Do "bad" politics make good music?
· 08/04/2006 11:46 AM by Steve Gigl
I got the new Stone Sour CD (on sale @ Target for < $10, which is my current requirement for a CD purchase) on a diaper run last night, and it seems pretty decent. [99% of Slipknot fans will hate it, naturally.]
But as usual there’s political content on a few songs that I completely disagree with, and it got me thinking: since artists always seem to lean to the left—or to be at the very least completely anti-war—does having a “right-wing” [scare quotes because he’s center-right at best on most things] or pro-war President make for better music? Or to put it a different way, do bands that are angry with the state of the country or world make better music?
Need examples? Pearl Jam fans are thrilled with their latest, which is pretty heavily political and anti-Bush. Same with Green Day. Within my range of music, Machine Head, Disturbed, Avenged Sevenfold, and now Stone Sour are all making good music while angry on some level with the President. And in the 80s, Metallica, Slayer, and countless pop musicians put together some great music while they were angry at… well, the world, but particularly policies of the west embodied by Reagan and Thatcher.
I know it makes more sense that really heavy music would be better when the musicians are already angry, but I’m more curious about Pearl Jam, Green Day, Disturbed, and pop music in general. Some theories I’ve thought up so far:
1) It’s the sense of purpose—legitimate or not—generated by being anti-war in a time of war.
2) It’s a focus thing: instead of rambling on about various feelings in a vaguely angsty way (see: lots of 1990s music), there’s a clear “enemy” to write about.
3) It’s easier to write lyrics about external problems rather than internal ones, leaving the musicians time and bandwidth to work on the music itself.
4) You have to be a little nuts to write good music, and BDS is driving musicians just far enough in that direction to generate some good music.
That last one gets a little too armchair psychologist for me, but does anyone else have any good theories?
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I agree completely. Their anger against policy they disagree with gives them that focus. Especially when they think it’s someone “destroying the world.”
These are the same kinds of people who can’t admit that Reagan was a great president.
— Cullen Aug 7, 05:47 AM #
My theory is that theatre people and musicians, while they may be very talented in their field, tend to be poorly informed otherwise. Once they are successfull, they fall in with what they think are sophisticates (i.e. the naive, idealistic and resentful crowd, the supposed intellectuals)and start mouthing the same rubbish. For example, I have never thought it likely that Dixie Chick has strong political beliefs. I think she was parroting what she had just heard at a last party somewhere.
— Bloody Gums Aug 7, 09:55 AM #
Well, if you want to get deep about it …
Consider where these people come from. Most of them were underprivileged, some downright poverty-stricken.
Even those raised in middle-to-upper class chose to forego that life and live the “starving artist” lifestyle until their band “made it big.” And this is almost always done in larger urban areas that depend on government infrastructure for so much.
Then, suddenly, when they do make it big, they’re being paid huge sums of cash for relatively little amount of work. Given their lower-class lifestyle and sudden wealth, they feel guilt concerning their well-being. How fair is it that they have all this money and stuff and all the people they knew before don’t?
So they sing about these inequalities and how “THE MAN” is keeping them down. How many of them actually do anything about it? Well, I don’t look at their accounts, but we hear very little about any of them actually doing anything, now do we?
Well, that’s my two cents anyway.
— Cullen Aug 7, 11:44 AM #
I blame M*A*S*H.
Well, OK, not really.
Dennis Prager likes to say (paraphrasing, here) that trained intellectuals become moral idiots by virtue of the way they end up thinking, and I wonder if some dichotomy like that applies here. Which means that artists, who rely pretty much entirely on emotion, lose their ability to think rationally.
[Or, you know, it could be all the pot. Does "dead brain cells" = “War is bad regardless of circumstances”?]
— Steve G. Aug 7, 01:47 PM #
No, you can’t dismiss it as all the pot. Aside from the fact that alcohol is actually more destructive of braincells, I am far from being the only stoner hawk.
— triticale Aug 12, 08:21 AM #