Music for America, Live 8 and "The Boss:" Notes on This Thing Called Music and Politics

What difference has music made on politics recently? MFA user purplesea001 (not to be confused with Purple Ocean), raised this question a few days ago in the MFA forums. The question is a nonstarter in some sense - the answer obvious. Music has made a great deal of difference in the past year alone. Everyone has seen the stats on how voting rates increased among our generation. Everyone saw the shift from a generation divided 50/50 in 2000 to one voting progressive 55/45 last November. Thousands of us became involved last year because of political exposure in cultural spaces.

The real question we should be asking here is "How does music have an effect?" With Live 8, a series of mega concerts just around the corner, and some parts of the MFA community itching to "go local," now is the perfect time to explore this question.

Live 8 will be a series of concerts performed around the globe on July 2nd. These concerts, featuring over 100 artists, will all call for an end to world poverty. Specifically, they are a PR program for the anti-poverty movement, and their agenda: to convince the world leaders at the G-8 economic summit in Scotland to double aid and forgive the debts of impoverished nations. Mega-concerts with big-name acts draw lots of media attention and raise awareness around an issue. Especially when they are coupled with a celebrity bracelet campaign, and successfully branded (Live 8 plays on the Live Aid concerts from two decades ago, also organized by Live 8 producer Bob Geldof).

Will it have an effect on the G-8 Summit? I seriously doubt it. With the exhaustive efforts of Bono on behalf of Third-World debt-relief, I think the issues has probably already peaked in popularity, and world leaders already take Bono seriously on the issue. Any relief that comes out of the G-8 summit is likely already decided upon, and a direct result of that work rather than a couple concerts making a ruckus - no matter how big that ruckus is. Either way, if some of Live 8's agenda is ratified, it will be impossible to tell whether it was the result of the concerts or an already existing mood cultivated by Bono's work.

Live Aid, its predecessor, was successful because the project had tangible goals that it could directly accomplish. The concerts were organized to raise awareness and funds to combat famine in Ethiopia. In this, they were successful - raising an estimated 150 million pounds in 1985 - and also similar to a recent marriage of music and politics - Vote for Change.

Vote for Change was hailed as the Music and Politics event of 2004, even though it accounted for less than 1% of the total politically driven music events that year, and probably changed no one's mind about anything. I may step on people's toes here, but I regard Vote for Change as a weird combination of utter failure and great success. Vote for Change succeeded in a task which was never stated as its main goal - raising money for ACT and MoveOn. It failed completely in the taks which it claimed as its main objective - forming a union of populist politics and pop culture that convinced people to vote Democratic.

This outcome was always inevitable based on the way in which the concerts were organized - large shows with very little intimate contact and a range of performers geared more towards people 30 years of age or older. The size of the shows were a problem because the entire event became depersonalized. With no contact with the artists, and little to no contact with anyone to discuss the politics one-on-one, the events became advertisements - an embodiment of broadcast communication just as easily tuned out as the car commericals we skip with our TiVOs. The very size of the concerts distorted their attempted merger of culture and politics into a campaign rally in cultural drag. The choice of artists was equally disruptive of achieving the tour's stated goals. Signing acts like The Boss and James Taylor targted older voters who's patterns of voting were already well established, at the expense of younger voters whos political ideologies haven't calcified and who may not be habitual voters.

Finally, we bring it home, to Music for America. MFA was responsible for 2/3 of all politically conscious music events in 2004. We held over 2,400 shows between Ocotber 2003 and November 2004. In every way, MFA was and is the opposite of Vote for Change and Live 8. Small shows or all-day festivals where intimate contact with local people spreading a political message are what the typical MFA event is all about. It's not about giving up your money, the political work at events are about entering a conversation and a community. Because of MFA's wide reach into small local scenes all over the country, and because our presence is continuous and not confined to one-off concerts at crunch times like Elections or during major economic summits, MFA is able to blend in and become part of the music scene. It achieves a true merger of populist politics and pop culture by making political conversation and participation an enduring cultural phenomenon - a typical part of going to see a show on Saturday night.

