Gilad was recently here for the JZ Festival in Shanghai’s Pudong district and he also taught; I’m assuming, at the JZ school. I can imagine the experience. The JZ Festival went off without a hitch in a beautiful park in the Pudong New Zone. The JZ school is situated in the former French concession among old houses and tree lined lanes. Between the lanes, the Jazz and the skyscrapers of Pudong, it must have been an intoxicating week. But we are supposed to be dissidents and radicals and some parts of Gilad’s article are lazy and dangerous. We need perspective.

Gilad writes, “China is a financial miracle.”

I have lived in Shanghai for eight years and a large part of my life is given to the underground music scene. But before we get to the reality of that we have to address the big problem. The myth of the “economic miracle”. This is not specific to China. This is a global myth. Let us start with a reminder of the state of the global system. According to the World Bank development indicators for 2008, 80% of the world, or 5.15 billion people, live on less than ten dollars a day with 3.14 billion of those, or half the world’s population, living on less than two dollars fifty.² The top 20%, as we are all aware, is divided into the so called middle classes and the super rich.

China is a fair reflection of this global trend. The most recently touted indicator has been the internet usage stats.³ China recently approached the 300 million mark for internet users. Economic commentators foamed at the mouth and noted that was equal to the entire population of the USA. Of course, what it actually represents is the creation of a 20% middle class to go with it’s remaining billion people who are on or below the subsistence mark. Gilad also states, “It is a miracle because it somehow manages to restrain hard capitalism with a unique socially orientated system.” That is simply not true. It is purely hard capitalism. Period. There is no restraint, there is a free for all that is destroying the countryside and resulting in monthly riots across the land.⁴

In any region of the world, a system which enriches a minority of the people while plunging the rest downwards — while destroying their land rights and environment — should never be called a miracle. It should be called a disaster.

It is also dangerous to freely mix ideas of state or government with people or culture. I love to live here and my experiences on the underground rock scene and with local artists have been amazing. However, a little reading or asking around the subject will reveal that writing, music and art has a glass ceiling that is directly imposed by state censorship. For every Jazz Festival that goes on there are a slew of cancelled events.⁵ During the Olympics, the entire music scene was forcibly shut down for a month by the police.⁶ The underground is allowed to exist, as long as it doesn’t try to go public. I might also mention that no word gets published in print media without being first read by the Xinhua Agency.

I love living in China and Shanghai. The people are great and the issues I bring up are not only relevant to China. I myself don’t like ‘China Bashing’ and the countless lazy stereotypes that appear in journalism about this complex country. However, Shanghai is the glossy facade for the rest of the country and it’s our job as radicals to always keep our perspective.

1. ”Autumn in Shanghai” by Gilad Atzmon
2. ”Global Issues Poverty Facts.”
3. ”China has close to 300 million internet users AFP.”
4. ”58,000 mass incidents in China in first quarter as unrest grows to largest ever recorded.”
5. ”Modern Sky Festival 2009” from China Music Radar.
6. ”The Clampdown” from China Music Radar.

Trotsky wrote that “every ruling class creates its own culture, and consequently, its own art.” While one might be hard pressed to justify most television shows and most pop music as art, they are what pass for culture. Once, a conversation with a friend who worked as a college faculty member turned to the question of whether film and music reflected or created popular trends and thought. In other words, does the culture we absorb influence us or do we influence it. Naturally, there is no conclusive answer to this question, and we did not reach one that day. However, there are some clear examples of each. To begin with, television shows like the quasi-fascist 24 and its less unnerving predecessors like the 007 series of films exist to instill a fear not only of the enemies of the state but of the state itself. Thusly, we are encouraged by these obviously propagandistic works to ignore or consent to whatever illegal and immoral actions taken by those who claim to protect us. Furthermore, we are subconsciously trained to identify the state’s enemies as our own. Reality shows like Cops further this consciousness.

To substantiate the other side of the coin let me turn to the most popular rock band of all time, The Beatles. These young men arguably began as consumers who picked up musical instruments and replicated the music of their musical heroes, most of whom were bluesmen from the United States. They went on to become the most popular rock group of the 1960s and a cultural phenomenon with out parity. When the band grew their hair long and talked about LSD, were they propagandizing a new way of life or were they reflecting a way of life already in existence? To put it differently, did the Beatles and other rock bands lead the youth of the western world into the counterculture or did the counterculture consume the bands into its community? There is no clear answer to this, of course. The relationship was symbiotic at best and parasitic at its worst. Just like the later phenomenon of hip-hop, the streets created the music and the music in turn mutated, reflected and popularized the culture. Unfortunately, the aspects which were popularized were those that challenged the dominant system the least. In rock music that turned out to be the sex and drugs. In hip hop it turned out to be the sex, drugs and money. Politics and the sense of community were removed in favor of an individualistic pursuit of gratification. In other words, the capitalist ethos prevailed. This makes sense, of course, given that we live in a capitalist society and the companies that produce the music are instrumental players in that society’s economy.

Even on the occasion where something truly remarkable that serves a purpose beyond titillation comes into the cultural marketplace–a phenomenon seen in cinema and music more than television–the coverage of the work and its creators is often trivialized if it is covered at all. This was brought home to me recently as I watched the coverage of the Golden Globe Awards at a friend’s house. Little was said about the meaning of the films presented but thousands of words were wasted on the clothing worn by various actors and actresses as they walked around outside of the event showing off for the cameras. In the media coverage the following day, more print space was used describing people’s clothing and who they were with than on the works that were nominated. When it comes to music, reviewers tend to delve a bit deeper. However, at the end of the year, it is usually the musical works that made the most money that are celebrated in the media events viewed by the general public. This usually means that the works with the least meaning are those which are publicized most. This in turn propels even more sales, leaving works of consequence to linger in the CD bins until they are dropped by the industry.

Books are quite similar. Hundreds, if not thousands of titles, are rarely acknowledged by the media, while certain authors monopolize the sales charts and the minds of the reading public. I see this phenomenon daily as a library worker. Thousands of dollars are spent buying books that read very similar to the last work by an author, while other literature is never ordered. Well-read people end up reading materials that not only endorse the thought processes of the dominant culture of consumption and alienation, but are convinced that they are consequently somehow more enlightened than those that don’t read. Once again, we return to the question of which influences which. For example, are second- and third-rate crime authors like Patricia Cornwell popular because people like her writing or are these authors popular because the advertising budgets behind them convince people that they should read them precisely because they are popular?

I’m listening to Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “Machine Gun” from a concert he performed in Berkeley in May 1970 while people rioted in the streets against the US invasion of Cambodia. This song is not only a prayer for peace and love. It is about the massacre of Blacks in the streets and Vietnamese in the jungle. It is also a cry for an end to greed and the wars it causes. It is a condemnation of the masters of war and a cry of defiance. I don’t think it will be appearing in a commercial any time soon. Do you think Obama has this song on his iPod? Would it make a difference if he did?

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

– Victor Hugo

I meet David Rovics outside his host’s apartment building. I recognize him immediately from the pictures I’ve seen of him. He is tall and slender with closely cropped hair. He is dressed in casual attire with a black t-shirt that says “Gaza on my Mind” on it.

It’s June 2009 and images of the Iranian protesters are being broadcast everywhere — on Facebook, through Twitter, BBC, CNN, Fox News. Rovics can tell that I’m Iranian: “Tell me your take.”

He is not one to wait for his turn to talk. He listens intently and when I’m finished asks another question. After all that Rovics has seen and heard during more than 20 years as a singer-song writer who has performed all over the world, he has yet to act like a self-proclaimed expert on anything.

Rovics was born in New York city to parents who were “progressive and counter-culture in their own way.” His earliest experience of music mixed with politics came in 1979 while attending a Unitarian-run camp in Western Massachusetts in a town that at that time had the oldest nuclear reactor in the United States. At this camp Rovics learned about vegetarianism, sex and the wickedness of nuclear power by anti-nuclear activists who were invited to speak to the children — he was 12 years old. He had up until that point been playing the cello and living a middle class life in a mostly Christian town with non-religious parents who were both classical musicians, but would be marked forever afterwards with an inclination towards political activism: “That was the first time I heard music that had a political orientation to it and I guess I’ve gravitated to that kind of stuff ever since.”

Rovics’ youth is not unconventional among independent musical artists. He was in many ways the stereotypical, long-haired, pot-smoking hippie during his teenage years, but would discover radicalism and intellectual thought in his early twenties. While living in Berkeley, California, Rovics was exposed to anarchists and Marxists, and the music of revolutionary artists like Phil Ochs and Buffy Sainte-Marie. Their inspirational spirits would send him to open mikes in the streets singing their songs, while working “depressing occupations” to make a living.

In 1993 Rovics would experience “the single most seminal event” in his life. He wrote about it in “Song for Eric”:

   San Francisco at night
   And the warm summer breeze
   Walking back alleys
   Just as free as you please
   And I think of those poor boys
   Who drove up to say
   “Give us your money”
   And then they blew you away
   With one pull of a trigger
   Your sweet life was through

   Every time I see that street, I think of you

The experience of losing his close friend in a gang shooting that was intended for someone else broke Rovics and made him all at once:

Losing Eric like this was an experience of such grief, nothing like anything I’d ever experienced, and it opened my eyes to the kinds of things the majority-world goes through so predictably. I suddenly understood so much more viscerally the looks in the faces of the Central American refugees populating the Mission. For me, the definition of the word “us” suddenly got dramatically bigger.

Rovics had been writing songs prior to that event, but the passing of Eric stirred something in him that would become impossible to suppress. His lyrics went from “preachy” to provocative. He was no longer writing for an audience or intentionally reiterating an ideology or specific worldview: “At that time, songwriting became a survival mechanism, my main way of dealing with life.”

Since the mid 90s Rovics has been touring the world playing concerts for audiences not unlike the one I saw him perform for in Vancouver, BC. The Baptist Church venue was full with a 50+ crowd made up of peace activists, Vietnam deserters, those that harbour them and a few younger writers and musicians. In this church Rovics would sing about those that the Western media was at that time vilifying as the Somalian “Pirates”: “Here’s to the pirates of Somalia / I’ll raise the Jolly Roger to you,” and the attack against an American doctor who had been performing abortions for desperate women despite constant harassment by Christian fundamentalists.

“In the Name of God” was written for Dr. George Tiller who was shot to death (he had already been shot in both arms in 1993) on May 31, 2009.

   In the name of God
   This is not Afghanistan
   It’s the Heartland USA
   Where a girl has to wonder
   If she’ll get acid in her face
   Where they bomb the women’s clinics
   Because the preacher told them to
   Where the man there on the TV
   Tells them that’s what they should do
   In the name of God

Although Rovics’ songs also touch on traditional musical themes like love found and love lost, most of his fans are drawn to the political nature of his work. I ask him about his take on recent statements made by former Pink Floyd member Roger Waters, who was accused of being an anti-Semite after referring to Israel’s Apartheid Wall as an “exercise in colonialism” during a visit to the occupied Palestinian territories. Rovics responds that politics and music are inherently mixed, whether artists want to accept this it or not:

The music industry has been trying to separate music from politics for years now, trying to get artists to believe that politically oriented music is not attractive for mainstream audiences so they produce work that is safe and preferably only between two people. But artists are part of society too, so they can’t expect to be above politics. Whenever they make a decision to play in a certain country, they are making a political statement. In this case Waters made a direct statement about Israel and because he is a very prominent member of society it reached many people and touched them in different ways. I think that’s wonderful. Especially for an artist who recorded an album called The Wall, it makes perfect sense!

Rovics’ own political statements touch on a variety of topics including labor history, the Bush Administration’s self-serving “War on Terror” and gender relations. Many of his songs are also inspired by the hundreds of cities he’s visited, from no-name small-towns in the USA, all the way to the occupied Palestinian territories. In his 2008 release of The Commons, Rovics’ song list includes titles like: “Halliburton Boardroom Massacre,” “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” and “Falluja.” Also included on this list is “Jenin,” named after a Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank. Sings Rovics:

   Were you thinking of the taunting of the soldiers
   Or of the shit they smeared upon the walls
   Were you thinking of your cousin after torture
   Or Tel Aviv and it’s glittering shopping malls
   When the fat men in their mansions say that you don’t want peace
   Did you wonder what they mean
   As you sat amidst the stench inside the darkness
   In the shattered City of Jenin

Rovics has never been one to shy away from controversy; this is how “Jenin” concludes:

   And why should anybody wonder
   As you stepped on board
   The crowded bus across the Green Line
   And you reached inside your jacket for the cord
   Were you thinking of your neighbours buried bodies
   As you made the stage for this scene
   As you set off the explosives that were strapped around your waist
   Were you thinking of the City of Jenin

Humour is also a constant element of Rovics work. During his performance at the Baptist Church he pokes fun at Leftist conspiracy theories and tells the audience about how he almost died in Lebanon — after slipping to his death in the bathtub. The death of an activist in a country like Lebanon would have no doubt stirred all kinds of alternative explanations considering the geographical context. At the end of the lyrics of “Moron” which can be found on his songbook which is available for download on his website, Rovics adds this instructional note for those who are using his song sheet to perform:

*Insert here the name of whichever moron appears to be the Democrats’ lead candidate

Significantly, Rovics is adamantly against the corporate music industry’s brutish intimidation tactics against anyone who engages in promoting or downloading music for free. Although he makes a modest living and could probably make at least a little more by subjecting his work to copyright, he has intentionally made his songs and lyrics available on his website for download. Fans can indeed choose to pay, but that choice is optional and not forced at every opportunity. Such are the actions of someone who lives by what he believes in. The life of a musician is hard and exceptionally so for one like Rovics, but he doesn’t see things that way:

If I wasn’t trying to do something about the state this world is in today then I would be going crazy. I often ask people who are depressed (and there is a tremendous number of them especially in the US) if in addition to the steps they’re taking to battle their depression, whether they’ve considered becoming an activist. Many people feel powerless in the face of everything being so messed up in this world because they have empathy and compassion for their fellow humans and this tends to stress people out. Activists, many of whom are barely making a living or working two jobs just to make ends meet are also stressed out for a variety of reasons, but they tend to be among the happier people in society because they are trying to do something. That is empowering. My line of work permits me to travel around the world regularly and I meet people like that all the time and they’re lovely. There is nothing I would rather be doing than writing songs and singing them for them and anyone who wants to listen.

