All art is political

The predictable pissing and moaning about Bruce Springsteen taking a stand and working to fight Bush's re-election is firing up the internet. The two main complaints are incoherent rage from the Freeper-types and the more-sensible sounding argument that musicians and other artists like actors are stepping over the line, that their area of expertise is their art, not politics.

The right is spreading the "art, not politics" meme as fast as they can, not because they believe it but because they know they don't have the talent or numbers on their side. The idea is both to intimidate artists from appearing political and even more to convince the audience that nothing an artist has to say about politics has value. But the "shut up and sing" thing makes absolutely no sense. Most artists who push political buttons speak AND sing their beliefs. Johnny Cash would be a perfect example of someone who seamlessly intertwined his religious and political beliefs in both his music and his spoken statements. The line between performing and merely expressing is not that easy to find.

And even if you could find the line and artists kept their political opinions in the context of the music, I doubt the "shut up and sing" crowd would be satisfied, since those political opinions would still be coming out of the "unqualified" artists. The push is not to muzzle them from makig political speeches, but from being "political" at all. But even if they are able to convince people that music should not be political, there is a huge problem. There's no such thing as an "apolitical" expression.

Art comments on culture. That's political--period. Even the most innocuous song lyric has some political underpinning. Even some warbly pop songstress taking off her clothes, singing about doing what her lover wants and giggling incoherently between songs is making a statement about a female's role in our society, and in this case one that pisses off both feminists and the modesty-loving anti-feminists. Anyone who listens to Springsteen's lyrics would realize that he would have a serious problem with Bush's steal from the poor to give to the rich policies, just as in the 60's it wasn't all the surprising that Johnny Cash would disapprove of an out-of-touch government putting the bodies of ordinary young men on the line in Vietnam to prove some idealogical point.

The "apolitical" music that the wingnut pundits want isn't apolitical at all. It just would adhere to a monolithic, pro-corporate, anti-intellectual viewpoint. At that point, it does cross a line, from art to propaganda. The word "propaganda" is extremely popular right now in the punditry, but it's used pretty much solely to describe art that challenges the status quo, which is not really what propaganda is. Propaganda, as the term is properly used, is art made by the leaders to reinforce the status quo. The wingnuts like to compare any and every vaguely leftist artist, especially Michael Moore, to Goebbels, but actually the person whose function in the government is closest to Goebbels is obviously Karl Rove. (NOTE: I AM NOT SAYING THAT ROVE IS A NAZI. REPEAT, NOT SAYING THAT. BUT HE IS PRETTY MUCH A PROPAGANDA MINISTER.) Moore isn't even comparable to Riefenstahl, since her films were boot-licking government praise machines.