The question now, as Alex has asked, is to what end to we motivate these communities? Because without action and without forward movement on issues, the community will either stagnate and never reach its full potential or die. Last year was easy - we had a national election to organize around. Educating people about the ways in which politics affected their lives, and urging them to pay attention and vote were sufficeint messages - on both the local and national levels - in 2004.

This year is more complicated. As I've argued before, we need a national campaign on which it is possible to achieve local victories. Its clear that we need to take the people who join our community at concerts and give them things to do on the ground in their communities. Furthermore, we need to help our members as much as possible and lead them in these projects until they can stand on their own two feet. All of us who have been involved in politics for these last 2 years shouldn't forget how intimidating it can be to start up an organization, even a local chapter, and what a herculean task it can be to effectively organize even 20 or 30 people when you are juggling a job, school, and navigating the political waters for the first time.

And now, to blow your minds (as mine was blown last night at a dinner when a musician I know asked me this question) - what ethical responsibilities do groups like MFA, United for Peace and Justice, MoveOn, ACT, and all the groups who use artists to further political ends have towards the artists and their issues. What responsibilities do we have to support musicians who have been cheated by labels and venues? Who have labor disputes with recording studios and venues? Isn't it our responsibility to show some reciprocity and support artists in their causes, when they are so generous in helping us with ours?

Hipping the Squares: Retooling Democratic Institutions and Using Culture to Reach Young Voters (DRAFT)

2004 was a record year for youth turnout. Everyone has seen the stats – despite efforts by the SCLM to deflate the amazing achievements in youth outreach ((by omissionand outright bad reporting) – but with all the misreporting done by the MSM, it bears repeating. Turnout was up to 51% (from 34%) nationwide, and turnout in swing states reached as high as 64%. It turned out that the Kids were alright in 2004. And that was a big boon to John Kerry (as Joe Trippi noted in the WSJ), it saved his ass from McGovern-esque riducule. Kerry carried young voters by a 10 point margin – a dramatic improvement over Al Gore's split decision with Dubya in 2000 – and the only age demographic to break in favor of the Democrats.

But to say that Kerry carried young voters is misleading. Many of us cast our ballots not for Kerry, but against Bush. Like a page out of the Daily Show playbook, the reigning ethos among our generation was “John Kerry is a douchebag but I'm voting for him anyway.” Democrats carried the kids in 2004 (and I count myself, at 26, in this demographic), but there's no guarantee that they'll stick around. We've got to step up our efforts if we're going to keep them. And we need to – it's more than Kerry's inability to carry his own generation, or the failure of the greatest generation to vote for the greatest good. 1990 witnessed the highest birthrate since the height of the baby boom. Millions of teenagers will turn 18 in 2008, and right now Demoratic organizations are woefully underprepared to bring them into the Democratic Party. The Republicans, you can be sure, are already stepping up their efforts to rebrand themselves among the next generation in politics. They're staking territory, and unless we can reimagine groups like the Young Democrats, College Democrats, and retool outreach programs by organizations like ACT and the Democratic National Committee, we're fucked.

Efforts are being made – organizations like the League of Independent Voters, Music for America, Downhill Battle, Driving Votes, Cosmopolity and many others are stepping into the breach, but many of these groups operate outside the party, with little financial support, and the best pracitces of these organizations are little understood outside a small circle that comprise the national staff. This essay is a work in progress; an attempt to outline exactly why the Democratic Party has difficulty reaching young voters, what makes these groups successful in their communication with the next political generation, and simple things that party organizations, 501c's, and 527s can do to make their own programs more successful in dealing with young voters. Most of this will be from the point of view of my having spent 21 months building Music for America from scratch.

Politics is a four letter word; culture is what happens when you get out of bed

For the majority of “young” Americans, politics isn't important in the same way it is for us junkies. In fact, politics is a dirty word. (We made gains, for sure, in 2004, but the election is over, the momentum is stalled). This seems like a no-brainer, but the manner in which youth outreach programsbof the Young Democrats, College Democrats, DNC, and ACT work illustrate that this fact remains unabsorbed. It is a constant that is always in people’s minds, but never fully comprehended during formulations of planning sessions, retreats, and daily meetings.

