Being an activist is hard, but being a musician is crazy!!!

If I Can't Dance.....

An Open Letter to the US Left on the Relevance of Culture


Being an activist is a hard, relatively thankless, generally unpaid job.
There are some really wonderful people who are going to be offended by this
essay, and I apologize in advance if you're one of them, but what I say
here had to be said. We're all hopefully trying to make the world a better
place, and sometimes that means having open disagreements. I welcome any
and all feedback, public or private, and of course feel free to post and
distribute this essay wherever you see fit.

Last weekend I sang at an antiwar protest in downtown Portland, Oregon, on
the fifth anniversary of the ongoing slaughter in Iraq. In both its good
and bad aspects, the event downtown was not unusual. Hard-working, unpaid
activists from various organizations and networks put in long hours
organizing, doing publicity, and sitting through lots of contentious
meetings in the weeks and months leading up to the event. On the day of the
event, different groups set up tents to network with the public and talk
about matters of life and death. There was a stage with talented musicians
of various musical genres performing throughout the day, and a rally with
speakers in
the afternoon, followed by a march. Attendance was pathetically low. In
large part I'm sure this was due to the general sense of discouragement
most people in the US seem to feel about our ability to effect change under
the Bush regime. It was raining especially hard by west coast standards,
and that also didn't help.

The crowd grew to it's peak size during the rally and march, but was almost
nonexistent before the 2 pm rally. There was only a trickle of people
visiting the various tents prior to the rally, and the musicians on the
stage were playing to a largely nonexistent audience. The musical program,
scheduled to happen from 10 am to 6 pm, was being billed as the World War
None Festival. The term festival was contentious, however, and Pdx Peace,
the local peace coalition responsible for the rally, couldn't come to
consensus on using the term festival. In their publicity they referred to
the festival as an action camp. The vast majority of people have no idea
what an action camp is, including me, and I've been actively involved in
the progressive movement for my entire adult life. The local media, of
course, also had no idea what an action camp was, and any publicity that
could have been hoped for from them did not happen. Word did not spread
about the event to any significant degree, at least in part because people
didn't know what they were supposed to be spreading the word about.
Everybody from all political, social, class and ethnic backgrounds knows
what a festival is, but certain elements within Pdx Peace didn't want to
use the term to describe what was quite obviously meant to be a festival
(as well as a rally and march). Anybody above the age of three can tell you
that when you have live music on a stage outdoors all day, that's called a
festival. But not Pdx Peace.

Why? I wasn't at the meetings -- thankfully, I'm just a professional
performer, not an organizer of anything other than my own concert tours, so
I only know second-hand about what was said. There's no need to name the
names of individuals or the smaller groups involved with the coalition in
this case -- the patterns are so common and so well-established that the
names just don't matter. Some people within the peace coalition were of the
opinion that the war in Iraq was too
serious a matter to have a festival connected to it. Because, I imagine, of
some combination of factors including the nature of consensus
decision-making, sectarianism on the part of a few, and
muddled thinking on the part of some others, those who thought that a
festival should happen -- and should be called a festival -- were
overruled. My hat goes off to the World War None Festival organizers (a
largely separate entity from Pdx Peace), and to those within Pdx Peace who
tried and failed to call the festival what it was, and to organize a
well-attended event.

As to those who succeeded in sabotaging the event, I ask, why is so much of
the left in the US so attached to being so dreadfully boring? Why do so
many people on the left apparently have no appreciation for the power and
importance of culture? And when organizers, progressive media and others on
the left do acknowledge culture, why is it usually kept on the sidelines?
What are we trying to accomplish here?

It wasn't always this way. Going back a hundred years, before we had a
significant middle class in this country, before we had a Social Security
system, Worker's Compensation, Medicare, or anything approximating the
actual (not just on paper) right to free speech, when most of the working
class majority in this country were living in utter destitution and
generally working (when they could find work) in extremely dangerous
conditions for extremely long hours, often in jobs that required them to be
itinerant, required them to forego the pleasure of having families that
they might have a chance to see now and then, out of these conditions the
Industrial Workers of the World was born.

The IWW at that time was a huge, militant union that could bring industrial
production in the US to a halt, and on various regional levels, quite
regularly did. It was a multi-ethnic union led by women and men of a wide
variety of backgrounds, from all over the world. It's most well-known
member to this day was a singer-songwriter named Joe Hill, and he was only
one of many of the musician-organizers that constituted both the leadership
and membership of the IWW. While starving, striking, or being attacked by
police on the streets of Seattle, Boston and everywhere in between, the IWW
sang. Their publications were filled with poems, lyrics and cartoons.
Everybody knew the songs and sung them daily. Some of the songs were
instructive, meant to educate workers in effective organizing techniques.
Others were battle cries of resistance, and still others celebrated
victories or lamented defeats. Their cause was nothing short of the
physical survival and spiritual dignity of the working class. They put
their bodies on the line and were often killed and maimed for it, but they
transformed this society profoundly, and they sang the whole way through.
Was their cause serious? As serious as serious can get. And to this day,
multitudes around the world remember the songs of Joe Hill, Ralph Chaplin,
and T-Bone Slim, long after their speeches and pamphlets have been
forgotten. Like many other singer-songwriters throughout the history of the
class war, Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad in 1916. Why? Exactly
because he was so serious -- a serious threat to the robber barons who
ruled this country.

