regards to organizing the revolution in the USA, he
said there were three primary components: the unions, the streets, and
the theater. Fighting for the welfare of the working class by
organizing for the eight-hour day and decent wages (largely through the
communist-led Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO),
organizing the starving millions in the streets into the unions of the
unemployed, and -- just as importantly -- fighting for the hearts and
minds of the people through music, theater, and art. Among the musical
vanguard of the communist movement of the 1930’s were people who are
still household names today for millions of people in the US and around
the world -- Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, to name a few.
Traveling theater companies brought the work of Clifford Odetts and
Bertoldt Brecht to the people, educating and inspiring militant action
throughout the US. I remember Bob describing the audience reaction to
one of the early performances of Waiting for Lefty in New York City,
the gasps of excitement and possibility in the packed theater when the
actors on stage shouted those last lines of the play -- “Strike!
Strike! Strike!” Ten curtain calls later, everyone in the theater was
ready to take to the streets, and did.
Bob and his comrades
organized and sang in New York, just as they sang going into battle in
Spain in the first fight against fascism, the one in which the US was
on the side of the fascists. Nothing unusual about that -- soldiers on
every side in every war sing as they go into battle, whether the cause
is just or unjust. They and their leadership, whether fascist or
democrat, socialist or anarchist, know that the songs are just as
powerful as the guns (regardless of what Tom Lehrer said). You can’t
fire if you’re running away, and if you want to stand and fight you
have to sing. Talk to anybody involved with the Civil Rights movement
and they’ll tell you, if we weren’t singing, we surely would have lost
heart and ran in the face of those hate-filled, racist police and their
dogs, guns, and water cannon. Talk to anyone who lived through the 60’s
-- who remembers any but the most eloquent of the speeches by the likes
of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or Mario Savio? But millions remember
the songs. Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, James Brown, Aretha Franklin
were the soundtrack to the struggle. Open any magazine or newspaper in
this country to this day and you will find somewhere in the pages an
unaccredited reference to a line in a Bob Dylan song. (Try it, it’s
fun.)
Around the world it’s the same. Dedicated leftists may sit
through the speeches of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez, but transcendent
poetry of Pablo Neruda and the enchanting melodies of Silvio Rodriguez
cross all political and class lines. You will have to try hard to find
a Spanish-speaking person anywhere in the Americas who does not love
the work of that Cuban communist, Silvio. You'll have to search hard to
find a Latino who does not have a warm place in their heart for that
murdered Chilean singer-songwriter, Victor Jara.
Talk to any
Arab of any background, no matter how despondent they may be about the
state of the Arab world, try to find one whose eyes do not light up
when you merely mention the names Mahmoud Darwish, Marcel Khalife,
Feyrouz, Um Khultum. Try to find anyone in Ireland but the most
die-hard Loyalist who doesn’t tear up when listening to the music of
Christy Moore, whatever they think of the IRA. And ask progressives on
the streets of the US today how they came to hold their political views
that led them to take the actions they are now taking, and as often as
not you will hear answers like, “I discovered punk rock, the Clash
changed my life,” or “I went to a concert of Public Enemy, and that was
it.”
Music -- and art, poetry, theater -- is powerful (if it’s
good). The powers that be know this well. Joe Hill and Victor Jara are
only a small fraction of the musicians killed by the ruling classes for
doing what they do. By the same token, those who run this country (and
so many other countries) know the power of music and art to serve their
purposes -- virtually every product on the shelf in every store in the
US has a jingle to go along with it, and often brilliant artistic
imagery to go along with the jingle, shouting at us from every
billboard and TV commercial. (The ranks of Madison Avenue are filled
with brilliant minds who would rather be doing something more
fulfilling with their creative energy.)
Enter 2008. Knowing the
essential power of music, the very industry that sells us music
mass-produced in Nashville and LA has done their best to kill music.
For decades, the few multi-billion-dollar corporations that control the
music business and the commercial airwaves have done their best to
teach us all that music is something to have in the background to
comfort you as you try to get through another mind-numbing day of
meaningless labor in some office building or department store. It’s
something to help you seduce someone perhaps, or to help you get over a
breakup. It is not something to inspire thought, action, or feelings of
compassion for humanity (other than for your girlfriend or boyfriend).
