In a recent session at the Sydney Writer’s festival, Don Walker – lyricist extraordinaire and now author of the excellent, stream of consciousness collection of memories ‘Shots’ spoke of rock as something that should be ‘undiluted by politics’. He explained this no further and I imagine he meant that politics robs music of its primal, visceral power to move and excite.
I disagree, I’d defy anyone to sit still through, say, Rage Against the Machine belting out ‘Killing in the Name Of’ with an audience of thousands chanting ‘fuck you I won’t do what you tell me’. Closer to home, up and coming Australian band Mammal drives capacity crowds of sweaty punters into a frenzy with a potent mix of sex drenched driving funk, blistering guitar-shredding metal and a strident, at times blunt force, political message. No doubt in my mind, politics and rock can and do mix to powerful effect…
No-one could call Cold Chisel a political rock band – and in that sense I guess Don was within his rights to disavow politics as part of music. But there is another politics at play that underlies the party political and which is used to manipulate, wedge and dog-whistle us. The politics of the personal – an individual’s place in the world and the relationship each of us has with the power structures in which we live. How we reel in shock when personal politics – in particular those of the alienated, brutalised and marginalised – spill or coalesce into tragic action such as murder, suicide, or more widely terrorism, revolution or revolt… how quick we are to blame… yet how seldom we walk in the shoes of another.
Here, in my opinion, Don is being somewhat obtuse with respect to his own work – for his lyrics express the Australian working class view of the world. Set these lyrics to music that is anthemic in its simplicity and you have the reason why Chisel are still revered (and sung along to) in every pub in every suburb and country town in Australia. Like all good lyricists, he puts the listener in the place of his protagonist.. gives us a fleeting moment of shared experience.. ‘Four walls, washbasin, prison bed’, ‘Standing on the outside, looking in’, the escapee from the stultifying small town in ‘Flame Trees’, the truck driver in ‘Shipping Steel’, the powerless suburban blokes in ‘Star Hotel’ here lies a local culture, Most nights were good, some were bad. Between school and a shifting future. It was most of all we had.
Billy Bragg, for all the wonderful call to arms songs he has written is, I feel, at his best addressing politics obliquely from the point of view of the (again) working class, suburban individual… you can picture his characters, where they live, what they wear.. In ‘Greetings to the New Brunette’, his bloke … celebrating my love for you with a pint of beer and a new tattoo, wallows, confused by his pregnant lover’s sexual politics.. out of his depth & out of her social class, eventually leaving her alone with the new baby. The lonely woman in her mobile home listening to the 4 Tops in ‘Levi Stubbs Tears’… who ran away from home in her mother’s best coat and married before she even entitled to vote and a victim of domestic violence,he put a hole in her body where no hole should be .. For anyone with a shred of empathy its songs like these that drive home just where we should be focussing ourselves politically and what the real goal of politics should be: empowering the individual, building communities & networks, ensuring education and equality of opportunity, offering safe havens to people at risk.
Go back to 1992, 30 years after Nixon started the unwinnable War on Drugs & 10 years before the Uniting Church finally opened its safe injecting room in Kings Cross over continuing howls of protest. Listen again to Alice in Chains’ prophetic ‘Dirt’, the self loathing & anger of the addict battling not only his own demons but those around him who seek to drag him down and a society which spurns him as a criminal yet uses him as a pawn in the power games & funding wars between federal and local politicians, the justice system and those who grow fat on the profits of drug trafficking or from warehousing prisoners in jails full of drug users and dealers.
Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon’s angry, alienated poor white boy in 1977 looking for a white riot, a riot of my own… wanting a reason to smash windows like the black rioters at Notting Hill, feeling solidarity with another group on the fringes united against a racist police force and unfeeling Government & yet unable to express his anger in any way other than violence.. a view to Brixton in 1981 and the Poll Tax riots of 1990.; Steve Earle’s portrayal of the American Taliban John Walker Lindh raised on MTV & his disastrous search for some meaning & light in his life; Kurt Cobain’s ‘Lithium’; NWA spitting out the anger of the black teenager in ‘Fuck tha Police’.. to deaf ears.. pre-empting the LA Riots 3 years later; John Schumann’s heartbreaking country boy proudly marching off to Vietnam as his family watches, returning home haunted and broken to become perhaps the bitter drifter of Walker’s iconic ‘Khe Sanh’..and of course Archie Roach telling his own and Australia’s devastating story in ‘Took the Children Away’.
I could, of course, go on and on.. My point? Like great literature, journalism and documentary.. but shorter and with music you can sing along to, great songwriting can open doors to understanding and bring our focus back to the real reasons we should continue to vote, care, fight and stand up and be counted… the only politics that count in the end, the politics of the personal.
