I’ve been writing a lot about musicians endorsing political candidates, there is something about it that sticks in my craw, it just seems to me as if there is something fundamentally wrong about a pop music, about youth music, becoming so embodied in the mainstream that it is endorsing Presidents.
Even some sort of self serving condensed concept of rebellion is trashed when rock and politics gets it bed together. I am not saying rock and roll,or hip hop, or any sort of current youth music need to be the up against agit prop of late 1970s Rock Against Racism. For one reason, there is no real reason for it.
But getting in bed with politicians? Yuck. Better to be caught in bed with two hookers and two groupies and various crstachans than be caught in bed with a politician. I am not exaggerating the horribleness of these guysm they are biggest bunch of lying, thieving neerdowells in the world. All of them, always.
Always? Well, maybe not always. Since, say, 500 BC. If you ehave ever read Claude Levi Strausse’s “Trististe Tropique”, possibly the great book ever written about politicians, you will know that the earliest human tribes had politicians, people who chose to SERVE their fellow man. The head of the tribe, woted by the tribe, was responsible for neotiating with other tribes but was also expected to give any gifts he received back to the community, was supposed to go out and look for food for the tribe when there was no food. Was, again, a servant to the people. This is a concept served solely by lip service in not modern, well from Ancient Greece and going forward politics.
A politicians job is to get re-elected. That’s it. That’s all It isn’t even the weilding of power that matters any more, it is just the doing of the job and the job is to be reelected. And that’s slimey but fine even when politicians lead nations into war for the sole purpose of being reelected.
I am guessing you know all of this but if you know it why don’t rock stars know it. Why don’t they see it as the breach of trust between musician and fan to lend their moral dignity to the moral hustle of elected politicians. At the very least, surely a life in the arts implies a life nore dignified then the bashing self-nterest gainst the greater needs of our fellow man. Did you read Mikal Gilmore’s interview with Dylan in Rolling Stone, where Gilmore tried to get Dylan to support Obama? Dylan treated the question with withering contempt: "He loves music. He's personable. He dresses good. What the fuck do you want me to say?"
That is how great men deal with party politics. They don’t endorse them for fuck’s sake.