A very different, much more rigidly ideological organization that rose to
prominence during the declining years of the IWW was the Communist Party.
This is an organization whose early years are within the living memory of
close friends of mine, such as my dear friend Bob Steck, who died last year
at the age of 95, and spent most of his life fighting for humanity. I spent
hundreds of hours over the course of many years interrogating Bob about his
life and times (at least ten hours of which are recorded for posterity on
cassettes somewhere). The Communist Party was very different from the IWW
in many ways, but in it's heyday it was also a huge, grassroots movement,
whose leadership and membership took many cards from the IWW's deck,
including their emphasis on the vital importance of culture.

When Bob talked about the CP's orientation with regards to organizing the
revolution in the USA, he said there were three primary components: the
unions, the streets, and the theater. Fighting for the welfare of the
working class by organizing for the eight-hour day and decent wages
(largely through the communist-led Congress of Industrial Organizations,
the CIO), organizing the starving millions in the streets into the unions
of the unemployed, and -- just as importantly -- fighting for the hearts
and minds of the people through music, theater, and art. Among the musical
vanguard of the communist movement of the 1930's were people who are still
household names today for millions of people in the US and around the world
-- Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, to name a few. Traveling
theater companies brought the work of Clifford Odetts and Bertoldt Brecht
to the people, educating and inspiring militant action throughout the US. I
remember Bob describing the audience reaction to one of the early
performances of Waiting for Lefty in New York City, the gasps of excitement
and possibility in the packed theater when the actors on stage shouted
those last lines of the play -- Strike! Strike! Strike! Ten curtain calls
later, everyone in the theater was ready to take to the streets, and did.

Bob and his comrades organized and sang in New York, just as they sang
going into battle in Spain in the first fight against fascism, the one in
which the US was on the side of the fascists. Nothing unusual about that --
soldiers on every side in every war sing as they go into battle, whether
the cause is just or unjust. They and their leadership, whether fascist or
democrat, socialist or anarchist, know that the songs are just as powerful
as the guns (regardless of what Tom Lehrer said). You can't fire if you're
running away, and if you want to stand and fight you have to sing. Talk to
anybody involved with the Civil Rights movement and they'll tell you, if we
weren't singing, we surely would have lost heart and ran in the face of
those hate-filled, racist police and their dogs, guns, and water cannon.
Talk to anyone who lived through the 60s -- who remembers any but the most
eloquent of the speeches by the likes of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or
Mario Savio? But millions remember the songs. Bob Dylan, Buffy
Sainte-Marie, James Brown, Aretha Franklin were the soundtrack to the
struggle. Open any magazine or newspaper in this country to this day and
you will find somewhere in the pages an unaccredited reference to a line in
a Bob
Dylan song. (Try it, it's fun.)

Around the world it's the same. Dedicated leftists may sit through the
speeches of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez, but transcendent poetry of Pablo
Neruda and the enchanting melodies of Silvio Rodriguez cross all political
and class lines. You will have to try hard to find a Spanish-speaking
person anywhere in the Americas who does not love the work of that Cuban
communist, Silvio. You'll have to search hard to find a Latino who does not
have a warm place in their heart for that murdered Chilean
singer-songwriter, Victor Jara.

Talk to any Arab of any background, no matter how despondent they may be
about the state of the Arab world, try to find one whose eyes do not light
up when you merely mention the names Mahmoud Darwish, Marcel Khalife,
Feyrouz, Um Khultum. Try to find anyone in Ireland but the most die-hard
Loyalist who doesn't tear up when listening to the music of Christy Moore,
whatever they think of the IRA. And ask progressives on the streets of the
US today how they came to hold
their political views that led them to take the actions they are now
taking, and as often as not you will hear answers like, I discovered punk
rock, the Clash changed my life, or I went to a concert of
Public Enemy, and that was it.

Music -- and art, poetry, theater -- is powerful (if it's good). The powers
that be know this well. Joe Hill and Victor Jara are only a small fraction
of the musicians killed by the ruling classes for doing what they do. By
the same token, those who run this country (and so many other countries)
know the power of music and art to serve their purposes -- virtually every
product on the shelf in every
store in the US has a jingle to go along with it, and often brilliant
artistic imagery to go along with the jingle, shouting at us from every
billboard and TV commercial. (The ranks of Madison Avenue are filled with
brilliant minds who would rather be doing something more fulfilling with
their creative energy.)

