Political expression in popular music is still alive if a little unwell in places

In western liberal democracies, it has become something of a journalistic cliché to characterise the relationship between popular music and politics as an often difficult and unhappy one. To be sure, there are many sound reasons as to why recording artists may be sufficiently convinced that politics and music simply don’t mix.

With the recording industry in a seemingly terminal downward spiral of decreasing sales, many artists may be increasingly reluctant to take the commercial risks that are often associated with on-record politicisation. Put another way, appropriating some form of politics can carry with it the potential to alienate certain sections of existing artist fan bases or even prospective fans. This is to say nothing of the unease that many artists may feel about being perceived as preachy or obtuse if they decide to express themselves politically. Thus, for some of the most successful artists of the early 21st century, politics only features as an aside to their recorded output in various forms of activism.

Scores of today’s most successful artists are more than willing to put in a live performance or public appearance for live earth, live aid, trade justice or anti-racist campaign events (delete as appropriate), even when these issues are rarely if ever the subject matter or inspiration for their recorded material. Likewise, this activism often concerns relatively ‘safe’ uncontroversial issues. Many contemporary artists have at least nominally supported campaigns to stop the spread of aids in Africa – a worthy cause that few would disagree with on principle.

This hesitant relationship between popular music and political expression contrasts with those 20th century artists that were perhaps more willing to directly address matters of social and political significance in their music. Kanye West’s records seem downright apolitical up against the likes of Public Enemy or N.W.A, whilst Coldplay certainly aren’t in any danger of releasing anything with the sort of political import of say, Dylan’s Masters of War. And yet, although the protest song may be on its last legs, a less visceral form of politics centred on the individual and identity seems to have taken its place. Jay-Z, like many of his peers, provides an interesting example.

Until recently, the superstar rapper was reluctant to ‘do politics’ directly, yet the lyrical messages throughout much of his back-catalogue are dedicated to his experiences making ends meet as a socially disadvantaged, young, black American. Many of his records are also closely wedded to the most traditional of American political ideals – that when sufficiently endowed with the necessary talents and work-ethic, the individual can overcome adversity to achieve almost limitless prosperity and success. In short, much of Jay-Z’s recorded output is loaded with the identity politics of American capitalist individualism.

As a rule of thumb, contemporary hip-hop artists have approached politics far more intelligently than the torrent of ‘landfill indie’ bands that currently populate the UK charts. The Enemy’s new album Music for the People highlights the poor state of mainstream guitar music, both in general and where meaningful political expression is concerned. The album is replete with the most hackneyed references to the 2003 Iraq war and post-Thatcher Britain. Lines like, ‘this is the 51st state/oil drums/but were still paying at the pump', are some of the more cringeworthy that the album has to offer, and, when taken together, must rank as one of the most tame and wrong-headed objections to the Iraq war that has ever been mustered. In some bizarre fit of Daily Mail-esque logic, the band have obviously sought to concern themselves with the way in which the war failed to yield reductions in the price of petrol, thereby somewhat overlooking the death of over 90,000 Iraqi civilians and 179 British service personnel.

Adolescence: recalling early noughties nu-metal.

Whenever the 90’s are invoked, the spectre of so called ‘Britpop’ (or worse still, ‘Cool Britannia’) hangs over the entire decade. In the early 21st century, we are still living with the vestiges of 90’s Britpop – this year alone, the record buying public have been subjected to yet another Oasis studio album that summarily fails to reach the songwriting zenith of ‘(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?'

Rather than revisiting the now cringeworthy ‘Oasis v.s. Blur’ battles, the foolhardy associations with the emergence of New Labour, or any other supposedly seminal moment in what was a period of often desperate and self-congratulatory attempts to forge a new ‘golden era’ of British pop; this post is dedicated to the wave of ‘nu-metal’ in the late 90’s and early noughties that marked my adolescence.