During a conversation after the interview Rovics offhandedly mentions that he is grateful to have a bed to sleep in at his host’s apartment. He explains that he has encountered organizing members of his fan base who have scoffed at his request for a guest room as opposed to just a couch. While some other types of musicians sleep in thousand dollar a night hotels, Rovics is stuck trying to educate his well-meaning concert organizers about how to effectively market his shows and constantly accepting the short end of the stick when it comes to accommodations, but he has no complaints. “This is what I love to do” he tells me with a smile, “and there is of course a glass-ceiling in terms of how far a musician like me can get in terms of any kind of fame or fortune, but I didn’t start doing this because I wanted to become famous, I started doing this because I felt like I could make some kind of difference.”

Amy Goodman has referred to Rovics as “the musical version of Democracy Now!” and Cindy Sheehan has called him “the peace poet and troubadour of our time.” These are just a few statements that hold true to the social significance of David Rovics.

Earlier that year, in June 1969, the largest radical organization (Students for a Democratic Society–SDS) in the United States at the time fragmented during a tempestuous national convention in Chicago. This split was the result of a hardening of political stances and disagreements over lifestyles. Primary among the political disagreements were those over the war in Vietnam and the role of the African-American struggle for liberation. The dominant argument over lifestyle concerned the role of youth in the movement and the political meaning of the burgeoning youth counterculture. These issues loomed large in the minds and hearts of the hundreds of thousands of politically minded youth in the late Sixties and it was appropriate that they would be played out at the national convention of the country’s largest radical youth group.

The three groups claiming the SDS mantle were the Progressive Labor Party, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, and the Weatherman organization. The name “weatherman” was from the line “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” in Bob Dylan’s 1965 song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Weatherman would go on to become not only an underground group dedicated to its version of armed struggle, it would also become the most well known of the three SDS remnants. This was due to its headline grabbing actions–an explosion in a NYC townhouse that killed three of its members, freeing LSD guru Timothy Leary from a California jail, setting off bombs in the U.S. Capitol and Pentagon in protest of military actions by the United States against the people of Vietnam and Laos, and its support of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

By October of 1969, Woodstock and its accompanying euphoria had come and gone. The major antiwar demonstrations planned throughout the United States–the Moratorium scheduled for October 15th and the National Mobilization to End the War scheduled for November 15th –were the focus of virtually every antiwarrior in the country. Local organizers sat at tables in shopping centers and universities, and spoke to community and student groups urging people to make their opposition to the murder going on in their name known. John and Yoko Ono Lennon penned and recorded “Give Peace a Chance,” and President Richard Nixon told the press that he would be unaffected by any demonstrations against his policies. As it turned out, Nixon and his advisers decided not to attack Hanoi with nuclear weapons after the massive protests of October and November (which attracted more than two million people to both days of protest across the country), fearful that a revolution would break out in America. It was a revolution the ultra-left hoped for, but would never see.

Meanwhile, the ultra-left, which included most of those who had attended the SDS convention that June, were organizing protests of their own. Weatherman was calling people to Chicago for a series of offensive attacks on the state and its symbols in an attempt to “bring the war home”. RYM had split off from Weatherman and were planning a series of mass demonstrations in Chicago at the same time. Both groups then planned to attend the November protest in D.C. The Weatherman demonstrations became known as the Days of Rage. Despite the organization’s hopes, these protests involved no more than 1000 people and succeeded primarily in alienating the group from much of the left, at least for the time being. RYM had a bit more success: their final demonstration attracted around 5000 students and workers and the support of the local chapter of the Black Panther party.

This chapter of the Panthers was led by the charismatic Fred Hampton. Hampton was a young man, barely 20, and had been active in civil rights organizing since junior high and was high on the list of Panthers who would assume the chairman’s position should Huey Newton remain in prison. His leadership in Chicago had turned the Panther chapter there into one of the party’s strongest and most cohesive. Besides the standard Panther program involving free breakfasts-for-kids and Panther schools, Hampton was working on creating the first Rainbow Coalition-a coalition he hoped would include the Latino Young Lords, the working-class white Patriots and the street gang, The Blackstone Rangers. To put it bluntly, the possibility that this proposed coalition might take hold scared the pants off the local, state and federal government, who did their best to sabotage the negotiations that would bring the Rangers into the group. This ultimately included the December 4, 1969 death squad murders of both Hampton and Mark Clark-a member of the Illinois state Panthers. As court testimony later proved, these murders were planned and executed by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies working together. These assassinations were part of a concerted effort by the FBI and other government agencies to destroy the Black Panther Party.

Musically, the Rolling Stones were touring the country promoting their new album Let It Bleed , another of their adventures in reworking North American blues and folk idioms into hard-driving rock and roll. The song of the summer had been Honky Tonk Women, which appeared on the album as a boozy country funk. Perhaps the most important song on the platter, however, was Gimme Shelter, a blistering indictment of the world of war and greed. Of course, the Beatles had their own record out as well. Abbey Road appeared in record stores on September 26 and blasted to the top of the charts. A bit more whimsical than the Stones’ album, it did include a somewhat acid-drenched song written for Timothy Leary’s run for the governorship of California–Come Together.

Two days after the Hampton-Clark murders, the Rolling Stones ended their tour at the Altamont Raceway in California, closing out an all-day festival which included Santana and the Jefferson Airplane, as well. The Grateful Dead were scheduled to play after the Stones that night but changed their minds when the festival careened towards chaos near the stage after a gun-wielding black man was murdered by members of the Hells’ Angels motorcycle gang. This act was the final violent act of a very violent day– a satanic reflection of August’s Woodstock fest. The Dead had hired the Angels as security believing that the band’s past history with the bikers would pay off and the festival could be run without any real cops near the stage. Unfortunately for all, the Angels who showed up to work that day were mostly hopeful prospects eager to show how tough they could be and ready to kick anybody’s ass who dared defy their authority. As it turned out, anybody included members of the Jefferson Airplane along with various concertgoers. The concert ended after the Stones’ set and forever jaded the counterculture–it’s innocence defiled. The new dawn heralded by the Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick at the beginning of the Airplane’s Woodstock set had become a wintry night. A night which would extend into the seventies and, some would argue, until today.

As Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter wrote in his first song about the Altamont concert, New Speedway Boogie, “One way or another, this darkness got to give.”

My transition to political radicalism — going to the root of problems, recognizing that dramatic and fundamental change in the way society is organized is necessary if there is to be a decent human future — involved a lot of pain, in two different ways.

The first concerned the process of coming to know about the pain of the world. I had never been a naïve person who thought the world was a happy place, but like many people who have privilege (in my case, being white, male, a U.S. citizen, and economically secure, though never wealthy) I was able to remain ignorant of the depth of the routine suffering in the world. I was able to ignore how white supremacy, patriarchy, U.S. imperialism, and a predatory capitalist economic system routinely destroy the bodies and spirits of millions of people around the world. When I made a conscious choice to stop ignoring those realities — in my case, when I returned to a university for graduate education with the time to read and study — the process of coming to know about that pain was wrenching. But I found myself wanting to know more.

Why would someone with privilege press to know more about the pain of the world when that knowledge creates tension and emotional turmoil? In my case, coming to understand that the world’s pain is the product of profoundly unjust social systems helped me understand a different kind of personal pain I had been struggling with. Most of my life I had felt like a bit of a freak, like someone out of step with the culture around him. There’s nothing dramatically wrong with me physically or psychologically, but I always struggled to fit in. I had always had a lingering sense that I didn’t want what others around me seemed to want. Because of my privilege, the world offered me a lot, and I am grateful for much of what I have — work I have usually enjoyed, an adequate income, relative safety. But I could never figure out how to be normal — how to kick back with the guys; how to get excited about sports, television, or the latest hit music; how to care about what kind of car I drove. In many ways I had it made, on the surface, but that sense of being out of step always dragged me down.

The best way to deal with our individual struggles is to put them in a larger context. That means both understanding the forces that shape our world as well as placing our problems in perspective. Becoming radicalized politically allowed me to see that I was suffering because I didn’t want to fit into a world shaped by unjust systems; the problem wasn’t my values and desires but the pathology of those systems. That didn’t solve all my personal problems, but it sure helped. Radical politics also helped me understand more clearly how others were suffering much more than I; it shook me out of my self-absorption. Both realizations led me to want to continue the search for more knowledge and understanding about how this all worked, and to commit as much time and energy as I had to movements for social justice.

The paradox is that since I have immersed myself in the pain of the world, I have been able to find new joy. I still understand that the world is not a happy place, and to be truly alive we must face what my friend Jim Koplin calls the “sense of profound grief” that comes with looking honestly at the world. As the writer Wendell Berry has put it, we live on “the human estate of grief and joy.”¹ Grief is inevitable, and it is only through an honest embrace of the grief that real joy is possible. The conventional world tries to sell us many pleasures, but it offers us little joy. That’s because the conventional world is also trying to sell us many ways to numb our pain, which keeps us from that grief. So long as we are out of touch with the grief, we are unable to feel the joy. We are left only with the desperate search for pleasure and a panicked scramble to avoid pain.

This process has, for me, been slow and gradual — there have been no epiphanies. I don’t believe in epiphanies, and I don’t trust people who claim to have epiphanies. I don’t think the deep understanding of the world that we strive for can come in a single moment. It comes from the long and painful struggle, with the world and with ourselves. Insight doesn’t magically descend upon us. We have to work for it, and that always takes time.

As the singer/songwriter Eliza Gilkyson (who also happens to be my partner) has put it, “Those are lost who/try to cross through/the sorrow fields too easily.”² To expand on her metaphor, we cross those fields not in search of a utopia somewhere ahead. Our life is that journey across those fields, facing the grief and celebrating the joy along the way.

1. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), p. 106
2. “He Waits for Me,” from the CD Beautiful World, Red House Records, 2008]

The occasion was a post-show celebration of the taping of Hip Hop Kom, an American Idol-type talent competition for Palestinian rappers. Fifteen acts from across Palestine performed on Thursday night, and the show was broadcast simultaneously in Gaza City and the West Bank city of Ramallah. Through the use of video conferencing and projection, each city could see and hear the performances happening in the other. Five groups from Gaza participated, and Gazawians came in first, third, and fourth place.

The Gaza City show was held in a small theatre in the Palestine Red Crescent building. Although only publicized by word of mouth, nearly 200 young people filled the theatre, loudly cheering for the rappers and breakdance crew who took the stage.

One of the organizers of the contest, a charismatic literature major named Ayman Meghames, is a minor celebrity here. Part of Gaza’s first Hip-Hop group — named PR: Palestinian Rapperz — Ayman dedicates his time to supporting and publicizing Gaza’s young music scene.

Armed with a ready smile, Ayman was seemingly everywhere at once that night. He was on stage introducing the acts, helping with technical difficulties, greeting friends, and coordinating with the West Bank organizers.

For Ayman, making music is a form of resistance to war and occupation, and also a tool to communicate the reality of life in Palestine. “Most of our lyrics are about the occupation,” he tells me. “Lately we’ve also started singing about the conflict between Hamas and Fatah. Any problem, it needs to be written about.” Rapper Chuck D, from the group Public Enemy, once called rap music the CNN for Black America. For Ayman and his friends, music is their weapon to break media silence. “Most of the world believes we are the terrorists,” he says. “And the media is closed to us, so we get our message out through Hip-Hop.”

One of the first acts to take the stage was a duo called Black Unit Band. Mohammed Wafy, one of the two singers, displays the innocent charm of a teen pop star as he jumps from the stage and into the audience. Tall and skinny with a shock of black hair, Mohammed is 18 and looks younger. Khaled Harara, the other singer (and Mohammed’s next door neighbor) is a few years older and several pounds heavier, but no less energetic on stage.

As the evening progressed, the energy in the room continued to rise. The next act featured six members from two combined groups (DA MCs, and RG, for Revolutionary Guys) now collectively called DARG Team. The crowd was up on their feet, many of them singing along as the performers displayed a range of lyrical stylings.

In Mohammed Wafy’s apartment, the perfomers waited anxiously for the results of the contest. The call came in on Ayman’s cel phone. Putting it on speaker, everyone listened as the results were announced: DARG team had come in first place, and Black Unit had placed third. There were no hurt feelings apparent for those that didn’t win — for these young performers, every victory is a shared victory. DARG members will now go on to Denmark to produce an album (if they can get out of Gaza).

Fadi Bakhet, a studious and slightly preppy looking Afro-Palestinian in wire-rimmed glasses, is DARG’s manager, and also the brother of one of the members. As the night continued, the gathering moved to his apartment. They celebrated the successful show, which also fell on the last day of exams for many students, and the laughing and conversation continued late into the night. The next day was hot and sunny, and thousands of Gazawians gathered on the beach to swim and relax by the Mediterranean.

These stories may seem incongruent with much of the international reporting about Gaza and the Hamas government. But it is exactly for this reason that they should be told.

If you follow the reporting on Palestine in the US media, you may imagine a fundamentalist state. Hamas-stan, as at least one Israeli commentator has called it. You may imagine a nation of terrorists, where women are oppressed and men launch rockets. But perhaps when we learn that Palestinian families swim on Friday afternoons, that they study literature in the day and rap about imprisoned friends at night, we can rethink the US’ unquestioning support for Israeli aggression against this almost entirely defenseless population.

Yesterday, I visited a journalism class at the Islamic University, taught by Rami Almeghari. The students had many questions, but one young woman’s words in particular stayed with me. “What can we do to reach people in America and tell them how things really are here,” she asked. “How can we get them to listen, and to see?”

Tall and self-assured, Freedia is a powerful performer and brings an undeniable energy to the play. During rehearsals, says Lucky, “when Freedia comes in, the cast lights up, and everyone does their best.” Freedia is best known as part of a community of gay rappers self-identified as sissy bounce artists. She rejects that label, saying, “I’m a gay rapper, don’t get me wrong. But there’s no such thing as separating it into straight bounce and sissy bounce. It’s all bounce music.”