There
are always exceptions to prove the rule, but by and large, the writers
and performers in Nashville and LA know what they’re being paid to do,
and what they’re being paid not to do -- if it ever occurred to them to
do anything else in the first place. But even more potently, all those
millions of musicians aspiring to become stars, or at least to make a
living at their craft, know either consciously or implicitly that any
hope of success rides on imitating the garbage that comes out of these
music factories. Of course, there are the many others who write and
sing songs (and create art, plays, screenplays, etc.) out of a need to
express themselves or even out of a desire to make a difference in the
world, but they are systematically kept off of the airwaves, out of the
record deals, relegated largely to the internet, very lucky if they
might manage to make a living at their craft. Fundamentally, though,
they are made to feel marginal, and are looked at by much of society as
marginal, novelties, exotic. Although they are actually the mainstream
of the (non-classical) musical tradition in the US and around the
world, although the kind of music they create has been and is still
loved by billions around the world for centuries, in the current
climate, especially in present-day US society, they are a marginal few.
And
no matter how enlightened we would like to think we are, the
progressive movement is part of this society, for good and for ill.
Most of us have swallowed this shallow understanding of what music is.
The evidence is overwhelming. There are, of course, exceptions. Folks
like the organizers of the annual protests outside the gates of Fort
Benning, Georgia -- School of the Americas Watch -- are well aware of
the potency of culture, and use music and art to great effect,
inspiring and educating tens of thousands of participants every
November.
On the other end of the spectrum are the
ideologically-driven people who have turned hatred of culture into a
sort of art. I have to smile when I think of the small minority of
Islamist wackos who tried to storm the stage at one rally I sang at in
DC in 2002, shouting, “No music! No music!” Security for the stage was
being provided by the Nation of Islam, who faced off with this group of
Islamists, who ultimately decided that throwing down with the Jewels of
Islam behind the stage that day wasn’t in their best interests,
apparently.
But much more prevalent, and therefore much scarier,
are groups like the ANSWER “Coalition.” (I put “coalition” in quotes
because I have yet to meet a member of a group that theoretically makes
up the “coalition” that has had any say in what goes on at their
rallies, although the leadership of ANSWER is of course happy to
receive the bus-loads of people that their “coalition” members bring to
their rallies, which seems to be the only thing that makes ANSWER a
“coalition.”) ANSWER, last I heard, is run by the ultra-left sectarian
group known as the Worker’s World Party, which I strongly suspect is
working for the FBI. (Although as Ward Churchill says, you don’t need
to be a cop to do a cop’s job.)
Millions of people in the US who
regularly go to antiwar protests are unaware of who is organizing them.
They just want to go to an antiwar protest. ANSWER has become almost
synonymous with “antiwar protest,” to the extent that many people on
the periphery of the left (such as most people who go to their
protests) refer to antiwar protests as “ANSWER protests,” as in “I went
to an ANSWER protest,” whether or not the protest was actually
organized by ANSWER. (Just as many people say “I was listening to NPR”
when they were actually listening to a community radio station that has
nothing to do with NPR, broadcasting programs such as Democracy Now!,
which the vast majority of NPR stations still will not touch with a ten
foot pole.)
I always find it unnerving and intriguing that
ANSWER protests always seem to be mentioned on NPR and broadcast on
CSPAN, whereas rallies organized by the bigger and actual coalition,
United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), almost never manage to make it
onto CSPAN or get covered by the corporate media. ANSWER always seems
to get the permits, whereas UFPJ seems to be systematically denied
them. Anyway, I digress (a little). I tend to avoid anything having to
do with ANSWER or the little-known, shadowy Worker’s World Party, but a
few years ago I was driving across Tennessee listening to CSPAN on my
satellite radio, and they broadcast the full four hours of an ANSWER
protest in DC. I sat through it because I wanted to hear it from
beginning to end, for research purposes, and Tennessee is a long state
to drive through from west to east, had to do something during that
drive. There was one song in the four-hour rally. Although I’ve been an
active member of the left for twenty years, I recognized almost none of
the names of the people who spoke at the rally. Every speech was full
of boring, tired rhetoric, as if they were out of a screenplay written
by a rightwing screenwriter who was trying to make a mockery out of
leftwing political rallies. Judging from the names of the organizations
involved, very few of which I recognized either, they were mostly tiny
little Worker’s World Party front groups. And since the Worker’s World
Party apparently doesn’t have any musicians in their pocket, there was
no music to speak of. (Or, quite probably I suspect, they don't want
music at their rallies because they don't want their rallies to be
interesting.)
