Silly Love Songs and the Occasional Politics of Popular Music

Just trying hard to blend in, are we? Hardly.

Silly Love Songs and the Occasional Politics of Popular Music

© 2009 Craig Chereek, all rights reserved

Each of The Beatles brought their own contributions critical to the band’s identity. Paul McCartney made them melodic and emotionally available, George Harrison made them deep, clever and true, Ringo made them everyman, fun, and danceable, but it was the words of John Lennon that made the Beatles vitally important, critical even. It is indisputable that the culture and the time would have been much different without them.

WE would be.

In hindsight, whether you agreed or not, his politics were consistent and compelling. But lot’s of people’s are, and even if you ever learn of them, you are unlikely to pay their views any mind. Why were John’s views different? Why did they have such an impact? He sang of Revolution, but that’s hardly revolutionary. I submit it was because he was outrageous on purpose. What that purpose was may not have been clear even to him, but we can hear the echoes of its consequences today, far beyond the music.

He was outrageous enough to make you listen to him, almost as much as to keep himself entertained in what he surely must have found to be a very square world. When he said the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus,” he may have been decrying the fall from popular focus of the humanism Jesus symbolized, he may have been crowing like a rooster, he may have been poking fun at how the members of a mere musical group could be sought out for their serious opinions on current events and what world leaders were saying. He may have been doing all three, but with that single sentence he doubled the number of people who would recognize his name the next time they heard it, and he ensured that each would at least consider his next quote, if only to find fault. It may have been unintentional, but it hardly matters, the effect was the same either way.

In a matter of months, The Beatles had re-inserted a hip populism back into popular music that, for the most part, had just recently been re-excluded from the cultural vernacular. The steady produce coming from the radio at the time rattled NO cages. “A Do Run Run” is not an attack on anybody, and is unlikely to change the human condition very much. “Up on the Roof” is just what it was designed to be: catchy and comfortable. Although few songs are more pop-perfect, I submit musical lyrics have a higher purpose, a catalytic social function that only lyrics can perform as well.

Whether it be to answer a call to arms, or to support Andrew Jackson’s latest political campaign, beginning in America no later than “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, the lyrical call to do the honorable thing is an old tradition. The protest lyric has long been been one of the truest arrows in the progressive quiver, and from Stephen Foster through Henry Rollins, has long shaped public debate. But only in spurts, as the emergence of protest music inevitably provokes a swift reaction from those at whom the protest is aimed, usually the rich and powerful.

By following the repeated rise and fall of protest lyrics, we can see the cycle of populism/and what could be called “depopulism” through the popular music that has grown in its strength to shape the American consciousness ever since since the player piano gave way to radio. But the peoples music, local and regional traditional music, was at first left out as unfit for high minds, and so the ancient populist lament of the unfairness of the many suffering for the enrichment of the few has been disproportionately under-represented in early popular music, that is, codified and packaged music.

The first tape recording of the American populist view was but an academic exercise intended to save American folk music for posterity at a time when the smart people selling packaged music wouldn’t touch its subjects with a stick. William Jennings Bryant’s failed campaign and Teddy Roosevelt’s failed Bull Moose Presidential bid had left smoking craters in the populist movement within living memory, that battle had been fierce, and the folk music and the blues that had produced its anthems were thought to be endangered species, surely to pass from the stage when it’s current, ear-trained practitioners passed on. When Alan Lomax was first taping American blues, it was in the same spirit that impelled museums to send expeditions out looking for the last Dodo.

For the lyrical content was not the focus of the effort to collect the songs, it was more of an anthropological study, focused on the songs only as artifacts of a passing people, much like creation myths, baskets or pottery. An earlier collection called “The Child Ballads,” provided the model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Ballads).

There are no protest songs in Big Band music, whose lyrical message was crafted to be innocuous if not non-existent, nor in the music of it’s immediate successor, be-bop jazz, and so it was despite the lyrics that America’s native hill and flatland folk music first came to market as a novelty at a time when big bands ruled the airwaves and the charts.

