(Originally published October 2016)
On Tuesday, Mipso, the folk-bluegrass band hailing from UNC will have a free concert atop Rosemary Parking Deck to promote Roy Cooper, and perhaps more importantly, to oppose Pat McCrory. On November 6, there will be a “Stand Against HB2” music festival at Cat’s Cradle featuring a hoard of local acts. The same event happened back in May in Hillsborough. The trend of canceling shows, as many musicians did over the summer, has started to fade. Musicians are starting to be a part of the participatory political culture by raising awareness and speaking to those who already agree, instead of by protest, which may prove a problem in the future if we want to make actual progress in repealing HB2.
I support political musicians. I’ve always had this deeply held conviction that you cannot separate music from the cultural and political contexts in which fostered it, therefore all music, whether we’re aware of it or not, is political. This concept is debatable, but you can’t deny that artists of all forms have always used their art to make political statements and reflect on the world, from Da Vinci to Warhol. I went to the Tate Modern in London last winter and witnessed more cultural commentary than The Atlantic’s website. Wilde philosophized about aesthetics, but even he himself disproved his theory with A Picture of Dorian Grey (Wilde believed in art for the sake of enjoyment and aesthetics, but he used Dorian Grey to prove this statement, therefore contradicting his entire philosophy).
But music, however, has always been more vague. Musicians are often only accepted in their respective realms, hindered by genre. They’re entertainment and enjoyment, but once they open their mouths, they’re obsolete. We, as a society, constantly exploit artists for their work and often don’t even acknowledge them as free-thinking individuals. One of my favorite political controversies of our time is the Dixie Chicks and their stark objection to the War in Iraq. The trio, being a country band, wasn’t taken lightly when they announced they didn’t support the war, and thus essentially didn’t support Bush, at a show in London in 2003. Soldiers destroyed their CD’s, the country music community shunned them, and their career was essentially ruined. All their contributions to the genre forgotten, and their voices ruled too radical and disrespectful.
They came back in 2006 with a song titled “Not Ready To Make Nice,” where lead singer Natalie Maines bites back; “How on Earth could the words that I said/send someone so over the edge that they’d write me a letter/saying that I’d better/shut up and sing or my life would be over.” And that, by itself, proved the context in which politics interact with musical culture. I was talking to a friend last week about our mutual love for the Dixie Chicks, to which he said, “Yeah, they were great, I wish they didn’t get so political though.” and that’s precisely it. We want artists to shut up and sing, but we don’t want to listen to what they have to say.
When Beyonce made a political statement at the Super Bowl, conservative blogger Tomi Lahren acted as if it was a personal attack against white people (“White people like your music, too!” she said. “Little white girls wanna be like you just as little black girls do!”) when it was simply a comment on police brutality. When Kendrick Lamar uses his conscious hip-hop music to churn out poetic and passionate raps, he’s still coined as a delinquent, but when rappers chose not to be overtly political, they’re still coined as “thugs.” You can’t tell marginalized groups how to feel, it doesn’t work that way.
So when a slew of artist cancelled their North Carolina shows because of HB2, their political voices were finally recognized. Middle aged Springsteen fans were directly affected by something, for once in their lives. They may not know what it feels like to be discriminated against, but now they know what it’s like to be directly affected by a political issue, and that, I think, is why the concert-protest phenomenon is important. No one who disagrees with a cause is going to show up at an event in support of it. The opposition is unmoved. But when Springsteen, Pearl Jam, Ringo Starr, Boston and more–bands with primarily middle-aged male audiences and the same cohort that is likely to support HB2–use their voice in this way, it gives them voice to reach people they otherwise wouldn’t. Protest doesn’t work unless there’s disruption, MLK proved that, so this phenomenon could finally make people listen to musicians.
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