Bounce is the name given to the style of New Orleans Hip-Hop recognized for a distinctive beat and call-and-response lyrical style that owes much to Mardi Gras Indians and other local cultural traditions. Although not widely listened to outside of the south, bounce dominates New Orleans clubs, and is so identified with the poor neighborhoods of the city, it’s sometimes called “project music.”

“When you hear bounce,” says Lucky, people in a club go wild. “They just forget about it. They throw their hands up in the air, they catch the wall.” However you label Freedia’s music, she is one of several gay rappers who have broken down barrier after barrier to become some of New Orleans’ most popular musicians.

Spreading New Orleans Culture

Catch Dat Beat attempts to spread the love of bounce, and it proves infectious. The play advertises that it has no profanity or “obscene body gestures,” (a challenge, when capturing the bounce experience, which often involves a lot of both). Lucky Johnson is a cousin of popular director/actor Tyler Perry, and like a Tyler Perry script, Catch Dat Beat has positive characters and an accessible story. The basic story follows a hair stylist (played by Freedia) who throws a block party to show a visiting cousin how New Orleans gets down. There are moments of conflicts (will Freedia’s grandfather, played by Lucky, accept her sexuality? Will police break up the block party?) but the show is really about celebrating local culture. Lucky also acts in the play, along with bounce trendsetter Tenth Ward Buck

The second act of the show recreates a block party on stage, and features short appearances by many of the biggest names in bounce. During the opening weekend, the crowd rose cheering to their feet as stars including Ms. Tee, Gotti Boy Chris and Katey Red took over the stage.

Lucky wants Catch Dat Beat to help popularize bounce and New Orleans. He structured the play around a block party to show that New Orleans celebrations are really about building community and supporting your neighbors.

“Growing up in less fortunate neighborhoods, your parents would have card games, or suppers,” explains Lucky. “Say Miss Carol across the street’s light bill was due. Miss Carol would have a supper. Everyone in the neighborhood would buy a plate to help her pay the light bill.” In other words, continued Lucky, the block party comes from this tradition, and is ultimately about “how a people are able to come together in a time of need.”

Lucky has produced many of New Orleans bounce hits, and sees producing as a way to support positive work. “I can’t sign a hip hop gangster rapper,” he says. “I don’t advocate killing and drugs or slap that bitch. I’m not into that. I’m not gonna put my money behind it. If you come to me with something that says ‘get on the dance floor and have a good time,’ then I can support it.”

He is excited about all of the play’s actors, heaping praise on the accomplishments of Tenth Ward Buck and Freedia. “Buck was the first in so many ways,” he says of his star, listing his accomplishments. “The first to speed up bounce, the first to take an R&B track and bounce it out.” Through more than ten years of albums, plus a film, an upcoming book, and his dedication to working with youth, Buck has earned the praise.

As for the star of the show, “Freedia is outstanding,” says Lucky. “Every time he’d get the mic, he’d just light up the room.” Buck also Is quick to praise Freedia. “As Freedia was coming up, a lot of people tried to drag him down,” Buck says. “And he didn’t care about what they said, he kept moving forward. I don’t care if you straight or what, everyone is bouncing to Freedia’s music.” In fact, the sissy bounce community that Katey Red birthed ten years ago with her album Melpomene Block Party has rejuvenated the form, and gay rappers like Freedia have gone from a novelty to a central part of bounce culture.

Conquering Obstacles

Bounce music faces many obstacles on the way to national popularity. It is in many ways so distinctly New Orleans, with most songs featuring neighborhood-specific references, that it’s hard to imagine a bounce party in any other city. However, elements of bounce have appeared in songs by national acts like David Banner, Mike Jones and Beyonce.

Here in New Orleans, bounce artists bring lines around the corner when they perform. Freedia believes bounce will keep growing, and isn’t worried about any potential obstacles. She has struggled in a sometimes-homophobic music scene and become one of the leading stars — gay or straight — in New Orleans. “We been working really hard all these years of getting people to accept us,” she says. “Maybe get throwed at and screamed at, but over time all that has changed. All the hard work has finally paid off.”

With a show at this year’s Jazz Fest by Big Freedia, Katey Red and Sissy Nobby, as well as a photo spread in hipster music magazine XLR8R, the music form is clearly reaching new audiences. “For me it was the determination to change the people and make them love what we do,” says Freedia. “And that’s what my job was. When I became a gay bounce rapper I said that I was going to change it and make people love me, and make them love gay people.”

“People say negative things,” about gay rap stars, acknowledges Lucky. “I don’t care, at the end of the day it’s about the message. People who are homophobic, it tells me about that person’s character, because god loves us all no matter what.”

* Check out Ya Heard Me, the definitive Bounce Film.

Once the show began all bets were off. The band began with the song “The Music Never Stopped” — a rock and roll stomper dedicated to those who always hear the music, even when the band has packed and gone. Next was “Jack Straw,” one of the classic Robert Hunter tales of the outlaw who is part hustler, part loser, and an essentially good guy who finds himself in situations that have nothing but morally ambiguous endings. The band’s work in the first thirty or so minutes was tight yet meandering in the way that one expects a jazz combo to be on a great night. Or, it was like the Grateful Dead was on a good night when Jerry Garcia was still alive. Taking the honors from Garcia was Gov’t Mule/Allman Brothers guitarist Warren Haynes. Haynes is a blues and rock guitarist extraordinaire whose legend just continues to grow with each gig he plays. As the set progressed into the sometimes sarcastic, sometimes celebratory “Estimated Prophet” and then the Dead’s paean to its fallen inspirations (from Beat legend Neal Casady to Jerry Garcia and beyond) “He’s Gone,” the music began to reach that space where the best Dead music has always gone. I can’t tell you exactly where it is, but it’s not of this earth yet is positioned firmly on the firmament the audience is dancing on. Finishing off with what might be termed the Dead’s Top 40 hits, rhythm guitarist Bob Weir led the band and audience through “Touch of Grey” and “I Need A Miracle.” Replete with the almost mandatory singalongs to certain songs and verses that each listener has hung their own special meanings to, the first set ended in a celebratory version of “Truckin’.”

The rhythm section of Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, and Mickey Hart remain much more than a mere rhythm section. It’s not just a backbeat, it’s a melodic riff. This would become even more apparent in the second set when they took over the stage for close to half an hour when the rest of the band took their leave in the middle of a jam that began as soon as they hit the stage after intermission. The disco tinged “Shakedown Street” broke the ice and, while folks made their way to a place where security wouldn’t insist they sit down instead of dance, the first strains of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” unleashed themselves from Haynes’ guitar. From there it was back to the early psychedelia of the Dead’s catalog. A jam that began with Haynes singing “Caution, Do Not Stop On Tracks” from the Anthem of the Sun album proceeded into a rhythm section performance that had its roots in the place in the human soul that resides somewhere between the Garden of Eden and the future we do not know. That’s a mighty big space, but this rhythm crew can fill it like no other. Entwined in the rhythm section’s recital were guitar notes that seemed to come from that space Sun Ra called the place. The rhythm section solo came back around with another hippie classic titled “Cosmic Charlie” from the 1969 album Aoxomoa and then bassist Lesh lent his vocals to “New Potato Caboose” — a song that sometimes sounds like it was written by Arnold Schoenberg after he attended a blues club on acid.

The set continued with a sonic adventure lifted from the first side of the 1975 Blues for Allah album. This series pf songs, which begins with the jazzlike “Help On the Way” slides into the instrumental “Slipknot” and releases itself in the anthemic “Franklin’s Tower” with its directive to “roll away the dew.” It was during this part of the concert that I was reminded of John Coltrane’s album Ascension. The music that came from the stage in Greensboro during this segment came down in walls without dimensions. Walls that overwhelmed the structure they were meant to contain. Walls that crumbled from their own depth and breadth of sound. Walls that became waves of musical substance without limit. Walls that resolved themselves in the dance that “Franklin’s Tower” insisted on.

And then, it was over. The band played the blues classic “Samson and Delilah” for an encore. This is a song that claims that “if he had his way, he would tear this whole building down.” Although the Greensboro Coliseum was able to contain the Dead this evening, if they continue to perform as they did the opening night of their tour, there may come a time when no building can.

“If you don’t give us trillions”
The CEOs began to squeak
“It’ll cost you zillions
The market’s gonna freak!”
Then those hungry eyes all turned to Bill
To question his intent
Was Bill a friend to billionaires?
Or from some demon sent?

But if ever there was question
Bill soon left there be no doubt
The first words that he spoke
Made them jump for joy and shout
Though there never was much question
The whole thing became a rout
When right away he told them
“Boys, we’re gonna bail you out!”

Then he said “I came here thinking bailout
Cause I’ve got bailout on my mind
And we want to do this bailout
Before bailout gets defined
And then we’re gonna bail out
Go sip champagne and wine
We won’t be here when they find out
Bailout Bill just robbed ‘em blind!”

And Bailout Bill became their Savior
His blessed words did soothe their souls
When he said “I’ll never leave you Wall Street boys
Outside in the cold
You boys are not some average Joes
You’re in a different class
It just won’t do if boys like you
Fall down on your ass”

“Cause when you reach a certain size
(Much bigger than a whale)
If we let you fall you crush us all
‘Cause you’re too big to fail
Yes, you’re all much too big to fail”
Bill told each giant firm
“So here’s a great big pile of Federal cash
For all of you to burn”

(Chorus unison “Here’s a great big stash of federal cash
for all of you to burn”)

“Let me tell you about free markets” Bill said
“Freedom isn’t free
Because failure’s not on option
For great big men like you and me
So my bi-partisan shipmates and I
Implore you: do not fret
As sure as my name’s Bailout Bill
We’ll socialize your debt!”

And as Bill stood there before them
Those titans on the Hill
It warmed their hearts (and private parts)
As only bailouts will
Said Bill “I’ve got one more thing
To say before I go
This is Bailout Bill from Capitol Hill
And it’s the Billionaire Bailout Show!”

(Chorus unison “Bailout Bill will be back next week
For the Billionaire Bailout Show!”)

As I was walkin’ I saw a sign there
And that sign said “No tresspassin’”
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothin’
Now that side was made for you and me
In the squares of the city/In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office, I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me

Woody sez: “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, ‘cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

Let’s not forget that Guthrie penned “This Land is My Land” in response to Irving Berlin’s saccharine “God Bless America.”

And let’s not forget the words Woody scrawled on his guitar: “This machine kills fascists.”

Let’s also not forget the power and prescience of Guthrie’s lyrics, like this from “Jesus Christ”:

Jesus was a man who traveled through the land
A hard working man and brave
He said to the rich, “Give your money to the poor,”
But they laid Jesus Christ in His grave

And this from “Pretty Boy Floyd”:

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen
And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home

Woody Guthrie laid the foundation for generations of American singer-songwriters to use their music and lyrics to challenge the prevailing platitudes of popular music…and to provide a Greek chorus of protest and outrage to keep us all more honest and aware.

With the stakes having never been higher and the denial never deeper, what we choose to do with this awareness and outrage—right now—is genuinely a matter of life and death…

The music ranged from British dance hall ditties to folk tinged ballads with some serious hard rock in between. Then there was the John Cage/Stockhausen mishmash of sound called “Revolution #9”. A counterpart to the other song titled Revolution (known as “Revolution #1”), “Revolution #9” was meant to be the chaotic sounds of revolution as conceived by John Lennon. At times reminiscent of a political protest and other times more like a football game, the entire collage reminds many listeners of a trip on LSD. “Revolution #1″, on the other hand, represented a debate going on between the Beatles, within John Lennon’s mind , and in the larger society over the merits of revolutionary change and the forms any such change should take. Chairman Mao and dogmatic cadres or Fabian-like evolutionary change spurred by a revolutionary change in consciousness. Of course, this latter possibility was also open to interpretation. Would this change in consciousness be towards the “new man” that Che Guevara wrote about or would it be the new consciousness Timothy Leary spoke of and Charles Reich would attempt to denote in his 1970 book The Greening of America?

The Beatles didn’t have the answers. Indeed, they were asking the questions like everyone else. However, in the convulsive year that was 1968, when all the pillars of what already was were being challenged, there were many who did think the Beatles had the answers. One of these was the aforementioned Charles Manson. His conclusions regarding the tunes “Helter Skelter” and “Piggies” combined with a racist and apocalyptic vision fueled an exceptionally gory spate of Hollywood murders and a particularly surreal series of spectacular trials. White Panther John Sinclair, meanwhile, wrote an open letter to John Lennon regarding the latter’s apparent hesitation regarding the political upheaval and dramatic shift to the left among the youth of the world. The letter was responded to by Lennon and was read by millions of readers in underground newspapers across the world. To be more precise, the letters concerned the single release of the song and not the album release. This difference was essential, primarily because the lyrics that read

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out

On the single version, go like this on the album version

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out (in).

The latter version obviously showed some ambivalence on the part of the Beatles (or at least John Lennon) regarding an approach that ignored the fact of the violence being used against the protesters. One other aspect of Sinclair’s argument had to do with these lyrics:

You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You better free you mind instead

It was Sinclair’s contention that both the institutions and one’s mind needed to be freed. Lennon eventually came around to a mode of thinking considerably closer to Sinclair’s. In fact, he helped spearhead a campaign to get Sinclair released from prison after he was sentenced to ten years for giving a narc one joint of marijuana.

But the four songs mentioned above were not the album. “Back In the USSR” poked gentle fun at the American rockers who celebrated the United States as the greatest place to be while conveniently ignoring its legacy of racism and war. “Julia” is a beautiful poem to Lennon’s mother, his first son and even Yoko Ono—the “ocean child” of the lyrics. “Blackbird” is a song about Rosa Parks and her refusal to move when ordered to do so by the realities of American apartheid. As we all know, that refusal was a pivotal movement in the struggle to rid the nation of that disgrace. George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was inspired by an epigram of the I Ching and is one of the most beautiful songs ever composed by a Beatle. Ad infinitum. I’ll let the reader fill in the spaces regarding the rest of the selections on this double disc.

