Exiles on Main Street

“There’s seven people dead on a South Dakota farm,” Bob Dylan sang back in 1964. The song was ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown.’ It was a graphic and moving story of a Depression-era American farmer driven mad by hunger, who with his last dollar, bought seven shotgun shells. Hollis Brown preferred to kill his family and himself rather than to feel the pangs of hunger and to hear his baby’s continuous cries. “Somewhere in the distance there’s seven new people born,” the song ended.

Dylan was right: the depression always moves on somewhere else. In 1994, there are millions of people who it would seem were born to starve to death. Wars and destruction are rife. Exploitation by the ‘First’ World of ‘Third’ World is institutionalised. Even the terms, of course, are tainted.

Should popular music address these and other ‘political’ subjects? There are those who say no, that music is entertainment, music is escape. They’re right. Music is entertainment and escape, and if you can’t have a good time with music, then things something is seriously wrong. However, music can aspire to doing more than simply entertaining, and whether you like it or not, many of the most inspiring musical forms around today find their roots in the politics of poverty.

Without the blues, there would be no jazz, no r & b, no rock ‘n’ roll, no soul, no funk, no disco, no rap. And as Gil Scott Heron puts it on ‘Bicentennial Blues,’ “The blues was born on the beaches where the slave ships docked/Born on the slave man’s auction block/The blues was born and carried on the howling wind/The blues grew up a slave/The blues grew up as property/The blues grew up in Nat Turner visions/The blues grew up in Harriet Tubman courage/The blues grew up in small town deprivation/The blues grew up in the nightmares of the white man.”

The blues grew up and became very profitable for white artists like Elvis Presley and The Rolling Stones, while legendary black figures, such as Howlin’ Wolf, died in relative poverty, and Muddy Waters was delivering coal into his fifties. The blues and much of the music that came after it – right up to the nauseous, tepid, popsy soul of Take That – became an example of the white world exploiting the black. In this sense, the popular charts are steeped in politics – dirty politics.

Most indigenous musics reflect the politics of the daily life which surrounds them. Although Dylan’s debut album was pretty much an homage to the blues, there was also ‘Song To Woody’. Woody Guthrie was the American working class historian and champion of social issues. His guitar bore the legend, “This machine kills fascists,” and he wrote such fundamentally important songs as ‘This Land Is Your Land’ and ‘Deportee.’

Elements of country music carry on the Woody Guthrie tradition. Its roots were in white trash communities, with artists such Johnny Cash, who recorded the album Folsom Prison in Folsom Prison, and Kris Kristofferson who released albums such as Third World Warrior, carrying on the tradition of protest.

Reggae, a second cousin of blues and r & b, is an inherently political music, a rich and deep voice of the poor and oppressed of Jamaica, with Bob Marley & The Wailers releasing albums such as African Herbsman, Burning Spear releasing Marcus Garvey and so on.

What will the Seventies be remembered for? Punk was a bit of a swindle, but at the same time there is little doubt that it tapped into a great anger and antipathy towards the establishment. Johnny Rotten was serious. So were The Clash. Meanwhile, in America, Neil Young kept the flame of protest burning with songs such as ‘Ohio:’ “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/Four dead in Ohio,” and ‘Zuma,’ a song about the brutal conquest of the Americas by the Spanish. And Bruce Springsteen managed to articulate better than most the sense of working class drudgery and the search for Friday night thrills, on albums like Darkness On The Edge Of Town.

From punk to British Ska – tipping its hat big-time to the Jamaican original – groups like The Specials were trying to make some sort of sense out of the fucked-up and truly depressive early Eighties. That anger seemed to disappear quickly, though, with the mid-Eighties being void, except for the faithful few like Killing Joke, who still believed that there were important things to be sung.

Then came Public Enemy and rap. (Of course, before PE was Grandmaster Flash and that definitive song of the ghetto, ‘The Message’.) They exploded for many reasons, one of them being that they were actually saying something in a music industry that was on a sugar drip. Chuck D was a prophet of rage, rapping the positive: “Small chance a smart brother’s/Gonna be a victim of his own circumstance.” There was KRS One from Boogie Down Productions who on songs like ‘Why Is That’, traced the genealogy of Jesus, insisting that he was black.

Ice T might to some represent the ugly, woman-hating side of rap. While it very much exists, and while Ice T often plays up to that kind of dull-witted audience, he has shown a masterful muse on songs like ‘Escape From The Killing Fields:’ “No one wants to live in an urban war/You live there ‘cause your parents were poor/They live there ‘cause theirs was also/Get yourself together/Hit the gates bro!”

Although Irish pop is as dumb as it comes when it comes to politics, Irish folk is often quite the opposite. Shane MacGowan and The Pogues showed that you can mix politics, craic and whiskey and stew up some of the wildest, most rousing and heart-warming music you are ever likely to hear. Yes, Irish folk is full of stories of rebellion, emigration, gaol, starvation and deportation. Its best artists, such as Christy Moore and Jimmy McCarthy, more than entertain; they craft songs which resonate deeply in the Irish psyche.

Politics and music have always mixed. In fact, looking at it from another angle, the most innocuous music has probably the most dirty business politics behind it. Yeah, sure, a song won’t change the world, but even if it helps change someone’s mind, then that in itself is a noble and worthwhile achievement.

There is a great project in which we can all participate: the creation of a truly just, egalitarian society. Crucial to that is turning the tide on the exploitation of developing countries by those rich countries of the North who currently hold the reins of power.

It is up to musicians to provide the soundtrack to that revolution. Starting from now . . .