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Originally Posted by demonrail666
Yeah, I should clarify my original post.
I do believe that every action is a political one in so far as it either reinforces or critiques a given 'system'. Whether anyone living in that system can ever properly attack it is a difficult one. Personally I think it can but a flood of theory says I'm wrong.
Whatever I'm saying, it isn't that we need to return to the tub-thumping of red wedge, but rather the way in which culture can be used as a questioner of consensual values. In this sense It's my belief that a group like Public Enemy were more politically useful in their attitude to the language of music than they were lyrically. Any innovation in musical structure or attempt to redefine how music can be produced or distributed is (for me) far more politically useful than seeing a singer on stage with an acoustic guitar bemoaning the war. In this sense, whether he wants to acknowledge it or not, I'd say that someone like Dr Evil is potentially far more political than someone like Chris Martin. Spouting reactionary ideas via a radicalised language is far more useful than spouting supposedly radical ones via a dead one. The Dixie Chicks call into question a particular issue but ultimately uphold the system that allows for it. Dr Evil calls into question that very system simply by existing, it seems to me. Seeing him sing 'More Punnany' on daytime TV would be one of the most radical things in music I can think of right now.
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I've a feeling this is going to get a bit Routledge set*...
I think you're cock-on about the Dixie Chicks being part of the system they're critiquing, but that's an essential tenement of political progress, especially at that mass level - the hegemony of the system is perpetuated by its fluid, amorphous, nameless mass, not by it being the image of the demagogue puppeteering malificiently. The role the Dixie Chicks play is to represent the dissensus within this formless mass, the dissimulation and the re-orientation of the hegemony. It's not a question of political top trumps, but I'd argue that the Dixie Chicks tacitly and likely unconsciously represent a far more powerful movement in America
in general than do, say, the DKs. This statement will necessarily be lost on most here, I'm afraid to say. A caveat - while PE galvanised and awakened political consciousness in a great many black
and white men and women, their ultimate legacy is musical - anyone who was tipped into big-p Political actions by PE would've become a firebrand regardless, PE are the catalyst.
The Pistols speak of being a parody of their political selves (to my mind retroactively). 'Smash the system' is a trope, a narrative, and at this point in history, a staging, a theatrical gesture. The reason why people dislike 'corporate' punk is precisely because it reminds them of this theatrics, it reminds audiences of the suspension of disbelief that accompanies even the smallest scale of punk songs. No-one ever 'smashed the system', the system has no body to smash, it is not brittle and fragile, it doesn't adhere to any such metaphor. The system merely
is, its being formed as an impossible network of organs and byways, intractable and in-negotiable.
*It's a real shame that it's only Herr Rail will get this gag, it's a good one...