Everyone had (or has) their favorite Beatle. Mine was always John Lennon. Similarly, everyone has their favorite Beatles song(s) and album(s). Without a doubt, mine is the White Album.

Normally such a move would provoke all the derision this writer can muster. Live at Shea is an exception, however, for two reasons. One: this is The Clash! This is the band that politicized punk rock from its very inception, and brought rebellion back to rock ‘n’ roll in a way that still inspires to this very day.

Two: the album is a glimpse into a period in the band’s history that was simultaneously exalting and tragic — between things begun and ended, between the power of great music and ideas and the power of right-wing fear and reaction.

The Clash’s decision to open up for the Who on the mega-stars’ “farewell” tour of American stadiums in the fall of ‘82 was itself an ideological quandary. The Clash was the biggest they had ever been, and were arguably one of the biggest groups in the world. Combat Rock was proving to be their most successful release to date, and was fast on its way to platinum status.

It seemed that the band’s incendiary message was reaching more people than ever before. For a group poised to take over the world, a stadium tour seemed the logical next step. For a group that had always taken an unflinching radical stance, though, stadium tours represented all that was wrong with rock ‘n’ roll. Everything from the flashy stage shows to the overpriced tickets smacked of how capitalism was ruining music.

Furthermore, as biographer Pat Gilbert puts it, “The group had always preferred the intimacy of medium-size venues. It was this philosophy of being able to see and communicate with their audience that lay behind their week-long residencies at modest venues . . .” In other words, stadiums were where all the democracy and solidarity of music was crushed by piles of cash and elitism.

The Clash justified the move by figuring (and rightly so) that the tour was a way to reach even more people. Sound logic, no doubt. The America that The Clash was returning to had entered a new and scary era. The rightward drift of official politics in the US mirrored the same in Britain. A year and a half into his presidency, Reagan had already crushed the air traffic controllers’ strike and signaled that he had more of the same in store for women, Blacks, and anyone who dared defy the new Washington consensus.

Combat Rock was filled with impassioned calls-to-arms, urging young people to dig their heels in and resist the upcoming onslaught. In an interview years later, Joe Strummer would recall his thoughts on the advent of Reagan/Thatcher: “[When] Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of England and Ronald Reagan became President of the U.S. . . . it was hard to tell who would be worse, but we knew that a tremendous struggle was ahead . . . their tendencies leaned to the far-right if not fascism.”

* * * * *

When The Clash took the stage at Shea on October 13th, rain was coming down in sheets. The prospect of playing in front of 50,000 screaming fans was indeed daunting. Bass player Paul Simonon recalls that “it felt a bit like miming because there were so many people there.”

Yet listening to the album today, one would never guess that the group was so nervous. Footage of the gig shot by documentarian Don Letts shows the four members throwing themselves around the massive stage with the same swagger and confidence that they brought to the countless club dates they had performed in previous years. Strummer even jokes with the audience at one point: “Will you stop talking at the back, please? It’s too loud. It’s putting us off the song, here! We’re trying to concentrate so stop yakking!”

The moments of raw power and vitality are numerous on Live at Shea. The opening notes of “London Calling” are punched out so forcefully they could shatter concrete. “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” possesses a rolling raucousness that can’t even be heard in the studio recording. And “Career Opportunities” — the only song from their first album played that night — carries all the immediacy it had when it was first performed by four unemployed punks in North London five years previously.

By the time the group finish off their set with a blistering version of “I Fought the Law,” they are holding the audience in the palm of their hand.

And yet, it’s also apparent that this is a band not too far from disintegration. Just prior to the tour the group had sacked drummer Topper Headon due to his growing heroin addiction, thus putting an end to the “classic” Clash lineup. Terry Chimes, drummer for The Clash on their first album, had been brought in as a last minute replacement.

The sudden change in personnel is evident on some tracks. While Headon had a background in myriad musical styles, Chimes was much more of a straight rock drummer. While he pulls-off the rap and dub beats during the group’s medley of “Magnificent Seven” and “Armagideon Time,” his playing is hollow and often sluggish.

Other more prominent schisms within the group are evident too. Those familiar with the group’s version of Eddy Grant’s “Police On My Back” will notice a section of the song when Mick Jones’ lead guitar part is strangely missing. The story here is that Strummer had walked up to Jones and physically grabbed the neck of his guitar to prevent him from playing.

The rift between Jones and the rest of the group had been growing for quite some time. He had disagreed with bringing original manager Bernie Rhodes back on board. He claims to have merely “gone along” with Topper’s sacking. And his original mix of Combat Rock had been shelved in favor of bringing Glynn Johns in to produce the final version.

Chimes was privy to how this bitterness was affecting the daily workings of The Clash: “By then Joe and Mick obviously had a difference of opinions on a range of things . . . They had devised a system where they didn’t have to confront each other all the time — there was an avoidance going on, which covered up the fact there were deeper issues there.”

* * * * *

Less than a year after the concert at Shea, Jones was kicked out of The Clash. That a founding member whose songwriting and virtuosity on the guitar had been an indispensable part of the group could be kicked out was evidence that their existence had become increasingly rudderless.

Combat Rock’s defiant protest hadn’t been enough to stave off the consolidation of Reagan/Thatcherism. As the heated struggles of the ’70s were pushed into bitter defeat, anyone with The Clash’s firebrand left-wing politics was forced into either abject obscurity or milquetoast compromise.

Compromise was never something The Clash was good at, and they continued to soldier on sans Jones. But with the movements that had long inspired The Clash — from the anti-racist forces to the Sandinistas — fighting for their very survival, the ground on which they stood became shakier by the day. It didn’t take long for one of rock’s most relevant groups to become a caricature, a music industry parody of what a “left-wing” band is supposed to look like.

“The worst moment was realizing that there was no way forward,” said Strummer some years later, “like the gap between rhetoric and the actuality. For example, talking about all the issues that The Clash raised and what your daily life would have been like if we’d have stayed together. . . You know, you’d never really have a life that would be real and yet you’d be expected to say something real about life to real people and make some real sense.”

Not long after the release of their universally panned follow-up to Combat Rock, the group would call it a day. The concert at Shea would simultaneously be their apex and the beginning of the end for The Clash.

One can’t help but listen to Live at Shea Stadium without remembering Strummer’s quip that “rock ‘n’ roll is played on enemy ground.” If a group like the Clash can walk into the belly of the beast and bring the same verve and immediacy that they delivered to anyone who ever listened to them is a testament to the power of truly great music. Knowing that they would be among the many brilliant political acts that imploded in the Reagan ‘80s makes these fleeting and final moments of greatness all the more prescient.

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels
I dont know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels
I look around for the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through
Looking into their eyes I see them running too

Running on – running on empty
Running on – running blind
Running on – running into the sun
But Im running behind

– from “Running on Empty” by Jackson Browne

Screaming in the Rain

I was on my way home from doing a radio interview in Reading, Pennsylvania. It was very cold, windy and pouring rain. As I got closer to home, I found myself driving down a road where many of my campaign lawn signs had been planted. I noticed that one had blown over and was lying in the street. I pulled my car over the side of the road, jumped out of the car and began screaming at the sign as I picked it up, straighten it out and re-planted it. “You’re not going to lay there on the road, in the rain and get hit by a truck. You’re going right back where you were and do your job”.

That was the first of three stops I made. When I jumped back in the car after yelling at the third lawn sign, it just dawned on me that I had ruined a very good pair of shoes and perhaps a very good blazer while saving around five dollars worth of lawn signs. But it took me until I got home to realize what had happened. It wasn’t about the price of the lawn signs and it wasn’t about wrecking my shoes and blazer.

Why would a 62-year-old man with a couple of university degrees jump out of his car on a cold, windy day in the pouring rain and start yelling at lawn signs insisting to them that he wasn’t going to let them lay in the rain drenched street and get hit by a truck? It wasn’t until later in the afternoon that what had happened began to coalesce in my consciousness.

This is what it’s like to run for Congress as an independent. This was a metaphor I could’ve never constructed consciously. I never gave a thought about wrecking a pair of shoes and a blazer in order to save five dollars worth of lawn signs. It was what I simply had to do. This is what I’ve been doing every day for the last nine months.

Why did this happen today? Have I finally snapped? In a week the election will be over. I have no money. Worse; I am around six thousand dollars in debt. I raised ten thousand dollars but I had to spend seven thousand of those dollars just to get on the ballot. That is how much it costs to collect the five thousand signatures required in Pennsylvania this year to appear on the ballot. So I had only three thousand dollars to conduct my campaign compared to the five hundred thousand dollars raised by my Republican opponent.

Raising money is not rocket science. There are only a couple of things you have to do. First of all you have to ask. That is the main reason why people contribute. But you do have to explain to people the value they will derive from their donation. If they don’t believe they will receive any value from such a donation, there will be no contribution.

So after hundreds of telephone calls, hundreds of letters and e-mail messages to thousands of people over nine months I have only raised ten thousand dollars. I know a lot of people. If each one that I asked had contributed just two hundred dollars I would’ve raised four hundred thousand dollars. That would actually be enough for an electoral victory. But out of the thousands of people I contacted only three dozen contributed a total of ten thousand dollars. What value did those three dozen people see that the thousands of others did not?

If someone were to ask me if I would like to have a seven series BMW, I would give them an emphatic ‘yes’. On the other hand, if they then said all I had to do was hand over seventy thousand dollars, I would have to say that I didn’t want one quite that much. Give it to me at no cost and I’d love to have one. I might even come up with twenty thousand dollars. But I would never spend seventy thousand dollars for an automobile. It is simply a luxury that I cannot afford.

Everyday I get e-mail messages and telephone calls telling me what a great job I’m doing and how much we need to have candidates like me. But as soon as I finish thanking the person for their complement and ask for a donation the message becomes very clear. “John, you’re doing a great thing but you can’t really ask me to throw away money on a candidate who cannot win. Maybe I can let you have twenty-five dollars”.

That’s when I go in to my explanation that, although I cannot get elected, there are many things that I can win. I usually explain how I was only permitted to participate in one debate two years ago but this year I have appeared in all three. I explain about all of the radio stations and newspapers which have interviewed me; all the organizations which have invited me to speak this year while none of that happened two years ago. But in the final analysis, I am perceived as a luxury candidate that people cannot afford. Progressives want me in very much the same way I want a seven series BMW. Give it to them with little or no cost and you have a deal. But I am just not worth two hundred dollars let alone two thousand.

JOHNNY I HARDLY KNEW YA

You hadn’t an arm, you hadn’t a leg,
Hurroo Hurroo
You hadn’t an arm, you hadn’t a leg,
Hurroo Hurroo
You hadn’t an arm, you hadn’t a leg
You’ll Have to be put with the bowl to beg
Oh my darling dear you look so queer
Johnny I hardly knew ya

– From “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ya”

Last Sunday night I went to the AMVETS to make a little campaign speech with the other candidates. After the presentation a big husky women veteran grabbed me by the arm and said, “Honey, you was the best one up there”. I thanked her very much and asked her if she would tell her friends about me and ask them to vote for me too. She said “oh honey, I ain’t going to vote for you; I hardly know you. I ain’t never seen you before tonight. I ain’t never seen you on the television and I ain’t got none of them postcards from you. None of the other ladies never heard of you neither. I think you ought to get a job on the radio because you sound very good like that Rush Limbaugh”.

Of course she has never seen me on television or received a post card from me and I only appeared in each of the newspapers that serve my congressional district one or two times as part of an article about the incumbent. It costs a lot of money to do those kinds of things. It would cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to send a postcard to each of the voters in my congressional district! The Republican and Democrat Parties send out postcards for their candidates. That way the candidates do not even have to use any of the funds they raised on postcards. They will spend their money on television advertising.

Even at this late date I could flood the local radio stations with advertisements for only about six thousand dollars. I could place an ad in the “Community Courier” for two thousand dollars and get into one hundred and ten thousand households. I could get out powerful progressive message and raise the consciousness of tens of thousands of people but this effort is of such little value that only a very few see it worth a contribution over two hundred dollars.

Buddy Can You Spare a Dime

They used to tell me I was building a dream
and so I followed the mob
when there was earth to plow or guns to bear
I was over there
right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream.
With peace and glory ahead –
why should I be
standing in line,
waiting for bread?

– From “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime”

The author of that depression era song tells us that the narrator is not bitter; he is bewildered. He is a man who had faith and hope in this country. Then came the crash. Now he can not accept the fact that the bubble has burst. He still believes. He still has faith. He just doesn’t understand what could have happened to make everything go so wrong.

Our nation is now closer to fascism than it has ever been. The two corporate parties have led us into two illegal wars, stripped us of our civil liberties, plunged us into a ten trillion dollar National Debt and have made corporations our masters instead of our servants. We have troops not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but in one hundred twenty-seven nations around the world. In the last few weeks we have bombed Pakistan and invaded Syria. For the first time since the Civil War we have a combat brigade on duty in the United States “to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities”. So much for the Posse Comitatus Act.

The two major presidential candidates have both confessed they plan to continue a foreign policy of war and aggression with the concomitant slaughter of potentially another million innocent men, women and children. Both have committed themselves to a failed economic system which sacrifices the well-being of ninety-nine percent of the people on the altar of the superrich ruling elite which finances their political campaigns.

The Republican and Democrat parties lack any clear vision for America. They have no real leadership and they inspire no hope for the future. They have given us a view of the world that is clouded by war, poverty, ignorance, fear and violence. I have a different vision for America. I see an America that leads the world in spreading peace instead of war; hope instead of fear; sustainability instead of disaster; freedom instead of occupation. I see an America in which every person, regardless of their race, creed, color, age, gender or sexual orientation is valued and lives in dignity, and every person is free to reach his or her full potential.

Before the night is over I will get a dozen “at-a-boys” in e-mail messages or from people on the phone and maybe if I’m lucky someone will contribute twenty-five dollars. Yesterday someone contributed five dollars. Running a congressional campaign on thirty dollars a day and a dozen “at-a-boys” pretty much explains why I went “screaming in the rain.” But it no longer makes me feel like I am “building a dream”.

