Popular Music and Politics

Memorial to John Lennon, Central Park, New York.

I think everyone assumes that the world of popular music, like Hollywood, is a leftist redoubt. One thinks, once again, of Joni Mitchell, of Neil Young's “anti-war” album, of Bob Dylan and the tradition of “protest songs,” of John Lennon's “Imagine,” and on and on. More generally, there is a hostility on the right towards the arts.

I think this is a big mistake.

To begin with, the arts by their nature are not political. Artists in general, including popular musicians and songwriters, are politically naive, perhaps more naive than the average person. But political organizations, by their nature, are eager to co-opt when they can. It seems to me that it is the left that has co-opted art, and it is a mistake for the right to allow them this ground. Because, while artists are mostly apolitical by nature—free spirits cannot function within a political organization—what they create can be immensely influential politically.

Dylan is the classic case in point. The truth is, nobody can really pin down Dylan's religion or politics. And this seems to be very deliberate on his part. Back in his “protest” days, he was given an award by a leftist organization, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. He took the occasion of the award presentation to announce publicly that he was not interested in politics.

Protesting the World Bank. CDs available.

“You people should be at the beach....There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore. There's only up and down, and down is very close to the ground, and I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics.”

Dylan was wise enough to realize that politics is a trap for artists. On the one hand, political groups are desperate to claim a fairly prominent artist on their own; they are soon knocking at any successful artist's door persistent as Mormon missionaries. At the same time, becoming connected with a movement gives an artist a ready-made distribution channel, enabling his art. WB Yeats says he got the advice, early in his political career, that to make it in Ireland as an artist, you had to have either the Catholic Church or the Independence movement behind you. As a Protestant, he could not hope for the Catholic Church. So he chose to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Hence Yeats's politics; which everyone else since has taken so seriously.

The danger of this approach, though, is that then the artist has a harness on, which rarely rests easily on an artist's shoulders. When he must always look over his shoulder at the possible political repercussions of what he sings, paints, or writes, this can lead to second-rate, insincere art. And politics is fickle: become publicly identified with a cause, and once the cause goes away, often, so do you. Yet, once you have become identified with a movement or a cause, it is very difficult and dangerous to get away. Not only will you have lost your audience; they will turn on you and hate you as a traitor. Dylan has risked this several times. Few members of Sinn Fein have a good word to say about Yeats today.

John Train in his early years.

Phil Ochs is a perfect counter-example of the danger Dylan sidestepped here. He got bought and sold as an anti-war advocate. The war ended. He was passe. He seems to have realized he had been tricked and trapped; in his last days, he re-imagined himself as a new person, “John Train,” who was systematically opposed to Phil Och's politics. Then he hanged himself.

Currently, there is also obviously tremendous pressure within the arts community to at least pretend you are leftist in order to get along. You have to be pretty big before you dare challenge your peers on such a matter—pretty big, and pretty politically aware. Andy Warhol once commented that he was for lower taxes, and really should be a Republican. “But artists aren't allowed to be Republicans, are they?”

Somebody should set up a refugee program for artists, welcoming them, getting the word out, trying to help them with a new audience when they flee the left-wing cult of the arts. It would have to be done delicately, though; the way Catholics do missionary work. No point in fleeing a leftist cult only to get caught up in a rightist one.

In the meantime, those on the right can at least be understanding, and not jerk their knees at a Joni Mitchell, a Neil Young, or a Keith Richards. They are leftists in the same sense that fish ride bicycles.