This should come as no surprise – politicians, and political groups are particularly inept when it comes to operating outside the realm of the established norms of the beltway.

How does this play out?

When Johnny and Susy “Young Dem” gets up in the morning, chances are they are thinking about politics (I know that I usually am) – whether its the latest Bush gaffe, an idea for a petition or campus action, we breathe politics. When the other 99% of our peers wake, they're thinking about something else – the band they saw, the movie that’s coming out, going on a date, the paper that is due, etc. Chances are, they don’t put much thought into what Rumsfeld did or didn’t say last week, or the latest outrage from Tom DeLay. If they think about politics at all, it’s because they watched the Daily Show and got some laughs the night before.

The difference in these mindsets is fundamental, and the repercussions of ignoring it are played out throughout all of our institutions.

Example: a member of the San Fernando Valley Young Dems posted that her group organized the following activities in 2004:

• Took bus trips to campaign for 2 California Assemblywoman in swing districts. (They both ended up winning.)
• Raised $1000 for the local Democratic headquarters selling buttons outside Farenheit 9/11.
• Set up a booth at the San Fernando Valley Fair and saw the world's biggest pig.
• Held an issues summit entitled "The Day After 9/11" highlighting domestic security issues.
• Personally interviewed all five leading Los Angeles mayoral candidates.

These are great things, but they are all highly political things. These are not things that most people want to do. I spend most of my day thinking and reading about politics, and I don't want to do half of these things. Does that make them less valuable or unimportant? No. Do I recommend that Young/College Dems stop doing these things? No way. Do I think having a laser focus on these types of activities is bad for Young Dems and bad for the progressive movement? You bet.

Lets face it, 99% of the people out there won’t find taking a road trip to canvass for someone they’ve never heard of in 90 degree whether to be an exciting prospect, and you shouldn’t organize your local dem chapter under the assumption that it is exciting . . . throwing the word “roadtrip” into a political event doesn’t automatically make it cool.

If we want to build a progressive majority, our coalition cannot be composed solely of folks who drink the Kool Aid. We need to tailor our activities so we can organize the greatest amount of people. The rub is that we can’t force them to conform to our world-view, we’ve got to adapt our own assumptions and ideas into their worldview. This was the realization that made Music for America so successful:

If you want to get apolitical youth involved in politics, you have to make political participation a cultural phenomenon.

That was the simple idea behind all of MfA’s successes. We took politics, which was a topic of taboo in youth culture – an automatic badge of unhipness – and changed the entire frame through which our generation perceived it. Politics wasn’t a freakish entity floating at the margin of their lives anymore. For the kids we reached, it was about going to good shows and hanging out with their friends, seeing a good band, having a beer and learning a tiny bit. After more than 2400 shows across the county, politics became part of a typical Saturday night out.

Issues and traditional political activities were important, and I’ll talk more about that further down, but the epiphany that the young left needs to have is that if we want to draw more of our generation into politics, and if we want them voting progressive, then politics can no longer be a thing that is separate from culture. We must erase the cool kid/poli sci nerd dichotomy. It’s not that we need to act cool to get kids to realize that it is their civic duty to participate, or that the country will go to shit if they’re apathetic. This isn’t about who’s cool and who’s not. It’s about cultural relevance and comfortability. Politically minded folks need to realize that we’re in the minority. It is we who have to bend and incorporate ourselves into culture, not the other way around.

This isn’t about wanting to be the coolest kid on the block. It’s not about dissing the college dems or demeaning the work you do, or saying that you should give up on that. I apologize if anyone reading this is coming away with that interpretation – its not my purpose. This is about finding an effective way to expand the base of people in progressive politics. It’s about embracing all the other people out there who aren’t as political as you, and realizing that it is OK that they don’t want to do some of the highly political activities you organize. Your job is to organize enough events with mass appeal to keep a large majority of folks interested and informed – at the most basic level – and use these informal settings to find people who can be “brought up to the next level.” These are the folks you want helping you when you interview mayoral candidates or take swing state road trips.