To the amazement of most, America loved it. Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives and The Weavers adopted the forms to write new songs, and ascended the Monday through Saturday pulpit for the small farmer, the working man, the poor, and the dispossessed.

But folk music, which is by definition protest music, is most definitely not the music of the rich, it is their unsworn enemy, and the rich recognized it quickly. Networks, record companies and radio stations were even then rarely owned by the poor. NBC worked very hard to drive protest down with Mitch Miller and his ilk, CBS tried to beat it to death first with Arthur Godfrey (who outsmarted them), and then with Art Linkletter and his like, but it kept coming back to life, like all necessary things. The message from the media was, what could you possibly have to protest? You have televisions, soap operas, comedies, game shows, and Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, don’t you? Just leave the big questions to the Big People, and you’ll be fine. Though it has served them poorly, it is a message the rich have been loathe to abandon. Perhaps they believe it, but we who are not, know better.

Every time protest came back into the lyrics, as in the earliest rockabilly of Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley, the protest was tediously pared back by its marketers to mere romantic hedonism. “Rhythm and Blues” became acceptable only once pared of it’s class-consciousness, Rock and roll was only tolerated once  shorn of its race-consciousness.

Yet protest came back, with the folk revival of the ’60′s But by now the media knew it’s playbook well.

Surf songs, especially the instrumentals, were the bullets fired back by the American media moguls. In England, the label that released The Beatles had no idea they weren’t doing more of the same. Cute lads, happy harmonies, love songs: bread and circuses. When John’s lyrics turned them out to be secret populists and unrepentant utopians, a “harmless” version of the same was inevitable, and so we get the identical formula repeated over and over but without any lyrical protest, hence Herman and the Hermits (sorry Peter), Chad and Jeremy, The Dave Clark Five, Peter and Gordon, and The Monkees. There is the carrot of great wealth (and American visas) to dangle, and then even the Rolling Stones suddenly abandoned Muddy Waters for: you guessed it, a romantic hedonism.

Rock and Roll has learned it’s lessons well, too, so plain speech in protest music is being abandoned for the double-entendre. The lyrics of Bono are not as provocative on their face as his spoken vision, while even classic 60′s  stations make a religion of romantic hedonism, and stay the hell away from protest music. Janis Joplin is fine, Country Joe and the Fish are evidently not.There are no private radio stations anymore, concentrated wealth has lobbied the FCC effectively to price Ma and Pa broadcasters completely out of the market. If your songs are not picked for one of the three big media holding companies’ playlists, you are not played over the air anywhere, they control them all.

Artists like Michael Jackson or Brittany Spears can wear, say, snort, drink, screw or do anything but sing a protest lyric, and their albums will be promoted to be pre-release platinum. That means they have shipped a million copies of their album before anyone outside the label has even heard it. Why? First, because they are incredibly gifted entertainers, and second, because their lyrics have been  found politically acceptable. There are only so many minutes on the playlist, this is a “must play,” and gee, that’s funny, there’s no room here for anything else. Funny how that works. How many artists have made the transition from “Indie” to “Big Time” since the FCC has relaxed it’s rules on media consolidation?

Protest can never be prevented, but it can be diluted, and it can be discouraged. There is a pattern here. It was the love songs of Joan Baez that got the heavy rotation, a tiny part of her repertoire. Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay,” a love song, got heavy promotion, his “Everything is Broken” received little. The Paul McCartney’s get knighthoods and the John Lennon’s get shot. Gangsta Rapper Ice T (“Cop Killer”) tones down his tune, moves uptown and gets a recurring role on Law and Order, Tupac Shakur gets shot. Marvin Gaye could get play for his protest lyrics only after a decade of the Supremes’ love songs opened the door for him to FIRST become a star with his love songs. And then he was shot. In modern lyrics, anybody, anything and everything can be debased, and any sin elevated to a virtue, that is evidently just fine, just don’t threaten concentrated wealth.

And that, Sir Paul, is what’s wrong with silly little love songs: they insulate the status quo.