ANSWER is an extreme example, but a big one that
most progressives are unfortunately familiar with, whether they know
who ANSWER (or Worker’s World) is or not. Inevitably, most people leave
ANSWER protests feeling vaguely used and demoralized -- aside from
those who manage to stay far enough away from the towers of speakers so
they can avoid hearing all the mindless rhetoric pouring out of them.
Contrast the mood with the protests at the gates of Fort Benning, where
most people leave feeling hopeful and inspired.
I know I have no
more hope of influencing the leadership of Worker’s World with this
essay than I have of influencing the behavior of the New York City
police department with it. But neither of these organizations are my
target audience. Those who I hope to reach are those who are genuinely
trying to create rallies and other events in the hopes of influencing
and inspiring public opinion, in the hopes of inspiring people to
action, in the hopes of winning allies among the apolitical or even
among conservatives. The people I hope to reach are those who have been
unwittingly influenced by the corporate music industry’s implicit
definition of what music and culture is and is not.
And, here we
go, I would count among this group most of the hard-working, loving and
compassionate people who are organizing rallies, who are organizing
actions, who are organizing unions, and who are creating progressive
media on the radio, on community television and on the internet in the
US today.
I’d like to pause for a moment to make a disclosure. I
am a professional politically-oriented musician, what the corporate
media (and many progressives) would call a “protest singer,” though I
reject the term. I’m not sure what, if anything, I have to gain
personally by publishing these thoughts, but I think it behooves me to
point out that I am one of the lucky ones who has performed at rallies
and in progressive and mainstream media for hundreds of thousands of
people on a fairly regular basis throughout the world, and I would like
to hope that my words here will not be understood as Rovics whining
that he’s not famous enough. I speak here for culture generally, not
for myself as an individual singer-songwriter.
My desire is to
reach groups like Pdx Peace and their sister organizations throughout
the country. These are genuinely democratic groups, real coalitions
made up of real people, not sectarian, unaccountable groups like
ANSWER. These are groups, in short, made up of my friends and comrades,
but these are groups also made up of people who grew up in this society
and therefore generally have a lot to learn about the power of culture
to educate and inspire people. It is not good enough to have music on
the stage as people are gathering to rally and as they are leaving to
march. It’s not good enough to have a song or two sandwiched in between
another half hour of speeches -- no matter how many organizations want
to have speakers representing them on stage, or whatever other very
legitimate excuses organizers have for making their events, once again,
long and boring (even if they’re not as long or as boring as an ANSWER
rally). It is not good enough for wonderful, influential radio/TV shows
like Democracy Now! to have snippets of songs in between their
interviews, when only two or three of those interviews each year are
related to culture. It is a sorry state of affairs that NPR news shows
do a better job of covering pop culture than Pacifica shows do in terms
of covering leftwing culture.
The vast majority of the
contemporary, very talented, dedicated musicians represented by, say,
the "links" page on www.davidrovics.com, have rarely or never been
invited to sing at a local or national protest rally (even if some few
of us have, many times). The vast majority of progressive conferences
do not even include a concert, or if they do, it's background music
during dinner on Saturday night. I can count on one hand the number of
times I have heard Democracy Now! or Free Speech Radio News mention
that a great leftwing artist is doing a tour of the US. The number of
fantastic musicians out there who have even been played during the
station breaks on Democracy Now! is a tiny fraction of those that are
out there -- of the dozens of musicians featured on my "links" page for
example, only a small handful have even been played once. It is
shameful that it's easier to get a national, mainstream radio show in
the UK or Canada to plug a tour of such a musician than it is to get
any national Pacifica program to do this.
Radical culture needs
to be fostered and promoted, front and center, not sidelined as people
are gathering, or when the radio stations are doing station ID's.
Because if the point is to inspire people to action, a song is worth a
hundred speeches. If the point is to educate people, a three-minute
ballad is easily equal to any book. (They'll read the book after they
hear the song, not the other way around.)
It is often said that
we are in a battle for the hearts and minds of the people of this
country. It is us versus CNN, NPR, Bush, Clinton, etc. In this battle,
style matters, not just content. In this battle, it is absolutely
imperative that we remember that it is not only the minds we need to
win, but the hearts. At least in terms of the various forms of human
communication, there is nothing on Earth more effective in winning
hearts than music and art. We ignore or sideline music and art at our
peril. It's time to listen to the music.
http://www.davidrovics.com
drovics@gmail.com
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