This Week in Music: A Manifesto

“Hey hey, you you [sic]. I don’t like your girlfriend.”

—Avril Lavigne


It’s brassy. It’s sassy. It’s totally irrelevant to life as you know it, and it’s taken your world by storm.

The invasion is everywhere — it overruns newsstands and consumes television networks; it projects million-dollar smiles from the Hollywood Hills and into your home. It’s new wave; it’s idol worship; it’s entertainment for the terminally jaded, and it’s coming to a theater near you.

Welcome to your culture. Here it is: Nickelback, Lindsay Lohan, 50 Cent, People magazine and E! Entertainment Television. Recognize these faces? That’s interesting — they don’t seem to recognize yours.

Welcome to your culture. It’s a top-down industry; it’s generated in factories and film studios, and it doesn’t care how your day has been or what you want to be when you grow up. It does, however, care about your fantasies: drunk-driving debutantes, or transvestite teenage dropouts? Blondes, or brunettes?

The vast majority of all this noise is generated by a handful of corporations — Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group, and EMI Group account for all but a fifth of the American market. By the time consumers are given the option to buy, choices have already been made for us. Backstreet Boys, or NSync? Jessica Simpson, or the other Jessica Simpson? These clone-like apparitions are generated by an industry that appeals to the lowest common denominator, to our primal cravings for sex and simple chord progressions. The power of customers to effect change is limited by a general lack of awareness — or, in more sinister terms, the false awareness that our culture doesn’t matter.

In an era of violence and change (is there any other kind?), the American consumer is, for the most part, protected. With notable — and newsworthy — exceptions, most Americans are not affected by genocide in Sudan or by totalitarianism in North Korea. A record number of Americans are not affected by the wars America is fighting, except insofar as they unfold on television and give us something to argue about.

The same cannot be said for American Idol, which registered 74 million audience participants in its last season showdown (roughly a fourth of the United States’ population). While the United States remains a politically active superpower, our popular culture — the reality most Americans are plugged into — portrays a world of glamour and furious emotion, an eternally youthful rollercoaster of hormones and sex appeal.

The truth is, our culture does matter. American culture is our largest export — it draws from and influences global culture, marshaling talent from across the world and selling its vision in transnational packages. It is also the milieu that informs the American citizen, and therefore American policy.

Yet politically conscientious pop stars are having a rough go. Gone are the days Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, or of Tupac and Eazy-E; onetime A-listers Sinead O’Connor and U2 are looking something like outdated imports with greater pull across the Atlantic. There are exceptions, many from within the hip hop community: Nas, P. Diddy, Kanye West, and many others have put their voices behind political change; however this hardly comprises an artistic climate, or a renaissance of anti-establishment music.

For the consumer to draw meaning from a politically aware culture, he or she must search outside the mainstream. Though media conglomerates are certainly implicated in the lack of meaningful choices, consumers are implicated in their complacency.

Much is lost in this capitulation. Throughout the twentieth century, music has been the source of alternative political debate — a conversation that has little to do with electioneering, or the tit-for-tat maneuvering of partisan candidacy. Music has taken on poverty, race, sexuality, immigration, war, civil disobedience, drug culture, gang culture, and the personal dimension of political realities in a way that Crossfire and 20/20 have not.

As wars continue to rage and ideologies to be formed, a sense of their cultural immediacy has disappeared. Lyrics revolving around club culture, teenage intrigue, narcissistic materialism, and vague, irrational emotion predominate. There is the paradoxical realm of the ghetto-fabulous, in which pop idols cultivate populist appeals amidst allusions to their vast, unencumbered wealth. Some healthy cynicism might be prudent here: Fergie may still go to Taco Bell, but no abundance of Jenny’s from the Block will save us from our apathy.

Political discourse lives on in the underground. M.I.A., Atmosphere, and Cody Chesnutt are just a handful of many, many artists who have used elements of hip hop to explore their politicized identities, dwelling on issues of race, economics, and gender construction. Ladytron and The New Pornographers borrow from pop music’s electronic instrumentation and simple composition, capturing an ambivalence to youth worship that harkens back to 80’s New Wave. The list goes on, branching into hundreds of genres.

Of course the underground, by definition, remains invisible in the popular sphere — and the underground is not a consistently political milieu. The difficulty of navigating independent music (even with the recent explosion of internet-based media) is one reason many consumers remain content with the culture that is handed to them.

For better or worse, this culture is one of mass appeal, and it’s not backing down. It’s hip, it’s sexy, and it’s aggressively seductive — CNN and BBC have nothing on Paris Hilton’s legs, or on the Top 40’s cocaine for the soul.

Let’s not mince words: it is possible to be a responsible citizen and listen to popular music. Music is not the end-all of political discourse or civic responsibility, but it does represent a dimension of awareness that is rapidly shrinking.

For those who might be concerned about this state of affairs, the only option is extra legwork and responsible consumption. The invasion is everywhere — and the resistance is not. It might seem a small gesture, but change can only begin when we begin to think — and to purchase — against the grain.