Enter 2008. Knowing the essential power of music, the very industry that
sells us music mass-produced in Nashville and LA has done their best to
kill music. For decades, the few multi-billion-dollar corporations that
control the music business and the commercial airwaves have done their best
to teach us all that music is something to have in the background to
comfort you as you try to get through another mind-numbing day of
meaningless labor in some office building or department store. It's
something to help you seduce someone perhaps, or to help you get over a
breakup. It is not something to inspire thought, action, or feelings of
compassion for humanity (other than for your girlfriend or boyfriend).

There are always exceptions to prove the rule, but by and large, the
writers and performers in Nashville and LA know what they're being paid to
do, and what they're being paid not to do -- if it ever occurred to them to
do anything else in the first place. But even more potently, all those
millions of musicians aspiring to become stars, or at least to make a
living at their craft, know either consciously or implicitly that any hope
of success rides on imitating the garbage that comes out of these music
factories. Of course, there are the many others who write and sing songs
(and create art, plays, screenplays, etc.) out of a need to express
themselves or even out of a desire to make a difference in the world, but
they are systematically kept off of the airwaves, out of the record deals,
relegated largely to the internet, very lucky if they might manage to make
a living at their craft. Fundamentally, though, they are made to feel
marginal, and are looked at by much of society as marginal, novelties,
exotic. Although they are actually the mainstream of the
(non-classical) musical tradition in the US and around the world, although
the kind of music they create has been and is still loved by billions
around the world for centuries, in the current climate, especially in
present-day US society, they are a marginal few.

And no matter how enlightened we would like to think we are, the
progressive movement is part of this society, for good and for ill. Most of
us have swallowed this shallow understanding of what music is. The evidence
is overwhelming. There are, of course, exceptions. Folks like the
organizers of the annual protests outside the gates of Fort Benning,
Georgia -- School of the Americas Watch -- are well aware of the potency of
culture, and use music and art to great effect, inspiring and educating
tens of thousands of participants every November.

On the other end of the spectrum are the ideologically-driven people who
have turned hatred of culture into a sort of art. I have to smile when I
think of the small minority of Islamist wackos who tried to storm the stage
at one rally I sang at in DC in 2002, shouting, No music! No music!
Security for the stage was being provided by the Nation of Islam, who faced
off with this group of Islamists, who ultimately decided that throwing down
with the Jewels of Islam behind the stage that day wasn't in their best
interests, apparently.

But much more prevalent, and therefore much scarier, are groups like the
ANSWER 'Coalition'. (I put coalition in quotes because I have yet to meet a
member of a group that theoretically makes up the coalition that has had
any say in what goes on at their rallies, although the leadership of ANSWER
is of course happy to receive the bus-loads of people that their coalition
members bring to their rallies, which seems to be the only thing that makes
ANSWER a coalition.) ANSWER, last I heard, is run by the ultra-left
sectarian group known as the Worker's World Party, which I strongly suspect
is working for the FBI. (Although as Ward Churchill says, you don't need to
be a cop to do a cop's job.)

Millions of people in the US who regularly go to antiwar protests are
unaware of who is organizing them. They just want to go to an antiwar
protest. ANSWER has become almost synonymous with antiwar protest, to the
extent that many people on the periphery of the left (such as most people
who go to their protests) refer to antiwar protests as ANSWER protests, as
in I went to an ANSWER protest, whether or not the protest was actually
organized by ANSWER. (Just as many
people say I was listening to NPR when they were actually listening to a
community radio station that has nothing to do with NPR, broadcasting
programs such as Democracy Now!, which the vast majority of NPR stations
still will not touch with a ten foot pole.)

I always find it unnerving and intriguing that ANSWER protests always seem
to be mentioned on NPR and broadcast on CSPAN, whereas rallies organized by
the bigger and actual coalition, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ),
almost never manage to make it onto CSPAN or get covered by the corporate
media. ANSWER always seems to get the permits, whereas UFPJ seems to be
systematically denied them. Anyway, I digress (a little). I tend to avoid
anything having to do with ANSWER or the little-known, shadowy Worker's
World Party, but a few years ago I was driving across Tennessee listening
to CSPAN on my satellite radio, and they broadcast the full four hours of
an ANSWER protest in DC. I sat through it because I wanted to hear it from
beginning to end, for research purposes, and Tennessee is a long state to
drive through from west to east, had to do something during that drive.
There was one song in the four-hour rally. Although I've been an active
member of the left for twenty years, I recognized almost none of the names
of the people who spoke at the rally. Every speech was full of boring,
tired rhetoric, as if they were out of a screenplay written by a rightwing
screenwriter who was trying to make a mockery out of leftwing political
rallies. Judging from the names of the organizations involved, very few of
which I recognized either, they were mostly tiny little Worker's World
Party front groups. And since the Worker's World Party apparently doesn't
have any musicians in their pocket, there was no music to speak of. (Or,
quite probably I suspect, they don't want music at their rallies because
they don't want their rallies to be interesting.)