Inserting the Issues, Injecting Politics: Tying together issues that are relevant to the demographic, relative to the culture (a prototype for youth culture of what Lakoff calls “strategic issues”).

Once you are operating within the cultural realm that most 18-30 year olds occupy, this is when message becomes important and the Democratic Party, Liberals, Progressives, Greens, whatever you want to call yourselves, needs some more serious strategery retooling. Right now, many groups on the left are caught up in the identity politics that has driven the party since the 60’s. It’s created a mentality that makes working together and cooperative messaging like herding cats. The right doesn’t do this – they literally get together over breakfast and decide what the message for the week is and who the week’s winners and losers will be within their coaltion. Your group/issue loses one day, then it wins on another day, but the movement’s message always wins. We need to get this going on our side.

Single issues are important, but most people aren’t single issue voters, and we need to start formulating a complete worldview for democratic politics. An intermediary step in this process, and one that will help you reach younger demographics, is to tie issues together and then tie them to the lives of young voters directly. Some examples of how we did this at Music for America: We followed the lead of the Apollo Project – the environment is a great issue, but its not something that people base their votes on (not solely, anyway) – so we talked about how clean energy investment could create more jobs per dollar than investment in current coal and oil technologies, and then talked about how that would be good for the job market at all levels, good for the environment, good for weening us off foreign oil (hence fighting terrorism) and would help alleviate state and city budgets in energy savings – thus paying for itself and freeing up more money to invest in schools and other public needs. All this on one issue card handed out at a concert, and suddenly an environmental issue is now communicating the basic outlines of a whole worldview that encompasses a number of areas that concerned young voters - the lack of jobs, money for higher education, the war on terror and the environment. It’s not like reading a typical pro-environment flyer because it wakes the reader up to the way that issues affect each other. The relationship magnifies the importance of the issue and makes all the issues more engaging for the concert goer.

At MfA, another example was our ever popular “Rave Act Card.” This card talked about how the war on drugs was making concerts and clubs less safe by eliminating security/safety precautions. It was an example of something legislated that directly affected the culture – indeed, it effected the very event all of the people we reached were attending. Both of these issue – jobs and concerts drew a direct connection between politics, policy and the everday lives of our generation. This made it a powerful message, but it wasn’t message alone that convinced our peers to vote Democratic by a 10% margin (or at least Progressive, since many votes were anti-Bush votes).

Localism and Peer to Peer Messaging: AKA Bruce Springstein is a Carpet Bagging, Fundraising Tool

Message aside, what made MfA’s events effective was the scale. The average MfA event had 500 people, with 2-3 local volunteers working the show. We didn’t invent a tour wholesale with a political purpose a la Bruce Springstein’s Vote for Change tour. We didn’t really do the “large tour thing,” and when we did, we merely piggy backed on existing tours with cultural credibility. (Interestingly, the few “stadium” tours we piggybacked were some of the least successful shows we were involved with).

This mattered, and its something I fear people will forget or never learn at all – when we talk about the culturization of politics, we are NOT talking about Bruce Springstein and vote for change. V for C got a lot of press attention, but was essentially a one-off event for the choir in each city it went to. We need to talk to the choir and keep up the base in the party, but when it comes to young people, who vote in far less numbers and don’t self-identify as democrat, we need total cultural integration if we want to change perceptions about politics and integrate politics into culture, not a campaign rally in cultural drag. Springstein raised a lot of money, for sure, and that probably helped out ACT and MoveOn a great deal, but that is not what I’m talking about here, and to confuse the two will be to fail at reaching young voters. Fund raising is great, but it is a separate issue from what I’m talking about here, and it is something that can be accomplished locally in smaller shows that will also be effective at activating and communicating to new voters. (Def Jux, Ted Leo). (Drinking Liberally).

MfA worked because it became an established presence in the communities in which it operated. Saturday night at the Troc in Philly? MfA is probably there. Friday night at the Beacon in NYC – MfA’s got a table. Tuesday night local Hip Hop night in Detroit – there’s the MfA crew passing out issue cards and talking about the Rave Act. You can’t just have one-off events and expect to make a cultural connection with your community and peers. If all you are having is one Kegger every 3 months when you need to raise money, you are not integrating yourself into the culture, you are exploiting the culture for political ends – Just like ACT and MoveOn were when they hired Bruce to tour the Swing States.

