As the French discovered a coupla centuries ago, you can’t have a society without a middle class, you can’t just have rich and poor, and the States, against all odds, has a society with a seriously weakened Middle Class. If we have another recession and the middle class fall apart, well that will be it for American society as we know it, the nearly 250 year experiment will be over and we can all roll up our tents and go home folks, there is nothing to see here.
You can hear it happening in the streets now, it is starting with the black communities because they have it worse but it is encroaching on all sides and it will engulf us all sooner or later. There will be music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air.
Or will there? The soundtrack to this year’s round of black protests has been gangsta rap, and you have to wonder: how can such a me first universe of sound stand in for the multitudes? Is that what our black protesters want? To fuck hos and hustle crack rock. Even our most political astute (I mean among the rappers with an actual audience), Kendrick Lamar, are all me first. He may be great but “The Blacker The Berry”, surely the best response to the protests, is seen through Lamar’s self-referential prism. “I’ve felt this way since I was 16” is the giveaway.
Plus, anyway, everyone is variant dig wagglers. Some of it is great as sound and lyric, but it isn’t “Power To the People”.
It is not UK Punk. In 1976, kids in London would never have a job in their entire lifetime, talk about no future, they lived on government assistance and were the flowers in the rubbish and they rebelled through music. UK Punk was about what was happening that was causing them to do what they were doing, and musically, it dusted everything that came before it. in retrospect, compared to the big multi-track to infinity great pop moment 2015, the likes of ELP were just overeager, at the time they were the anti-Christ antithesis of rock and roll and took it back for maybe 20 years or so, say till Cobain croaked.
But music has fallen into the background of peoples lives and if and when the middle class whites realize how badly they are being fucked over, how all they will do is work and die within a tiny spectrum, like their UK counterparts in 1976 and their current black counterparts, they will get very upset.
But what part would there be to a return to UK Punk, or any punk, there is tons of punk bands, tons of hardcore to subcore, the music never really went away, what went away was the social implications in a world where nobody could care less. Say whatever you want, go ahead, nobody gives a damn. Nobody is listening.
So for Black America, the soundtrack was me first gangsta rap, and for white America, there wasn’t one. How can Hov or Muse or Bruce, any of these guys, be the music to a revolution: they don’t connect strongly enough to a groundswell. There is no musical movement to echo or explain, there is no us and them to music, if it is them they are part of the 1% and if it is us, we aren’t listening.
It might be sound good but the thing about agitprop, about the politics of pop is that if it isn’t reaching its audience, it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference. Can you imagine the anti-Vietnam demonstrations without music? can you imagine a war against the mass theft from the American public (all that blowback to the banks in 2009) with a soundtrack? Do you think you can argue wealth distribution to “Blank Space” or “Holy Grail” or “Believe”? Who would they influence and who would they be speaking t?
The truth is, once the revolution comes it will be every man for himself and God against all… Especially Musically.