ANSWER is an extreme example, but a big one that most progressives are
unfortunately familiar with, whether they know who ANSWER (or Worker's
World) is or not. Inevitably, most people leave ANSWER protests feeling
vaguely used and demoralized -- aside from those who manage to stay far
enough away from the towers of speakers so they can avoid hearing all the
mindless rhetoric pouring out of them. Contrast the mood with the protests
at the gates of Fort Benning, where most people leave feeling hopeful and
inspired.

I know I have no more hope of influencing the leadership of Worker's World
with this essay than I have of influencing the behavior of the New York
City police department with it. But neither of these organizations are my
target audience. Those who I hope to reach are those who are genuinely
trying to create rallies and other events in the hopes of influencing and
inspiring public opinion, in the hopes of inspiring people to action, in
the hopes of winning allies among the apolitical or even among
conservatives. The people I hope to reach are those who have been
unwittingly influenced by the corporate music industry's implicit
definition of what music and culture is and is not.

And, here we go, I would count among this group most of the hard-working,
loving and compassionate people who are organizing rallies, who are
organizing actions, who are organizing unions, and who are creating
progressive media on the radio, on community television and on the internet
in the US today.

I'd like to pause for a moment to make a disclosure. I am a professional
politically-oriented musician, what the corporate media (and many
progressives) would call a protest singer, though I reject the term. I'm
not sure what, if anything, I have to gain personally by publishing these
thoughts, but I think it behooves me to point out that I am one of the
lucky ones who has performed at rallies and in progressive and mainstream
media for hundreds of thousands of people on a fairly regular basis
throughout the world, and I would like to hope that my words here will not
be understood as Rovics whining that he's not famous enough. I speak here
for culture generally, not for myself as an individual singer-songwriter.

My desire is to reach groups like Pdx Peace and their sister organizations
throughout the country. These are genuinely democratic groups, real
coalitions made up of real people, not sectarian, unaccountable groups like
ANSWER. These are groups, in short, made up of my friends and comrades, but
these are groups also made up of people who grew up in this society and
therefore generally have a lot to learn about the power of culture to
educate and inspire people. It is not good enough to have music on the
stage as people are gathering to rally and as they are leaving to march.
It's not good enough to have a song or two sandwiched in between another
half hour of speeches -- no matter how many organizations want to have
speakers representing them on stage, or whatever other very legitimate
excuses organizers have for making their events, once again, long and
boring (even if they're not as long or as boring as an ANSWER rally). It is
not good enough for wonderful, influential radio/TV shows like Democracy
Now! to have snippets of songs in between their interviews, when only two
or three of those interviews each year are related to culture. It is a
sorry state of affairs that NPR news shows do a better job of covering pop
culture than Pacifica shows do in terms of covering leftwing culture.

The vast majority of the contemporary, very talented, dedicated musicians
represented by, say, the "links" page on www.davidrovics.com, have rarely
or never been invited to sing at a local or national protest rally (even if
some few of us have, many times). The vast majority of progressive
conferences do not even include a concert, or if they do, it's background
music during dinner on Saturday night. I can count on one hand the number
of times I have heard Democracy Now! or Free Speech Radio News mention that
a great leftwing artist is doing a tour of the US. The number of fantastic
musicians out there who have even been played during the station breaks on
Democracy Now! is a tiny fraction of those that are out there -- of the
dozens of musicians featured on my "links" page for example, only a small
handful have even been played once. It is shameful that it's easier to get
a national, mainstream radio show in the UK or Canada to plug a tour of
such a musician than it is to get any national Pacifica program to do this.

Radical culture needs to be fostered and promoted, front and center, not
sidelined as people are gathering, or when the radio stations are doing
station ID's. Because if the point is to inspire people to action, a song
is worth a hundred speeches. If the point is to educate people, a
three-minute ballad is easily equal to any book. (They'll read the book
after they hear the song, not the other way around.)

It is often said that we are in a battle for the hearts and minds of the
people of this country. It is us versus CNN, NPR, Bush, Clinton, etc. In
this battle, style matters, not just content. In this battle, it is
absolutely imperative that we remember that it is not only the minds we
need to win, but the hearts. At least in terms of the various forms of
human communication, there is nothing on Earth more effective in winning
hearts than music and art. We ignore or sideline music and art at our
peril. It's time to listen to the music.