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so this has drifted from baseball players as political agents to "celebrities"--musicians in particular--a topic that has republicans have been whining forever it seems--maybe because the only musicians they seem to be able to atract are mainstream country players, and frankly i doubt even most of them want to have to listen to that.
there is a huge difference between the level of articulateness about politics you might expect from a musician and what you would expect from a baseball player. nothing personal, but the mediums are very different. in my experience, music is almost always at some level about politics, but about the politics of this particular culture, about the choices that structure it.
to back up---popular music is not one thing.
if you are not inclined to listen, it is not surprising that you will not hear anything--my father, for example, was a devoted beethoven and haydn fan--i played some webern piano music for him once, and he thought it sounded like a cat walking a piano.
this reaction said nothing about webern--all it spoke to was what my father was accustomed to and what happens when a piece of music violates the implicit rules.
that said, there are some quite complex, quite formidable music that gets lumped into the category "popular"---and some extraordinarily articulate folk involved with making it.
there are of course more and a few cretins, an more than enough stupid, obvious, simple-minded stuff as well--but anyone who has ears can distinguish them.
all i will say is that you might find more musicians were supportive of the existing order if the existing system of cultural production was not as it is---if there was, for example, more funding for the arts in general---if there was a context more generally in which doing music does not in itself seem to constitute an oppostional act--if the american reliance on commercial channels was not generative of such odious results, both at the level of process and product. were successful musicians not expected to tour as copies of their recordings. were success not as much a trap as a benefit in this area. the list goes on and on.
you reap what you sow.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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