The choice of music and entertainment at these conventions speaks volumes. The Democrats had Kanye West, a significant choice considering this is a party that still seeks to keep rap’s more controversial elements at arms’ length. But West’s own limitations mirror those of the Democratic Party all too well: too star-struck by the system to really do anything about it.

As for the Republican Convention, they were entertained by Styx. That’s right . . . Styx! The power-ballad dinosaurs who have never been afraid to inhabit music’s lowest brow for the sake of making money. For the Republicans, a better choice could not have been made!

Compare these artists to those who played for the unwashed masses outside. While politicians hobnobbed with corporate executives and turned the dreams of the American electorate into so much political chum, students, workers, artists and musicians were raising their voices to bring real immediacy to the issues of war, racism, poverty and inequality.

The sheer diversity and dynamism of these musical acts make the “official” entertainment look like a yawn-fest. Punk, hip-hop, soul, reggae, folk, indie-rock — the multitude of genres was almost too much to keep track of. From the indie reggae-rock of State Radio to the jazz-funk inflected rap of the Flobots, to the ubiquitous presence of Rage Against the Machine.

The large amount of varying acts at these protests shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. The past several years have seen an increase in political music from artists both established and up-and-coming; musicians who, like most in this country, think the world is heading down an increasingly unequal and dangerous path. If the protests are any indication, then there may well be many more artists to come who are willing to give new meaning to the term “popular music.”

Recreate ’68?

Convention season opened with the certainty that the Democrats would nominate their first African-American presidential candidate — a historic announcement that has inspired a lot of hope past the mere personality of Obama. And so, protesters were of all different mindsets about a candidate whose rightward shift flies in the face of his slogans for “change.”

Veteran rocker and radical Wayne Kramer, who remembers when his own group the MC5 were caught up in the police riot at the ’68 convention in Chicago, said in an interview that he plans to vote for Obama, but wants to hold his feet to the fire: “I do this [protest] out of a sense of participating in democracy,” Kramer proclaimed. “Democracy requires participation, it’s not just a theory.”

Kramer’s presence wasn’t the only thing reminiscent of those heady days forty years ago. Organizers were aware of the deliberate resonance with the ’68 protests. Indeed, one of the slogans thrown around the most at the protests was “Recreate ’68.”

In that vein, there was an effort to recreate that same spirit of resistance that reached into every aspect of culture during that red-letter year. Throughout the convention activists participated in the “Tent State Music Festival,” which treated attendees to an eclectic lineup: Kramer, State Radio, Son of Nun, radical folk stalwart David Rovics, the genre-bending Michelle Shocked, Jill Sobule, The Coup and Jello Biafra were just a sampling of the artists who participated during Tent State.

Certainly not all these performers were of the same mind about voting Obama, however. One of the most recognized radical hip-hop acts of our time, dead prez, performed in front of the Colorado state capitol in downtown Denver right in the thick of the protests, where both stic.man and M1 made their thoughts on the elections very straightforward in a freestyle later posted on YouTube:

“You expect me to vote for the lesser of two evils? Never!
It’s more the evil of two lessers
That’s like saying to M[1] choose your oppressor
Pick one: Jeffrey Dahmer or Hannibal Lecter
You want crack or coke, Pepsi or Dr. Pepper?
They’re all fucked up and neither one of them better!”

Whether those marching and bobbing their heads were planning to vote Obama or not, the one thing unifying every voice on the streets was the idea that no matter who is in office, they must be held accountable by pressure from below. That was made very clear on the final night of protests as Tent State was given a send-off by Rage Against the Machine.

Thanks to a lot of overblown hype from the mainstream media, it’s feasible that Rage were the most high-profile aspect of the DNC protests. It was a frustrating development considering that their show, which also featured the Flobots and other artists, was intended as merely a prelude to the march lead by Iraq Veterans Against the War. Nonetheless, RATM was willing to put actions behind their words when they brought members of IVAW onstage with them before beginning their set.

By all accounts, the show was electrifying. More importantly, the IVAW march perfectly displayed the kind of strength that veterans can have in this movement. Directly defying orders not to approach the Pepsi Center, the vets and the thousands following them simply walked right through the line of police, who stepped aside rather than risk the embarrassment of having to beat up a former soldier.

Police On My Back

It was in St. Paul, however, that the police showed their true colors. Given the amount of physical repression doled out to activists at the RNC, there’s a certain amount of irony in activists’ application of the “Recreate ‘68” slogan to the Democratic convention.

A doubly sick irony was that the Republicans kicked their soiree off on Labor Day. Given the eight-year onslaught on workers’ living standards overseen by the Bush White House, choosing this date seemed to be rubbing it in the face of those anyone who has worked hard for so little.

Protest organizers saw very little humor in this. That same night the “Take Back Labor Day” concert took place on the south bank of the Mississippi River. Once again, the night brought a varied bunch of highlights. Billy Bragg lead the crowd in “There is Power in a Union.” Tom Morello, in his Nightwatchman alter-ego, brought anti-war vets onstage to sing “This Land is Your Land” (including the much more explicit “lost verses”). Mos Def dedicated “Undeniable” to New Orleans, possibly besieged once again by the specter of Hurricane Gustav. A recently reunited Pharcyde performed all their classics.

Even as attendees departed this relatively calm event, cops were still waiting to hassle them, even shutting off bridges to the mainland until finally and inexplicably letting people pass. This kind of craven intimidation characterized the whole convention. Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman was arrested along with her crew while covering the protests. Innocent bystanders were often brutalized and arrested as cops and protesters clashed. And of course, there were the ridiculous charges of “terrorism” leveled against activists arrested the night before the events even began!

Sure enough, musicians were also caught up in this atmosphere of heavy manners. At the IVAW conference held in the days running up to the RNC, Baltimore political MC Son of Nun was among many activists harassed, and was even singled out by police himself after being tailed by a hotel manager. As it played out, eight officers held him for a half-hour before letting him go, but it was a blatant example of racial profiling and police repression that smacked more of the Jim Crow south. As SON himself put it, “I’ve never been kicked out of a hotel before.”

The crackdowns extended throughout the whole weekend. At a rally/festival that Tuesday, as Anti-Flag finished their set, the rumors that RATM would also be playing at this demonstration were quickly dashed by the police, who fallaciously claimed that the permit for the park had expired. The entire crowd erupted into a defiant chant of “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” Not to be deterred, Zack De la Rocha and Tom Morello took the stage nonetheless to perform an a-capella version of “Bulls on Parade” that humorously featured Morello mouthing his iconic guitar part into a megaphone before joining the march to the convention center.

The Sound of Rebellion

When asked by Rolling Stone why he participated in the march, Morello simply stated, “I think it’s important to call out the economic crimes at home and the war crimes abroad while they’re [the Republicans] are here… Not to let them get away with it while the media is focused here. It’s important to get that message out . . . to have that amplified alongside the B.S. messages being spouted from the podium.”

In the days of and directly following the RNC, newspapers were filled with all manner of B.S. Those arrested were written off as “anarchists,” “violent.” Mainstream media treated protesters and musicians with either indifference or contempt. To some, the large amount of radical music acts was simply proof that these activists weren’t “serious,” and were only there to “cause mischief.”

It wasn’t only a slander against the already bruised and battered protesters, but a slight against the role music can play in movements. More than a hundred years ago, Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill famously explained that “a pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once. But a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over.”

In the thick of protests, with the urgency of injustice passionately felt by all the participants, and the threat of violence and repression looming overhead, the strength and inspiration that can be gleaned from these songs can be almost as important as the ideology and tactics.

By now, it’s obvious to all but the most cynical of commentators that people are fed up with the direction of this country, and growing numbers are willing to put real action behind this frustration and anger.

Where this goes past the election is anyone’s guess, but one can hope that these protests are only the early rumblings of something bigger. If that’s the case, then popular rebellion can’t help but bring large sections of the artist and musician communities with it.

Truly popular music. What a concept.

Given the disastrous decisions made by U.S. officials in the seven long years since September 11, 2001, it would be easy tonight simply to catalog those many mistakes and condemn the bipartisan depravity of the Republican and Democratic politicians who — starting almost immediately after the towers fell — manipulated people’s anger and fear to build support for illegal and immoral wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It would be especially easy for those of us in the anti-war/anti-empire movement to feel self-righteous and say, “We told you so.” By the end of the day on 9/11, many of us saw where the nation was heading and tried, in vain, to argue for a saner strategy. For example:

It need not be said, but I will say it: The acts of terrorism that killed civilians in New York and Washington were reprehensible and indefensible; to try to defend them would be to abandon one’s humanity. … But this act was no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism — the deliberate killing of civilians for political purposes — that the U.S. government has committed during my lifetime.

Let us not forget that a military response will kill people, and if the pattern of past U.S. actions holds, it will kill innocents. Innocent people, just like the ones in the towers in New York and the ones on the airplanes that were hijacked. To borrow from President Bush, “mother and fathers, friends and neighbors” will surely die in a massive response.

[I]f we are to be decent people, we all must demand of our government — the government that a great man of peace, Martin Luther King Jr., once described as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” — that the insanity stop here.

With help from friends in my political circle, I wrote those words late in the day on September 11, 2001. The full essay was posted on the web the next day and appeared in the Houston Chronicle on September 14, prompting a flood of angry responses from people who thought that the piece was outrageous and that I was a traitor. Yet analyses like this, which were so controversial at the time, seem rather unremarkable today. In a recent report, the establishment think tank Rand Corp. concluded that the United States made a fundamental error in portraying the response to 9/11 as a “war on terrorism” and that “the U.S. strategy was not successful in undermining al Qa’ida’s capabilities.” [Seth G. Jones, Martin C. Libick, How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa’ida, 2008.] Looking back at the statements and writings of the anti-war activists who spoke up right away, I think it’s fair to say that in general we were honest in our assessments of history and accurate in our projections of what was to come. We shouldn’t feel too cocky about that, however; predicting that an imperial power will act like an imperial power is no great accomplishment.

So, tonight I want to do more than review the crimes that the Bush administration committed with the cooperation of Democrats, and to go beyond self-congratulation. That would be the easy path, but the easy path is rarely the most useful. Instead, let’s focus on ourselves and our fellow citizens. Let’s try to be honest about who we are and who we have been, in the hopes we can learn lessons that will be valuable in the future.

I’ll start with the rule of thirds, assuming it can be helpful to divide any human population roughly into thirds on any particular question. Based on the past seven years, how would we describe 21st century Americans in political terms? I would suggest that 9/11 showed us that we the people of the United States are arrogant, ignorant, and cowardly. About a third of us are arrogant and proud of the United States’ aggressive posture in the world. Another third of us are ignorant and hide behind the excuse that we don’t, or can’t, know what’s really happening. And the final third — the group in which I would place myself — are cowardly, avoiding the moral consequences of what we aren’t willing to do.

That may sound harsh, but these are irrefutable claims — and I have the pop songs to prove it. Of course songs lyrics do not an argument make, but I will illustrate my points the work of popular musicians, whose story-telling reflects the society from which it comes.

Arrogance

Let’s start with Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” which he wrote a few days after 9/11 and which appeared on his 2002 CD, Unleashed.

Keith articulates a desire to strike back that is easy to understand. This reflex to respond violently to a violent attack is part of being human; we all have the capacity for such action. But that does not mean, of course, that military responses are always morally justified. We may feel a desire to strike, but such a desire should be examined in the light of history and contemporary politics. Let’s consider one of Keith’s verses:

Oh justice will be served
And the battle will rage
This big dog will fight
When you rattle his cage
And you’ll be sorry that you messed with the U S of A
‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass
It’s the American way.

Was justice served when the United States rejected diplomacy and launched an illegal invasion of Afghanistan? Has the United States ever advanced the cause of justice in the Middle East and Central Asia, especially during the post-World War II period of its unparalleled dominance? Do U.S. policymakers go to war only when our cage is rattled? Or, in fact, has the United States consistently used war to extend and deepen economic dominance, especially in that post-WWII period?

Sadly, the only thing Keith gets right is the recognition that violence is the American way. From the moment Europeans landed in the Americas, they acquired land and resources through the kind of barbaric violence that is all too familiar in human history and a consistent feature of the American story. However, basic moral principles suggest that’s not something to celebrate.

Keith claims that the song has been misunderstood, that it was more patriotic than pro-war, and his claim is easy to believe — in the United States patriotism is often fused with an assumption of dominance and the inherent righteousness of U.S. violence, which is precisely the problem. But before we write off Toby Keith as part of some reactionary fringe, let’s remember that “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” was a popular song that advanced his career. Also consider the fact that he’s supporting Barack Obama in the current presidential race. Last month Keith, who has said “me and Michael Moore would agree on a lot of things,” offered this analysis:

There’s a big part of America that really believes that there is a war on terrorism, and that we need to finish up. So I thought it was beautiful the other day when Obama went to Afghanistan and got educated about Afghanistan and Iraq. He came back and said some really nice things.

There is nothing inconsistent in Keith’s song and these comments. The arrogance that is at the heart of his song has been expressed by Democrats and Republicans alike since 9/11. The assertion that the United States fights for justice in its wars abroad is routinely asserted across the conventional political spectrum and echoed in corporate commercial media. The fact that all of contemporary history refutes that assertion is irrelevant, because we live in a country in which ignorance can be celebrated.

Ignorance

This brings us to Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning,” from his 2002 CD, Drive.

Rather than critique the sentimental self-indulgence of Jackson’s song — since everything is always about America, it’s hardly surprising that in the dominant culture what’s most important is how Americans feel — let’s focus on this verse:

I’m just a singer of simple songs
I’m not a real political man
I watch CNN, but I’m not sure I can tell you the difference
in Iraq and Iran
But I know Jesus and I talk to God
And I remember this from when I was young
Faith, hope and love are some good things He gave us
And the greatest is love.