Nu-metal bands – the likes of Korn, Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach and Slipknot – beat a path to success by effectively tapping into, if not ruthlessly preying upon, the emotional vulnerability of angsty teens. These bands were a slightly more hard-edged and downbeat prototype for today’s legion of emo bands. In recent years, the enormous commercial success of My Chemical Romance – who have successfully converted nearly all the pocket money of the young and emotionally fragile into boosting their record sales – owes much to nu-metal artists having done the initial legwork.

In their heyday of the early noughties, Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach were the most prominent examples of resoundingly dumb, alpha-male nu-metal makers, with big lumbering down-tuned riffs and a dreadfully embarrassing habit of trying to emulate their favourite rap stars. These bands exuded bone-headed vitriol, penning lyrics about anger, violence and generally ‘not giving a fuck’, yet the brash simplicity of the music and its lyrical messages were central to the widespread appeal of nu-metal. If you ever felt inexplicably pissed off as a young hormonally charged teen, nu-metal seemed like appropriate mood music.

The idea that nu-metal provided a truly effective artistic outlet for a supposedly disaffected, angry and unstable younger generation is one that many nu-metal acts readily bought into. Many appeared to firmly believe that their music truly spoke to their fans. Slipknot, for instance, came to affectionately refer to their fans as ‘maggots’ that ‘feed’ off the aggression and self-described ‘sickness’ of their music.

Although many nu-metal artists willingly claimed that their music resonated profoundly with the younger generation, they absolutely failed to channel the youthful angst of their fans into anything other than increased record sales. Without any sort of resistance, nu-metal artists accepted a negative stereotype of an allegedly nihilistic and uniquely apathetic generation, and set about effectively exploiting it for commercial ends. In retrospect, perhaps this is one of the most faithful expressions of teen angst that pop culture can muster in modern western societies – after all, nu-metal, like so much teen angst, was at once short-lived, obsessively image conscious and ultimately vacuous.

N.B. The biggest dunderhead of the nu-metal bunch would have to be Fred Durst, who gave us the lyric, 'I hope you know I pack a chainsaw, I'll skin your ass raw!'

Revisiting Late 90’s Hip-Hop

The enormous success of Eminem’s 1999 Slim Shady LP and its attendant slew of singles, all of which Dr.Dre produced, had the knock-on effect of making Dre’s 2001 (ironically released in 1999) familiar to many new white teenage rap fans. Both records were particularly popular with certain groups of kids at school around the time I purchased my first album (Nevermind by Nirvana, see previous post), yet I didn’t own either of them. The fact that 2001 came with the coveted ‘parental advisory’ sticker, seeing as it was packed with plenty of expletives and references to both drugs and sex, made it a popular choice with many approaching their mid-teens. The sizeable glowing ganja leaf emblazoned across the album sleeve and the CD label, might also have had something to do with the appeal of this record to late 90's and early noughties teens.

Compton, Los Angeles, is a long way both geographically and culturally from the rural town of Garstang in north-west England (where I attended secondary school until finishing my GCSE's), and nobody really fully understood or related to the record’s tales of a triumphant gangster come hip-hop producer. In retrospect, the trouble with 2001 is that it seems a bit forced. When it was released, Dre was a particularly wealthy 34 year-old who was happily married with several kids – a far cry from the aggressive bad-boy gangster image he was working so hard to project. Successfully cultivating a controversial media image, however far removed from reality, probably made this record one of the most memorable for those growing up in the late 90’s and early noughties.

90’s Nostalgia - my first record purchase (album)

My first album purchase - Nirvana’s 1991 classic Nevermind - was a significant improvement on Will 2k (my first single, see previous post). It was early 2001 by the time I bought this record - nearly a full decade after its original release date - and not long before my 15th birthday. By this time, most of my friends at school had started listening to a blend of early 90’s grunge and late 90’s nu-metal, and my initial preference for the slightly softer sound of grunge led me to purchase Nevermind.

‘Mosher music’ was the unflattering label given to grunge and nu-metal by the unconverted, which had more than a kernel of truth to it. The very expectation that the kind of people who listened to the likes of Nirvana would automatically jump around uncontrollably on hearing their music, made it attractive to any teenagers wanting to appear slightly edgy and cool. Put another way, besides the accumulated wisdom that Nevermind is a brilliantly dark pop record (a view which I wholeheartedly agree with), the lure of Nirvana’s music was found in what it said about you.

