Political music isn't dead, it's

just different
Today's musicians create subtler protest songs than
their rage6inflected predecessors. Must we keep harking
back?
Matt Bolton
Esteemed patrician of protest: Billy Bragg. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
Thu 20 Mar 2008 13.00 GMT
"Is nothing sacred?" asked John Harris on Tuesday, pointing out David Cameron's
annexation of bands that once defined themselves against everything his party stands for.
The Jam, Billy Bragg, the Smiths, Red Wedge... the list of the usual politico-suspects was
reeled out once again. While I couldn't agree more that the image of Cameron belting out I
Want the One I Can't Have to the bathroom mirror (with perhaps George Osborne joining in
on the choruses) is tantamount to mental waterboarding, I can't help feeling that Harris
himself is guilty of the sin of golden ageism.

Whenever music and politics is mentioned, time seems to stop still in the early 1980s. The
prevalent consensus is that the children of Thatcher and Reagan were so dazzled by the "me
first" avarice of the era that they ceased attempts to entwine leftist activism with music, and
retreated back to the staple pop diet of love and/or excess. Proponents of this theory still
believe Red Wedge was the pinnacle of political commitment in music: just as Thatcher
crushed the miners, so she irrevocably took the "the message" from the music.

Well, no. Political pop since those halcyon days may have taken on a less naively strident
form, but it still exists. Take Super Furry Animals. They may disguise their leanings with
doses of drug-addled surrealism, but ranging from The Man Don't Give A Fuck, surely the
most joyous two fingers up to whoever-the-hell-takes-your-fancy ever blasted out of a
speaker, to Slow Life, with its cutting critique of middle-east colonialism, the Super Furry
stance is always clear if you take the time to look.

The same goes for TV on the Radio. Days after Hurricane Katrina, the New Yorkers recorded
and gave away a new track, Dry Drunk Emperor. A towering epic that derided the Bush
administration in no uncertain terms, the final verse called for "all the fathers and the sons
[to go] marching with their guns drawn on Washington. Return to Cookie Mountain, the
album that followed, carried on in a similar vein. And what about Saul Williams? His
breakthrough eponymous album was awash with impassioned pronouncements on the
state of US politics, black culture and poverty - a genuine and sophisticated rage that did not
need to be dressed up in clichéd rhetoric.

Montreal post-rock pioneers Godspeed You! Black Emperor may have eschewed lyrics, but
their harrowing instrumentals predicted this century's warmongering apocalypse just as
eloquently. And even good ol' Jarvis and Pulp cannot be discounted. Cocaine Socialism,
released as a B-side just months after Blair's 1997 election remains the most succinct and
perceptive summation of Cool Britannia to date.

None of these bands are trying to ram their political message down anyone's throat, true.
But that is precisely their strength. Crude sloganeering is as outdated as the soapbox and the
loudspeaker. And that goes as much for music as it does for electioneering.

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