What does it say about the culture when a popular entertainer, who has ready access to as much information as he needs to understand the world, cannot distinguish between Iraq and Iran? He can’t tell the difference between the two most important regional powers in the most strategically crucial area of the world, home to the lion’s share of the planet’s petroleum, a place on which the majority of his country’s military power is focused? Through six decades in Iraq and Iran, the United States has been directly responsible for widespread death and incredible misery as a result of covert operations, direct attacks, and support for brutal dictators in each country. Yet even though he goes to the trouble of watching CNN, Jackson still is uncertain about which is which.

This is “willed ignorance,” the product of a conscious choice not to know what could be easily known and what one has a moral obligation to know. Again, Jackson is not idiosyncratic; I would suggest this stance is the norm in the United States. Rather than being embarrassed by his ignorance and taking steps to correct it, he offers it up as an indication of higher virtue, evidenced by his understanding of the centrality of love. I agree that faith, hope, and love should be central in our lives. But having faith, hope, and love doesn’t require ignorance. Knowledge is a good thing, too, something we can seek out ourselves and help each other acquire.

However, we also must recognize that knowledge won’t change the world unless we also have courage.

Cowardice

I have never been a fan of Toby Keith or Alan Jackson, and I don’t listen to much country music. I’m more of a Neil Young kind of guy. So, let me illustrate the cowardice of the American public by looking at Young’s music.

That may strike some as odd, given that Young’s 2006 Living with War CD was a direct challenge to the Bush administration and the U.S. occupation of Iraq. But the key to my criticism is the year — 2006. An anti-war record three years into the war should not be cause for uncritical accolades for a musician who claims to be a dissenter. We should be asking Neil Young, “Where were you in 2001?” The answer: He was writing and recording “Let’s Roll,” which was released on his 2002 CD, Are You Passionate?

That song is a tribute to the United Flight 93 passengers who intervened in the 9/11 hijacking of that plane and forced it down in Pennsylvania. One of those passengers, Todd Beamer, is said to have uttered the famous words, “let’s roll” as they took that action. Even if we want to interpret the song apolitically, as a simple tribute to human courage, it adds to the cultural mythology about U.S. heroism, which contributes to U.S. arrogance and does nothing to correct the ignorance crucial to engineering people’s consent for war. Beyond such a tribute, the song suggests a need for war:

No one has the answer
But one thing is true
You’ve got to turn on evil
When it’s coming after you
You’ve gotta face it down
And when it tries to hide
You’ve gotta go in after it
And never be denied
Time is runnin’ out
Let’s roll.

While Young was writing that song, the anti-war movement was trying to counter the country’s hyper-patriotism, warning where it would lead — to more U.S. aggression in the service of empire, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, to death and destruction, to the policies that Young eventually would oppose in Living with War. When the movement could have used an eloquent musical voice, Young was on the other side.

My goal is not to single out Neil Young, but to ask us all to reflect on how easy it was for so many to fall in line with that hyper-patriotism after 9/11, and how easy it might again be in the future. The task of responsible citizens in the empire is not to critique illegal and immoral wars when they go sour, but to resist those wars of aggression from the start. With that in mind, Young’s 2006 lyrics from Living with War ring just a bit hollow:

I join the multitudes
I raise my hand in peace
I never bow to the laws of the thought police
I take a holy vow
To never kill again
To never kill again

Courage requires taking risks. Most of the liberals who now are vocal in their opposition to the war did not take risks right after 9/11; most ducked and covered, claiming that America was too emotionally vulnerable for politics at that moment, as the politicians kept right on pushing their politics of empire, driving an arrogant and ignorant public to war.

My Cowardice

Again, while it’s always easy to catalog the flaws of others, it’s far more useful for all of us to attempt honest self-reflection, including those of us who opposed both wars from the start.

While I have worked hard over the years to learn about the Middle East and Central Asia, I recognize that it has been relatively easy given the resources and privileges available to me as a professor, and I also am aware of how much I still don’t know about those regions and about other parts of the world. I struggle for humility and try to learn more, though there’s ample room for criticism of me on those counts. But the virtue in which I feel most deficient these days is courage.

I have no problem defending the decision I made to speak out immediately after 9/11 and to contribute to anti-war organizing; at the time I thought those were the right things to do, and none of the criticism of those decisions — from conservatives or liberals — has ever offered a coherent moral or intellectual case against those actions. I am haunted not by what I did but by what I didn’t’ do, by my own cowardice. Why did those of us who opposed U.S. policy not take more risks and push harder? It’s fine to be right in one’s analysis; it’s better to be right and effective. And, in retrospect, the only thing that might have been effective in impeding the mad rush to war was for those dissenting from that madness to take real risks, to put our bodies in the path of the war machine. Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, articulated this so passionately on the University of California campus in December 1964:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Activists in the anti-war movement are sometimes accused of being cowards, of being afraid to fight. That is a slur designed to derail the anti-war movement’s honest critique of (1) the violence of the powerful, (2) the propaganda the powerful use to persuade ordinary people to support the violence, and (3) the economic motives of the elites whose wealth and privilege depends on that violence. But those of us in the anti-war movement should ask ourselves: Have we built a political culture that provides the support we need to act with courage? Do we have the real courage necessary to undermine the U.S. empire? While people suffer and die around the world as a direct result of U.S. military and economic policies, what are we doing to stop the machine? Are we willing to put our bodies upon the gears, the wheels, the levers? If forced to choose between our relative affluence and real sacrifices that conscience might demand, how do we choose?

This is not a question on which I have standing to pontificate. The answer is simple: I have not done enough. We haven’t done enough, because the machine is still grinding away, still grinding down people at home and around the world. Perhaps if anti-war activists had upped the ante and we had put our bodies in the way of the machine, the world would look very different tonight. Or perhaps all that would have happened was that we’d be in jail or dead because the machine would have rolled right along and rolled over us. There’s no way to know.

But I do know this: In the months after 9/11, when the political stakes seemed so high, I never really seriously considered putting my body on the gears and I never heard others in my political circles seriously discuss such options. We had not built movements and a political culture in which that question was on the table for most of us. When I think about that today — not that I didn’t do something more drastic, but that I never really considered it — I feel ashamed. That recognition doesn’t lead me to want to rush out and risk my life to prove something, but rather reminds me that I should rethink the strategies with which I’ve grown comfortable.

Facing Difficult Realities

This rethinking requires facing some difficult realities, which lead me to these recommendations:

* Drop the arrogance and face a painful truth: The troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are not fighting for our freedom or for justice. Whatever the individuals who serve in the military believe or do — and I realize that many believe they are defending us, and I know that many regularly act in compassionate and humane ways in the field — the U.S. military is not a defensive force or a humanitarian institution. It is an offensive force that destroys vulnerable people in other societies to entrench the power of a small U.S. elite and deliver the short-term material benefits that come to middle- and working-class people in the empire.

* Reject the ignorance and face a disturbing truth: The institutions that claim to help us understand the world (schools, universities, and the corporate commercial media) are key components of a propaganda system that encourages ignorance on these vital matters. Whatever the individuals in these institutions believe or do — and I realize that many believe they are part of a noble tradition, and I know many do challenge the conventional wisdom — these institutions are not fundamentally educational in nature. They are ideological factories that the elite use to undermine critical thinking about how power operates.

* Find the courage to resist and face some obvious truths: The crises we face in this country and the world — economic, political, cultural, ecological — will not be fixed by electing a new president, nor will the culture be turned around by traditional progressive political strategies. I will vote, and I will continue organizing. But I do not believe that the oppressive systems that structure our world can be dismantled through those methods. We need to think creatively, and we need to come to terms with the likelihood that until those in power believe that those of us who want to challenge power are willing to take serious risks, the machine will continue grinding.

These problems we face are not the result of an idiosyncratic moment in history or of one particularly thuggish group of politicians in power at that moment. We are dealing with the predictable consequences of a world shaped by patriarchy, white supremacy, nationalism, and capitalism — systems of coercion and control that are at odds with goals of justice and sustainability. That’s not easy to face, but it can help us break out of the insular self-indulgence that is so tempting when one lives in the most affluent society in the history of the world.

So, the crucial question isn’t, “Where were you when the world stopped turning?” The world didn’t stop turning. The violence of 9/11 should be understood as another ugly episode in a relentlessly violent period of human history. Let’s never forget that around the world people suffer 9/11-level violence on a regular basis. If that violence continues — the visible violence of war, the quiet violence of economic inequality, and the deeper violence of humans against the living world — it’s not clear there will be a world left, at least not a world we would want to leave to our children.

So, let’s ask another question: “Where are you as the world keeps turning?” As the violence continues, as the machine grinds on, where are we? What are we learning? What are we saying? What are we doing? What risks are we taking?

This is a time to realize that the dominant political institutions offer nothing beyond a tweaking of the same failed systems; in the middle of this presidential campaign, none of the major p lay ers are acknowledging the fundamental problems, let alone proposing meaningful changes in policy to acknowledge the problems. It’s also time to realize that old approaches to progressive political organizing don’t seem to be working; large scripted street demonstrations may have some benefits, for example, but they aren’t significantly advancing the goals we claim to want to achieve.

Where do we go from here? I have no well-developed plan to present tonight. My gut feeling tells me that while we prepare to vote in this election and continue traditional organizing in the short term, we have to think about a long-term strategy focusing much more on local, small-scale endeavors that will foster solidarity during the empire’s decline and could provide a soft landing when the empire is over. It doesn’t mean giving up our obligations to the larger world; the 500 years of imperialism that helped create this affluent society impose a clear moral obligation on us to work for global justice. But we also have to recognize that the world in which we live is going to change dramatically in the coming decades, and we need to build new institutions and networks that can help us cope with those changes.

Some may find it depressing to focus on how often we have failed and the consequences of those failures. But that analysis also reminds us that we are moving into a potentially creative period. Letting go of the things with which we have become familiar is difficult, but it also opens up possibilities for something new, and that can be exciting. To have the courage to act on what we can know, with humility, is the only way to imagine bringing the imperial phase of U.S. history to a humane close and creating the conditions that could make justice and sustainability possible.

Let’s return to the meaning of this day, September 11, which for so many evokes deep sadness and painful memories. Facing these harsh political realities and asking these questions does not dishonor those who died that day or trivialize the pain of their loved ones. It simply asks us to expand our moral circle, to recognize a common humanity and a common fate. To do that, we have to put aside our arrogance, correct our ignorance, and find our courage. That is hard, but that is the only way to imagine stopping the machine.

That insight from Gorka,² one of my favorite singer/songwriters chronicling the complexity of our times, deserves serious reflection. Tonight I want to argue that the way in which we humans have long imagined the future must be rethought, as the scope and depth of the cascading crises we face become painfully clearer day by day.

Put simply: We’re in trouble, on all fronts, and the trouble is wider and deeper than most of us have been willing to acknowledge. We should struggle to build a road on which we can walk through those troubles — if such a road is possible — but I doubt it’s going to look like any path we had previously envisioned, nor is it likely to lead anywhere close to where most of us thought we were going.

Whatever our individual conception of the future, we all should re-evaluate the assumptions on which those conceptions have been based. This is a moment in which we should abandon any political certainties to which we may want to cling. Given humans’ failure to predict the place we find ourselves today, I don’t think that’s such a radical statement. As we stand at the edge of the end of the ability of the ecosystem in which we live to sustain human life as we know it, what kind of hubris would it take to make claims that we can know the future?

It takes the hubris of folks such as biologist Richard Dawkins, who once wrote that “our brains … are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences.”³ Such a statement is a reminder that human egos are typically larger than brains, which emphasizes the dramatic need for a drastic humility.

I read that essay by Dawkins after hearing the sentence quoted by Wes Jackson, an important contemporary scientist and philosopher working at The Land Institute. Jackson’s work has most helped me recognize an obvious and important truth that is too often ignored: For all our cleverness, we human beings are far more ignorant than knowledgeable. Human accomplishments — skyscrapers, the internet, the mapping of the human genome — seduce us into believing the illusion that we can control a world that is complex beyond our ability to understand. Jackson suggests that we would be wise to recognize this and commit to “an ignorance-based worldview” that would anchor us in the intellectual humility we will need if we are to survive the often toxic effects of our own cleverness.⁴

Let’s review a few of the clever political and theological claims made about the future. Are there any folks here who accept the neoliberal claim that the triumph of so-called “free market” capitalism in electoral democracies is the “end of history”⁵ and that there is left for us only tweaking that system to solve any remaining problems? Would anyone like to defend the idea that “scientific socialism” not only explains history but can lay out before us the blueprint for a glorious future? Would someone like to offer an explanation of how the pending return of the messiah is going to secure for believers first-class tickets to the New Jerusalem?

To reject these desperate attempts to secure the future is not to suggest there is no value in any aspect of these schools of thought, nor is my argument that there’s nothing possible for us to know or that the knowledge shouldn’t guide our action. Instead, I simply want to emphasize the limits of human intelligence and suggest that we be realistic. By realistic, all I mean is that we should avoid the instinct to make plans based on the world we wish existed and instead pay attention to the world that exists. Such realistic thinking demands that we get radical.

Realistically radical

Imagine that you are riding comfortably on a sleek train. You look out the window and see that not too far ahead the tracks end abruptly and that the train will derail if it continues moving ahead. You suggest that the train stop immediately and that the passengers go forward on foot. This will require a major shift in everyone’s way of traveling, of course, but it appears to you to be the only realistic option; to continue barreling forward is to court catastrophic consequences. But when you propose this course of action, others who have grown comfortable riding on the train say, “Well we like the train and arguing that we should get off is not realistic.”

In the contemporary United States, we are trapped in a similar delusion. We are told that it is “realistic” to capitulate to the absurd idea that the systems in which we live are the only systems possible or acceptable because some people like them and wish them to continue. But what if our current level of First-World consumption is exhausting the ecological basis for life? Too bad; the only “realistic” options are those that take that lifestyle as non-negotiable. What if real democracy is not possible in a nation-state with 300 million people? Too bad; the only “realistic” options are those that take this way of organizing a polity as immutable. What if the hierarchies on which our lives are based are producing extreme material deprivation for the oppressed and a kind of dull misery among the privileged? Too bad; the only “realistic” options are those that accept hierarchy as inevitable.

