Three or four glasses of wine into the set, Matt Berninger declared, ""This one's for the swing states.""
Earlier that evening, Berninger's band, The National, played at a rally for President Barack Obama. Two years ago, the band's song ""Fake Empire"" was featured in Obama's predominant campaign video. Earlier that year, the band designed a T-shirt with Obama's face above the words ""Mr. November""—a clear play on both the November election and the National's song of the same name. The National weren't the only ones—they shared the stage Tuesday with Ben Harper and Mama Digdown's Brass Band, and were one of several bands that designed T-shirts to support Obama's presidential campaign—but that's the whole idea. Somewhere between Is This It and Living With the Living, more and more musicians started throwing their hats in the political ring. Ultimately, it leaves us with two big questions: Does it matter? Should it?
P. Diddy, Mary J. Blige, The Foo Fighters—file these under: well-known artists who tried and failed to accomplish anything in the 2004 presidential election. That didn't dissuade bands like No Age and Conor Oberst from coming out in support of Obama in 2008, though that seemed more indicative of a generation's surging involvement than a musical revolution. But bands are still at it. Case in point: The Sound Strike.
The Sound Strike was organized this past summer in opposition to the proposed immigration reform legislation in Arizona. Hundreds of artists, from Rodrigo y Gabriela to Kanye West, have signed the petition.
All of these bands signed onto the strike have agreed to boycott the state of Arizona so long as they continue to promote inhumane discrimination, and the state has since reconsidered its stance, if only slightly.
But even a non-partisan observer can easily see the flaws in the boycott. Frankly, Gov. Jan
Brewer doesn't care if Yeasayer plays a rock 'n' roll show in Phoenix. The Sound Strike is doing little more than denying local venues income while also taking a very hands-off approach to the grassroots uprising that overturning such legislation would require. Simply put, The Sound Strike is doing very little help to anyone, and is currently benefiting from internal political struggle.
It's a pretty short-sighted agenda, and it again begs the question: Should we really listen to these guys?
Probably not.
There's a reason bands like Anti-Flag and post-2004 Green Day have a hard time resonating with higher-educated audiences: None of us feel like getting preached at. We all construct individual political paradigms based on our experiences. Politics are very personal, and we group ourselves along party lines simply to reconcile the infinite discrepancies. That's why it comes off so hollow and off-putting when Billy Joe Armstrong tells us what to think—he has no idea who we are. We don't need bands to lobby for our votes–rather, we need bands to help us figure out why we need to vote. We don't need to hear what to do–we need to hear why. We need bands that say something unique that we can adapt into our own personal paradigms.
At no point during their show at the Orpheum Tuesday night did The National lecture the crowd about political responsibility or activism, and even their dedication to swing states would have been non-partisan had we not known of their previous affiliation with Obama. Likewise, when Berninger sings in ""Mr. November,"" ""I wish I didn't sleep so late / I wish that I believed in fate,"" it can have as much political resonance as when he repeats, ""I'm Mr. November / I won't fuck us
over."" He's not actually talking about politics, but he's making us talk. That's the whole point.