Studies show that the best motivator for political participation is being asked by a friend or peer. By operating in multiple small venues, spread across the nation, where direct, peer to peer contact was possible, MfA was able to accomplish this on a massive scale over 2 millin people reached at almost 2,500 shows. That’s the other key to success with cultural events. At the V for C tour, thousands of people heard Bruce Springstein denounce Bush from the stage. Maybe they saw him too if they brought binoculars or looked up at the JumboTron. But there was nothng personal about the event. There was no direct connection made. It was politainment at its best, a campaign event mistaken for a cultural-political revolution. No one changed their minds about how they were going to vote based on that, and many of the artists that played didn’t even have wide appeal to our generation. It was baby Kerry Boosters sucking money out of baby boomers from the MoveOn set. Again, if this is going to work, its got to be local, local, local, and its got to be underground with the musicians – the little bands that everyone loves because they think no one knows about them except their small clique. It can’t be all headliners and mass-scale.

Done effectively, this can not only get you more volunteers, increase the progressive voting base, it can get you press and raise ou some money too.

NOTE: This piece is unfinished and underedited. Help me combat my procrastinating ways! Drop a line and tell me what you think I’m missing.

Missing: Vast Left Wing Conspiracy

Bill Bradley lays it all out in a nice, consice piece in the NYT. Read it.

Get Your HTML On

The site is going to be experiencing weirdness over the next couple of days (not that anyone really reads it, anyway. At least not at the rate I've been posting lately).

I'm trying to figure out some HTML and get familiar with customizing the sidebar. So expect freak outs.

If you happen to know a thing or two about HTML and can help me figure shit out, that'd be much appreciated.

Fishing for Recommendations

Job recommendations would be nice - something involving politics, culture and/or writing.

But I'm really looking for book recommendations. After my previous post, it occurred to me that some of y'all might have some good book recommendations.

Right now I'm reading/have just finished these:

What it Takes
Public Opinion
The Tipping Point
The Emerging Democratic Majority
Bowling Alone
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Cluetrain Manifesto
Emergence
Don't Think of an Elephant
The Republican Noise Machine

I'm looking into Master of the Senate and that Caro book about Robert Moses raising NYC out of the ground through shear force of will (and a touch of occult).

Any other recommendatioins that run along these lines? Pop-culture/music book suggestions welcome too.

Cluetrain revelations on the 2 Train

From the bowels of the Hearst corporation, I recieve my second piece of hatemail ever. Read it here (I guess its not really hatemail, but it gets pretty down on a piece I did some reporting on). (My first piece ever was in response to an op-ed I wrote for MfA)

People Hate Prank Monkey

Also on today's menu: voice mail left with the head researcher here at PM calling all of our sources criminals and some innuendo about us being on the dole from the Project for a New American Century (not to be confused with the government dole, which I'm actually on -see below)

For those not in the know about PNAC: official site/must see flash animation description

But those are just preludes to my real topic: book learning (or what I'm reading and what I thought about it on the 2 train between Chambers and 14th St).

I didn't have too much time in the last year to read much, and there were a lot of books floating around that had theoretical and practical bearing on much of what I was doing for MfA. Now that my schedule is somewhat less than jam-packed, I'm finding the time to read some of this stuff. It's a weird experience, when, ex-post facto, you read the theory behind a large chunk of your own life. In a lot of ways, it takes the wind out of the idealist sails that some of these books might have otherwise filled.

Case in point, I had a Jack Handey-esque moment on the 2 train this morning as I was reading The Cluetrain Manifesto ( a screed about how the web and the return of community is ending what have been standard business practices for over a century). The book spends a lot of time talking about how businesses need to get out of the game of dictating to "markets" from up on high and get into having real, human conversations with the communities they serve and who support them. My thought: The actual "manifesto" portion of the book, and all parts of the book that reiterate its 95 theses, suck. The tone is high handed and dictatorial, the content is theoretical and abstract and lifeless even as it preaches against the same thing. The book kicks ass, however, whent he authors start telling their personal stories and using real-life examples to illustrate their points. Ironic, don't ya think? (sorry, couldn't help it.)