Let me offer a different view of reality: (1) We live in a system that, taken as a whole, is unsustainable, not only over the long haul but in the near term, and (2) unsustainable systems can’t be sustained.

How’s that for a profound theoretical insight? Unsustainable systems can’t be sustained. It’s hard to argue with that; the important question is whether or not we live in a system that is truly unsustainable. There’s no way to prove definitively such a sweeping statement, but look around at what we’ve built and ask yourself whether you really believe this world can go forward indefinitely, or even for more than a few decades? Take a minute to ponder the end of the era of cheap fossil energy, the lack of viable large-scale replacements for that energy, and the ecological consequences of burning what remains of it. Consider the indicators of the health of the planet — groundwater contamination, topsoil loss, levels of toxicity. Factor in the widening inequality in the world, the intensity of the violence, and the desperation that so many feel at every level of society.

Based on what you know about these trends, do you think this is a sustainable system? When you take a moment to let all this wash over you, does it feel to you that this is a sustainable system? If you were to let go of your attachment to this world, is there any way to imagine that this is a sustainable system? Consider all the ways you have to understand the world: Is there anything in your field of perception that tells you that we’re on the right track?

To be radically realistic in the face of all this is to recognize the failure of basic systems and to abandon the notion that all we need do is recalibrate the institutions that structure our lives today. The old future — the way we thought things would work out — truly is gone. The nation-state and capitalism are at the core of this unsustainable system, giving rise to the high-energy/mass-consumption configuration of privileged societies that has left us saddled with what James Howard Kunstler calls “a living arrangement with no future.”⁶ The future we have been dreaming of was based on a dream, not on reality. Most of the world that doesn’t live with our privilege has no choice but to face this reality. It’s time for us to come to terms with it.

The revolutions of the past

To think about a new future, we need to understand the present. To do that, I want to suggest a way of thinking about the past that highlights the three major revolutions in human history — the agricultural, industrial, and delusional revolutions.

The agricultural revolution started about 10,000 years ago when a gathering-hunting species discovered how to cultivate plants for food. Two crucial things resulted from that, one ecological and one political. Ecologically, the invention of agriculture kicked off an intensive human assault on natural systems. By that I don’t mean that gathering-hunting humans never did damage to a local ecosystem, but only that the large-scale destruction we cope with today has its origins in agriculture, in the way humans have exhausted the energy-rich carbon of the soil, what Jackson would call the first step in the entrenchment of an extractive economy. Human agricultural practices vary from place to place but have never been sustainable over the long term. Politically, the ability to stockpile food made possible concentrations of power and resulting hierarchies that were foreign to gathering-hunting societies. Again, this is not to say that humans were not capable of doing bad things to each other prior to agriculture, but only that what we understand as large-scale institutionalized oppression has its roots in agriculture. We need not romanticize pre-agricultural life to recognize the ways in which agriculture made possible dramatically different levels of unsustainability and injustice.

The industrial revolution that began in the last half of the 18th century in Great Britain intensified the magnitude of the human assault on ecosystems and on each other. Unleashing the concentrated energy of coal, oil, and natural gas to run a machine-based world has produced unparalleled material comfort for some. Whatever one thinks of the effect of such comforts on human psychology (and, in my view, the effect has been mixed), the processes that produce the comfort are destroying the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain human life as we know it into the future, and in the present those comforts are not distributed in a fashion that is consistent with any meaningful conception of justice. In short, the way we live is in direct conflict with common sense and the ethical principles on which we claim to base our lives. How is that possible?

The delusional revolution is my term for the development of sophisticated propaganda techniques in the 20th century (especially a highly emotive, image-based advertising system) that have produced in the bulk of the population (especially in First World societies) a distinctly delusional state of being. Even those of us who try to resist it often can’t help but be drawn into parts of the delusion. As a culture, we collectively end up acting as if unsustainable systems can be sustained because we want them to be. Much of the culture’s story-telling — particularly through the dominant story-telling institutions, the mass media — remains committed to maintaining this delusional state. In such a culture, it becomes hard to extract oneself from that story.

So, in summary: The agricultural revolution set us on a road to destruction. The industrial revolution ramped up our speed. The delusional revolution has prevented us from coming to terms with the reality of where we are and where we are heading. That’s the bad news. The worse news is that there’s still overwhelming resistance in the dominant culture to acknowledging that these kinds of discussions are necessary. This should not be surprising because, to quote Wes Jackson, we are living as “a species out of context.” Jackson likes to remind audiences that the modern human — animals like us, with our brain capacity — have been on the planet about 200,000 years, which means these revolutions constitute only about 5 percent of human history. We are living today trapped by systems in which we did not evolve as a species over the long term and to which we are still struggling to adapt in the short term.

Realistically, we need to get on a new road if we want there to be a future. The old future, the road we imagined we could travel, is gone — it is part of the delusion. Unless one accepts an irrational technological fundamentalism (the idea that we will always be able to find high-energy/advanced-technology fixes for problems),⁷ there are no easy solutions to these ecological and human problems. The solutions, if there are to be any, will come through a significant shift in how we live and a dramatic down-scaling of the level at which we live. I say “if” because there is no guarantee that there are solutions. History does not owe us a chance to correct our mistakes just because we may want such a chance.

I think this argues for a joyful embrace of the truly awful place we find ourselves. That may seem counter-intuitive, perhaps even a bit psychotic. Invoking joy in response to awful circumstances? For me, this is simply to recognize who I am and where I live. I am part of that species out of context, saddled with the mistakes of human history and no small number of my own tragic errors, but still alive in the world. I am aware of my limits but eager to test them. I try to retain an intellectual humility, the awareness that I may be wrong, while knowing I must act in the world even though I can’t be certain. Whatever the case and whatever is possible, I want to be as fully alive as possible, which means struggling joyfully as part of movements that search for the road to a more just and sustainable world.

In this quest, I am often tired and afraid. To borrow a phrase from my friend Jim Koplin, I live daily with “a profound sense of grief.” And yet every day that I can remember in recent years — in the period during which I have come to this analysis — I have experienced some kind of joy. Often that joy comes with the awareness that I live in a Creation that I can never comprehend, that the complexity of the world dwarfs me. That does not lead me to fear my insignificance, but sends me off in an endlessly fascinating search for the significant.

To put it in a bumper-sticker phrase for contemporary pop culture, “The world sucks/it’s great to be alive.”

About these crises

I have been talking about multiple crises without naming them in detail. As I have been speaking I suspect you all have been cataloging them for yourself. For me, they are political (the absence of meaningful democracy in large-scale political units such as the modern nation-state), economic (the brutal inequalities that exist internal to all capitalist systems and between countries in a world dominated by that predatory capitalism), and ecological (the unsustainable nature of our systems and the lifestyles that arise from them). Beyond that, I am most disturbed by a cultural and spiritual crisis, a condition that goes to the core of how we understand what it means to be human.

For me, an understanding of this crisis is rooted in my feminist work on the contemporary pornography industry. Shaped by patriarchy, white supremacy, and that predatory corporate-capitalism, pornography provides a disturbing mirror on our collective soul. We live in a world in which large numbers of people (mostly men) derive sexual pleasure from images of cruelty toward and the degradation of women. A smaller number of people (again, mostly men) profit from this industry. And except for a few people rooted in feminism and other radical philosophies on the margins, there is no significant progressive critique of it in contemporary society. Pornography is a place where we can see what the death of empathy looks like; it offers a picture of a world bereft of the fundamental values of compassion and solidarity; it provides a narrative of a people with no sense of shared humanity. Many aspects of the modern world — this mass-mediated, mass-marketed, mass-medicated world — can easily strip us of our humanity in ways that slowly leave us incapable of responding to these crises. Along with fretting about the other crises, I worry about that.

Add all this up and it’s pretty clear: We’re in trouble. Based on my political activism and my general sense of the state of the world, I have come to the following conclusions about political and cultural change in my society:

• It’s almost certain that no significant political change will happen in the coming year in the United States because the culture is not ready to face these questions. That suggests this is a time not to propose all-encompassing solutions but to sharpen our analysis in ongoing conversation about these crises. As activists we should continue to act, but there also is a time and place to analyze.
• It’s probable that no mass movements will emerge in the next few years in the United States that will force leaders and institutions to face these questions. Many believe that until conditions in the First World get dramatically worse, most people will be stuck in the inertia created by privilege. That suggests that this is a time to expand our connections with like-minded people and create small-scale institutions and networks that can react quickly when political conditions change.
• It’s plausible that the systems in place cannot be changed peacefully and that forces set in motion by patriarchy, white supremacy, nationalism, and capitalism cannot be reversed without serious ruptures. That suggests that as we plan political strategies for the best-case scenarios we not forget to prepare ourselves for something much worse.
• Finally, it’s worth considering the possibility that our species — the human with the big brain — is an evolutionary dead-end. I say that not to be depressing but, again, to be realistic. If that’s the case, it doesn’t mean we should give up. No matter how much time we humans have left on the planet, we can do what is possible to make that time meaningful.

Globalized tribal animals

I want to end by celebrating human beings. That may sound odd, given the rather grim nature of my remarks. But I think there’s a way to put all this in a perspective that is heartening. I return to Wes Jackson, who doesn’t shy away from naming the problems we face and holding humans accountable for our mistakes, individual and collective. But Jackson also often says we also should go easy on ourselves, precisely because we are a species out of context, facing a unique challenge. He reminds us that we are the first species that will have to self-consciously impose limits on ourselves if we are to survive. This is no small task, and we are bound to fail often. I believe that our failures will be easier to accept and overcome if we recognize:

• We are animals. For all our considerable rational capacities, we are driven by forces that cannot be fully understood rationally and cannot be completely controlled.
• We are tribal animals. Whatever kind of political unit we live in, our evolutionary history is in tribes and we are designed to live in relatively small groups, some would say of no more than 150 persons.
• We are tribal animals living in a global world. The consequences of the past 10,000 years of human history have left us dealing with human problems on a global scale, and we can’t retreat to gathering-hunting groups of 150 or smaller. Even if our future is going to return us to life at a more local level, as many think it will, at the moment we have a moral obligation to deal with injustice and unsustainability on a global level. That’s especially true for those of us living in imperial societies that over the past 500 years have extracted considerable wealth from others around the world.

What does this mean in practice? I think we should proceed along two basic tracks. First, we should commit some of our energy to movements that focus on the question of justice in this world, especially those of us with the privilege that is rooted in that injustice. As a middle-class American white man, I can see plenty of places to continue working, in movements dedicated to ending patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, economic domination by the First World, and U.S. wars of aggression.

I also think there is important work to be done in experiments to prepare for what will come in this new future we can’t yet describe in detail. Whatever the limits of our predictive capacity, we can be pretty sure we will need ways of organizing ourselves to help us live in a world with less energy and fewer material goods. We have to all develop the skills needed for that world (such as gardening with fewer inputs, food preparation and storage, and basic tinkering), and we will need to recover a deep sense of community that has disappeared from many of our lives. This means abandoning a sense of ourselves as consumption machines, which the contemporary culture promotes, and deepening our notions of what it means to be humans in search of meaning. We have to learn to tell different stories about our sense of self, our connection to others, and our place in nature. The stories we tell will matter, as will the skills we learn.

In my own life, I continue to work on those questions of justice in existing movements, but I have shifted a considerable amount of time to helping build local networks that can create a place for those experiments. Different people will move toward different efforts depending on talents and temperaments; we should all follow our hearts and minds to apply ourselves where it makes sense, given who we are and where we live. After starting with a warning about arrogance, I’m not about to suggest I know best what work people should do.

I am, however, reasonably confident that if we are to make a decent future for ourselves and our children, we have a lot of work to do. John Gorka also expresses that in his song: “The old future’s dead and gone/Never to return/There’s a new way through the hills ahead/This one we’ll have to earn/This one we’ll have to earn.”

We should not be afraid to face the death of the old future, nor should we be afraid to try to earn a new one. It is the work of all the ages, and it is our work today, more than ever. It is the work that allows one to live, joyously, while in a profound state of grief.

1. John Gorka, “Old Future” from the CD “Old Futures Gone,” Red House Records, 2003.
2. John Gorka.
3. Richard Dawkins, “An Open Letter to Prince Charles,” May 21, 2000.
4. Wes Jackson, “Toward an Ignorance-Based Worldview,” The Land Report, Spring 2005, pp. 14-16.
5. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
6. James Howard Kunstler, remarks at the meeting of The Second Vermont Republic, October 28, 2005.
7. Robert Jensen, “The four fundamentalisms and the threat to sustainable democracy,” May 30, 2006.

Son of Nun is far more than a political hip hop artist and an activist. He’s also a former Baltimore City high school teacher. He’s survived cancer and battled sickle cell anemia. Public Enemy’s Chuck D once described him as “[Leaving] a mean look on somebody’s face” for being “More than relevant!,” S.O.N. doesn’t just entertain his crowds, through uncompromising lyrics and his deeds, he empowers them.

S.O.N. has shared the stage with everyone from artists like Dead Prez, Immortal Technique to activists like Rosa Clemente, Howard Zinn and Cindy Sheehan. Educating and entertaining, he’s kicked it with Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine as well as Liam Madden from Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Music from his 2004 debut cd “Blood And Fire” has earned him spots on compilations with iconic artists ranging from The Last Poets to Sonic Youth, won him a “Best of Baltimore” award from the Baltimore City Paper, and took “Best Song of the Week” on NPR’s website.

S.O.N. has a forthcoming cd, “The Art of Struggle,” which is a collaboration with producer DJ Mentos and will be released August 2008. Please check out his MySpace Spot and website for information on how to buy and support his work.

We at SleptOn Mag got a few opportunities to watch him excite crowds as he performed as well as chances to sit down with him to discuss his music, politics among other things.

Below, we’re providing the text of our interview. Check it out.

SleptOn.com: So briefly tell the people who Son of Nun is …

S.O.N.: Who am I? I’m a political hip hop artist from Baltimore … D.C. and Baltimore, used to teach high school in Baltimore, been active in a few different movements over the years, and that’s basically where my music comes from.

