Well, it's Election Day. I know you've been pestered by people on State Street, on Library Mall; you've probably gotten phone calls and pamphlets and stickers and every opinion column in ever newspaper has been urging you to go out and vote, cast your ballot, etc. And, no surprise, I'm wholeheartedly encouraging you too. Madison tends to be a fairly civic-minded city, so I don't worry about the majority of us, which means I'm basically preaching to the choir here. But, as Aaron Sorkin pointed out, that's how you get them to sing. So go sing.
I thought it would be fun to talk about the relationship between politics and music today, in honor of Nov. 7. I sat down intending to write about Dylan and Baez and Hendrix and Reed and Young and Earle and the whole punk-rock movement and Pete Seeger and Rage Against the Machine and so on and so on and so on... Then I realized that's old news. Everyone knows about leftist leaning musicians—those Hollywood types that espouse crazy fringe beliefs (""War, what is it good for, absolutely nothing""). So I thought to myself, why not pay some attention to the minority? You know: right-wing music. What could be more democratic than lending voice to a minority—because, surely, any conservative musicians must be in the minority. In fact, I thought to myself, could I even think of a conservative musician? And then it occurred to me: I was thinking in the wrong genre. It's not rock or folk or blues or rap—these are genres that are almost intrinsically anti-Establishment. It's country music I'm after! Pro-USA. Pro-""our country""! So I began conducting a search for politically-minded country artists.
When I googled ""politics"" + ""country music"" the first few names that came up were Toby Keith, Clint Black and the Dixie Chicks. Now I knew the Dixie Chicks were lefties—I remembered they were criticized for speaking out against President Bush and Iraq and all that jazz during a concert in England a few years ago. So they were out. But I didn't know much at all about these former characters, so I did some investigating.
The big song every website kept pointing me to was a Toby Keith single from 2002 called ""Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,"" so I gave the lyrics a quick read. Sadly, as an English major, the first thing I noticed was the bizarre rhyme scheme of the chorus, abcadcedff. I spent a good minute and a half trying to analyze for meaning, finally deciding it was probably apolitical. I was sure, though, the lyrics would serve as a great endorsement for conservative principles, but they don't. In fact, there's nothing really political about the song at all. It's just angry—ultimately, I suppose, it less than subtly supports the invasion (and apparently eradication of) Afghanistan following Sept. 11, 2001, which is less political than just rabid, so ...
Try No. 2. Clint Black's ""Iraq and I Roll."" This is another very angry song, now focused on Iraq. And again, I have trouble citing this as conservative. There's no real politics in it—just demagoguery. The gist of it is the United States has to ""take out the garbage"" (Iraq) before Saddam gets us, which, according to the song, he's done before. This song left me more confused than patriotic. Honestly, the most conservative country song I could find was from Merle Haggard—he wrote ""Mama Tried,"" covered many times, most notably by the Grateful Dead, whose 1969 song ""Okie from Muskogee"" criticizes the hippy counterculture. To wit: ""We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee / We don't take our trips on LSD / We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street / We like living right, and being free."" Thomas Paine it ain't, but it makes its point.
So, Democrat, Republican, Independent, Green Party, Marxist, Socialist, Libertarian or Anarchist: Do your civic duty and vote. Then you won't feel so guilty about all the marijuana and LSD.