Anyway, other books I'm catching up on that you should read if you are into politics, open source culture, and the weird, Quizno guitar playing hybrid thing they've formed (voltron-like) in the last two years:

What it Takes, Public Opinion, The Tipping Point, The Emerging Democratic Majority
Bowling Alone, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Cluetrain Manifesto, Emergence, Don't Think of an Elephant, The Republican Noise Machine

I'm sure I've left something out, but too bad. Go plug these into your amazon favorites list and see what it churns up.

Projects

I'm speaking at a conference on Saturday - And So Forth: A Post Inaugural Assembly. The panel I'm on is called Politicizing Culture: The New Revolution in Music.

This is not usually my bag. I'm nervous as all hell. Come watch me speak eloquently or make an ass out of mysely: Saturday, Jan 22nd, 3:40 pm at OfficeOps in Williamsburg, BKLYN. MfA will be there an apparently they need some volunteers.

Also check out The Principles Project - a kind of Wiki manifesto for the new political generation and all of us reform democrats. 2020 Dems is running the project and it looks like a great exercise in open source politics. Hopefully something useful will come of it, or at the very least, it will be a model for other orgs to open source messaging and some decisions making.

Finally, to help some friends out in their attempt to Google Bomb the issue: Social Security.

The Paranoid Left

Posting has been light since I've actually been off the dole and working a real job for the past three weeks. A friend of mine hooked me up with a freelance gig at a magazine, and the work schedule has been pretty intense. The downside of that is that I've posted next to nothing recently. The upside is that I got paid a shitload of money and I'm getting a byline on the March cover story.

The mag I'm at now is Popular Mechanics, and oddly enough, my work there actually has some bearing on politics. The cover story I spent most of my time working is a debunking of all the conspiracy theories that have sprouted up around 9-11. You know what I'm talking about - CIA involvement in 9/11, demolitions at the Trade Center, F-16s shooting down planes, missile stikes at the Pentagon, etc. Way beyond Michael Moore conspiracy theory . . . more in line with Ollie Stone's paranoid America.

The comparison is apt; disconertingly so. Why is it that a vast majority of these nutballs are from the far left of the political spectrum? Is it purely a distrust of Bush? Residual distrust from the 60s/COINTELPRO/ Watergate? Granted, there's some of this coming out of the neo-nazi and radical libertarian fold as well, but the vast, vast majority is from left leaners.

This is a problem. When it comes to media represtation of the left, these people have hijacked the identity of our party. Yeah, the Vast right wing conspiracy/noise machine amplifies this, but the left has to face the fact that we've got some nutjobs in our party, and at the moment, they are the oppositional face of the left. Not a good state of affairs when you consider we control no branch of government and are confined to oppositional minority status for a good 4 years at minimum.

This is a rambling, bad piece of writing here . . . I'm grasping . . . with protest and any sort of traditional oppositional tactic hijacked by folks like UFPJ or worse, we need a new method of opposition. Its radical (in that it is fundamentally and historically unradical) but this is really going to mean a reformation of hte party from the inside by grassroots activists that are pragmatic, not ideological.

The DNC race is in full swing. . . don't know if I support Dean or Rosenburg at this point, but this will be step one in solving this riddle. Step two will be creating new groupps and institutions that can supplement or compliment whatever changes are made in the DNC and in the state parties . . .

We're also going to need a change of leadership . . . the party needs some new blood.

This is going nowhere now . . . frustrating. I'll end by saying that tomorrow is my last day at Pop. Mech. I'll be posting more and putting some time into finishing my essay in making the Democratic Party culturally relevant. I'm also scheduled to speak at an arts and politics conference in Brooklyn in two weeks. Got to throw together a presentation for that. I'll probably draw pretty heavily from the final version of my Hipping the Squares Essay . . .

OK, back to work . . . in 48 hours I'll reimerse myself in politics for a few weeks . . . maybe things will be a little clearer by then.