Although Kurt Cobain would almost undoubtedly turn in his grave at my typing those last few words, the music we like often has as much to do with our own sense of identity as it does the quality of the music itself. In the intervening years between Nevermind’s initial release and its gracing my ears (and those of my peers), Nirvana had come to be seen as sufficiently alternative so as not to be considered painfully mainstream, yet not so alternative as to be thought of as downright offensive.

By becoming a fan of grunge and later nu-metal, I was effectively ensuring that my musical tastes wouldn't make me a complete social outcast at school, whilst also guarding against the possibility of being lumped in with what was considered the ‘townie’ or ‘trendy’ demographic of the majority. Although my decision to purchase Nevermind and become a Nirvana fan was hardly as calculated as the preceding analysis implies, with hindsight, it seems clearer that it was partly a function of how I wished to be seen by my contemporaries, and which social groupings I wanted to be part of at school.



If you've ever wondered what happened to the baby on the album sleeve of Nevermind, click here.

90’s Nostalgia - my first record purchase (single)

Will 2K by Will Smith (a.k.a 'Big Will' or 'Big Willy Style') was the first single I purchased on my own dime, at the tender age of 13 in the winter of ’99. In essence, this record is a piss-poor cover version of The Clash’s Rock the Casbah, and it only further cemented Smith’s reputation as one of the worst rappers of the 90’s. Of course, at the time, I thought it was unspeakably cool. Smith was at the pinnacle of his 90’s fame following his roles in the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Independence Day, Men in Black, and, dare I mention it, the Wild Wild West, where he had often combined record releases with his output as an actor. I’d recently acquired a hand-me-down hi-fi from my elder sister and I would put the single on in my room, and proceed to gallivant around the house whilst singing along to it.

If any of the preposterous millennium-bug theories had materialised, I would have died happy, singing the chorus ‘it’s here and I like it....’ right before being crushed by a 747 falling out of the sky. With hindsight, the re-release of Prince’s 1999 would have been a marginally better purchase, especially seeing as it needed some sales to beat Will 2K to the top spot in the UK charts. Prince, however, was disgraced in the late 90’s after his changing-himself-into-a-symbol phase and Will Smith was a rising Hollywood action hero who could also rap a bit – there was no difficulty in deciding who was the coolest from the perspective of a 13 year-old boy.

The fact that this record was released to coincide with the dawn of the new millennium (or 'Willenium' as 'Big Will' liked to call it) - making me 13 years of age on purchasing it - probably makes me a late comer to the record-buying experience when compared to my peers. Up until that point, I had relied on the incremental trickle-down of music from my immediate family, and I clearly couldn’t be trusted with money in a record shop when I’d opted for the likes of Will 2K.

If you can, please take the time to remember Will Smith's only truly brilliant couple of minutes as a recording artist with Quincy Jones on production, by clicking here.

This collaboration with Jazzy Jeff is also something of a 90's pop gem amongst Smith's largely dire back catalogue of family-friendly rap tunes.

90’s Nostalgia – Was Whigfield a Satanist?

On the topic of 90's nostalgia, this post briefly highlights an unlikely discovery that was recently brought to my attention concerning the video for Whigfield's 1994 hit 'Saturday Night'. Whilst sat around in a friend's living room for a small get-together earlier this summer, said video appeared on the T.V. switched to some crappy freeview music channel. Mid-sentence, my friend Will suddenly stopped and announced that he had caught a glimpse of a horned beast amidst shots of Whigfield singing into a hair-dryer.

Although my initial reaction was to slowly inch away from him in the fear that he might be going all Linda Blair on us - sure enough, in the video Whigfield appears to be engaged in an act of idolatry with a picture of a man made to look like the devil. The following are mostly single frame shots that pop-up in the video. When seen together, they arguably convey a subliminal message of devil-worship.

Obviously, I felt compulsed to share this strange and wonderful bit of 90’s music trivia.