SleptOn.com: What kinds of activism were you involved in over the years?

S.O.N.: The Campaign to End the Death Penalty, Solidarity with Palestine, immigrants rights, nah mean … just general working people movements. And basically trying to tie those issues together, because something that I’ve always said … when I perform or you go to an anti-war protest … mostly white people. You go to an immigrants rights protest and it’s mostly brown people Latino. You go to a police brutality protest and it’s mostly black people. The problem is that it’s not like the government or the administration in power is a single issue administration. So it’s like, it’s up to us to recognize that and stand in solidarity with each other. So that’s where my music comes from. That’s what I try to convey.

SleptOn.com: When did you begin rhyming?

S.O.N.: ’97, started rhyming in 1997 … I used to write poetry. That’s how I came into it. Basically, a friend of mine was in a band and he was like “hey we’re practicing. You should come and spit some shit”. So I wrote something for that session and it just felt natural … you know. I picked up the mic and I haven’t put it own since. So …’97.

SleptOn.com: What projects are you working on right now? You’ve had at least one album, correct?

S.O.N.: Yeah, Blood and Fire. That came out 4 years ago so the new project should be out in August. It’s called the Art of Struggle …a collaboration with DJ Mentos… I’m excited about that shit man!

It’s going to have 15 tracks plus a bonus track … gonna put Free Palestine on there ‘cause we’re gonna put this album out right. Ya’ll are already helping me to do that. We’re not looking to hit commercial radio stations with it. That’s like a waste of my energy …but really community and college radio stations and I’m looking for different press outlets that are friendly to what I do… nah mean…

SleptOn.com: Like SleptOn.com?

S.O.N.: Right … I feel like I need a tattoo that says I AM SleptOn, ‘cause for real that’s what this independent music circuit is … it’s slept on and needs the proper exposure.

SleptOn.com: … and when is the album coming out?

S.O.N.: We’re set for August 6, 2008

SleptOn.com: Now did you collaborate with DJ Mentos on the first album?

S.O.N.: No that was DJ Crimson and a few different producers on the first album and some other guys on the West Coast with Innate Productions. They made some of the beats on the last album. They’ll actually have one of the beats on this album too … for the song “Pastures of Plenty” which is about immigrants rights … but it was mostly DJ Crimson on the first album.

SleptOn.com: What can you tell us about the name, Son of Nun?

S.O.N.: It’s actually biblical in origin> It’s Joshua, the son of none. He’s the one that took over for Moses and brought the Jews into the Promised Land. That’s where my head was at back in the day when I chose the name. As I got more political and started reading, I was like hmmm … the Native Americans, the British, the Spanish, the French … all these people coming over and setting up colonies. Then I looked at the bible again and I was like oh, there were already people in the Promised Land. They had to be wiped out too … but “God told them to do it.” So the more political I got, the more I stepped away from that literal meaning in terms of who he was and what he actually did and I just took it to mean like this is about passing the torch. I don’t know about the Promised Land but I know about trying to put people together and build and organize for something that’s better than what we’re dealing with now. So Son of Nun, that’s what it means … it’s like passing the torch.

It’s also somebody that doesn’t get a lot of play. People talk about Moses and stuff but nobody really talks about this guy Joshua, who played an important role. It’s like that underground type and that’s kind of where I am now. I don’t have any dreams of getting on MTV or any shit like that‘s cause they don’t play music anymore. You know, it’s about no illusions, just moving forward and building and doing that work that needs to be done.

SleptOn.com: So why do you do hip hop and not some other music genre?

S.O.N.: I grew up on that shit man … nah mean, it’s like I used to fall asleep with my first two cassette tapes as a kid. They used to have those things back in the day … I first took like Run DMC and Salt and Pepa. I went to sleep with my walkman …

SleptOn.com: A walk what? … what you say?

S.O.N.: Hahaha … they made the cassette tape things portable … it was like a stereo in your hand … it was magical.

SleptOn.com: Really? Never heard of it … but it’s cool, please continue.

S.O.N.: Those were my first two tapes, I remember going to bed with those … that was the shit. I’m not really into rock. That wasn’t moving me … didn’t even know about punk. Hip Hop moved me … caught my attention and my passion.

I actually got fed up with Hip Hop in the mid-‘90s when it all started sounding the same. I was like everybody is talking about killing black people and it got frustrating … that’s not to say that it isn’t a reality for some folks, but I also knew enough that everybody in the hood isn’t a drug dealer. Lots of people, lots of families work nine to fives and … work very hard. But that wasn’t coming out in the music. So that frustration really opened up my tastes for other music. I started writing poetry and that turned into spoken word and into hip hop. It’s also kind of like making the music that I wish I could hear.

SleptOn.com: So how did you get involved in radical, lefty politics?

S.O.N.: Yeah, basically Mumia’s case (Mumia Abu-Jamal) back in like ’96 just blew my mind. His ability to articulate in his own words what was happening to him. He was taking up the struggle himself and obviously lots of people got around him. He said yes, I’m on death row … yes they’re trying to kill me … yes it’s a messed up situation. At the same time he suggested that there are a much larger set of issues that are global. Injustice that’s perpetuated on a wide scale. Hearing him speak about that set off a lot of whistles and alarms in my head.

SleptOn.com: How old were you then?

S.O.N.: I was 18 or 19 years old back then. He had that perspective that shifted my own and made me look. Started questioning and started looking out. ‘Cause I went to college looking for the reasons and root causes of why things were fucked up. I wanted to be a part of changing things, but I still needed to know what it was that needed to be changed and how things got to be the way that they are … how things got fucked up. Which isn’t to say that things were once great and then now they’re fucked up … it’s more like what is the source of inequality? Where does that come from?

So I went to the Black Student Union when I was at UMBC (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), but it wasn’t that great. I thought there’d be more political involvement there. There was some political stuff but it was more like social activities and things like that. Having more of an organized presence for black folks on campus and that was a good thing but it didn’t provide the political groundwork that I was looking for. So I really came to it while learning about Mumia’s case. It was a learning process … took a long time and definitely not overnight.

I feel like a lot of people have a Mumia moment -where they learn about something that opens them up to a different reality that they’re not typically exposed to. Do you know what I mean? Like blatant examples of injustice where it’s crying out for something to be done. And they know that based on what’s happening, the only way that change can happen is if more people learn about it and do something about it. After that point you’ve got only 2 options. You can either get involved and jump in to some degree OR you can kinda step back and be like shit, I don’t know. What can I do? And kinda go back to sleep. Like “… it’s fucked up, but oh well” and forget it. For me, I wanted to get involved and learn more. The fact that Mumia was so articulate about so many different things outside of his situation and the death penalty definitely gave me a kind of a roadmap about things that I could look into.

I came into contact with different organizations that showed me how deep the rabbit hole goes … So that’s what it was about. That radicalized me, and changed my life. ‘cause, other wise, I’d just be, ya know … sleep walking.

SleptOn.com: Sleep walking …

S.O.N.: Yep

SleptOn.com: So S.O.N., what are you thinking about the presidential race? Are you rooting for Obama, now that he has the Democratic nomination? Or looking elsewhere for “change”?

S.O.N.: Haha … I honestly think it’s great to see a black man and woman being the choices for the Democratic nomination. I think that’s an historic thing, it’s marvelous just that that’s a reality. If you look a little bit deeper into that reality and look at their platforms … it’s like oh! This looks pretty much like everything else I’ve seen before. Which is to say, the first black president is not going to be a Panther right? Not gonna be a black radical. The first woman president is probably not gonna be a radical feminist. The other thing to is like it’s two-thousand-and fucking eight … 2008. We’re all like “Oh my god, a black president!” It’s like nah, that should of happened, a long time ago. I’m not settling for any scraps. And basically people who look like us and the other folks who are down and walked with us didn’t fight and die so that we can throw our votes away on just an image, a façade. The other thing, on top of that, is that the answer isn’t gonna be found in one person. Even just looking at the branches of government and what the executive branch can do … they can do some things, but it’s still one individual, so if the Congress doesn’t support him then he’s gonna have to deal with that. He’ll be ostracized, blah blah … so the answer for me and looking through history about the way that change is made … it’s about people coming together and organizing for it. It’s not relying on the president or some politician to find it in the goodness of his/her heart. It takes people on the ground ‘cause if Obama gets elected president, what’s he gonna do about the incarceration rate? What’s he gonna do about the shitty schools in the inner city? Nah mean?

SleptOn.com: Isn’t the problem that there’s an assumption that how we should engage in politics by voting, primarily. We should engage through the ballot box every four years and then wait for 4 years and let the “intelligent people” handle it for us. We need to work to redefine, again, for ourselves what it means to engage politically, because voting is the most passive and least fruitful form of civic engagement.

S.O.N.: Exactly, and you know it’s funny ‘cause I talk with other artists and I hear cats joke about how conscious, or political hip hop is in trouble. They say “how are we gonna be able to rhyme about racism in America, with a black president…” (confused face )

SleptOn.com: Uh … easy

S.O.N.: Right… haha …but a lot of people don’t see that. A lot of people are like ‘what are you complaining about … there’s a black president.’ People are already saying that … even with Obama as just as a black candidate. Quit complaining, get a job n*gger … it’s crazy.

SleptOn.com: So SON, tell the people what you’re listening to right now in your cd player or your MP3 player … Whatever it is that you use. You were talking about tapes just a minute ago right? As a matter of fact, tell the people at home a little about tapes, those that don’t know … the younger audiences. People all into MP3s and CDs ya’ll don’t even know what a tape is. We started off on tapes right? …

S.O.N.: (to camera) I mean everybody from our generation did. You could make a mix tape, you know, that’s where the name comes from. Like you could push pause, you know, and when you hear a song … push it again then record and then you hear the click, and the radio DJ says some shit, that’s what the mixtape is …

SleptOn.com: (to camera) That’s what the term mixtape comes from, it wasn’t a CD that they made into a mixtape!

S.O.N.: (to camera) Yep, and there were these little like boxes that you would put the tape in, and push PLAY.

SleptOn.com: (to camera) Wow, that’s right … almost forgot about that … and you had to push PLAY and RECORD at the same time, right? And sometimes you had to sit by the radio to wait for your song to come on, then try to record the joint, but then Funk Master Flex would talk and mess your whole joint up … haha

S.O.N.: (to camera) Yeah … those were the days, kids … just a little history lesson and tutorial for yall.

But back to the question about what’s in my CD player … Honestly, I listen to a lot of soul and some funk, Rage against the Machine, old school R&B, Nina Simone you know … she speaks to my soul. There’s an album that I couldn’t put down for months and months. Soul Gospel, I forget the label that it’s on but it’s l ike Etta James, Urma Thomas, the Sweet Inspirations, all those folks … Sam Cooke. I feel like it’s true for some of the other emcees that I talk to as well. The biggest thing that they listen to isn’t always hip hop. They just listen to the stuff that speaks to them. That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of hip hop artists that don’t bring it. Part of the reason is that I also don’t wanna get influenced, I wanna be original so I try not to listen to too much hip hop so I can still come with my own thing. No one can be like oh, he took that from him. So I want to be original, you know …

SleptOn.com: Son, do you have any tattoos?

S.O.N.: Well, the DC police already have my identifying marks … so I don’t mind telling you about my tattoos. I’ve got a few tattoos, “Blood Fire” right here under my neck around my collar … “Change is Constant”. I’ve got “Choose Life” backwards so that I can see it in the mirror and remind myself. On my back I’ve got from shoulder to shoulder the word “Maroon” with chains broken.

SleptOn.com: What does “Maroon” mean to you?

S.O.N.: That’s the Maroons man! I mean that’s the autonomous slave societies that the British never defeated in Jamaica, nah mean … so it’s like that was in Jamaica but they had Maroon societies from like Mexico to Brazil. So that’s something that I definitely identify with. My family is from Jamaica and Barbados …immigrant parents, but we’re all forced immigrants you know. So Maroon, I had to represent that ’cause my people are from Jamaica so that’s the heritage I identify with.

SleptOn.com: What books are you reading?

S.O.N.: You know, one of the last books that I’ve read was “The Narrative of the Life of a Slave” by Frederick Douglass. It gave me a new perspective. Obviously he was a brilliant abolitionist, but you also learn about what his life was like as a slave. How he was resisting bondage while he was enslaved. There’s a story in there where he said that he was sent to this slave master to be broken. So Frederick Douglass was 16 at the time …he was getting whipped and whipped and he said,’nah … I’m never getting whipped again.’ So he dipped for a while … just left, and when he came back the master said basically that he’s about to get his. So Freddy was like, ‘nope.’ …and they fought for two hours …Like a full out knock down and drag out brawl. Freddy beat him and wondered why he was not killed after their fight. Like beating up a white man is pretty fucking serious. The master didn’t want it to get out that the reason he killed Frederick Douglass was because he got his ass beat by this slave. Fred never got whipped again. That’s not the image that they put out of Frederick Douglass. They put the old gray hair image, very wise and elderly but not like … I’ll beat your ass if you touch me. That’s Freddy D though!!!

He lived a long time and dedicated his life to freeing slaves and that’s amazing.

SleptOn.com: SON, on one of your songs, you say something about certain artists spitting truth, but getting it wrong on gay rights and homophobia. When I first heard that I was thinking … oh he’s talking ImmortalTechnique!!! Was I jumping the gun? Tell us about that.

S.O.N.: But see that’s the thing … I don’t know that man … I’ve never met Immortal Technique. I’ve heard him say publicly that he doesn’t have anything against how people live their lives. The stuff that I have read about Immortal Technique … he comes from a perspective where that’s how people talk. Like if you’re weak, you’re a “fag”, so I’m not saying that that’s cool … and what I say is

“Some real rappers spit truth every night, but say stupid shit when it comes to gay rights. They talk about the Panthers but they never knew that Huey woulda called their asses out for what they do.”

The reason why I say that is not ‘cause of Immmortal Technique or this rapper or that rapper. It’s more like anybody that is claiming a radical or revolutionary image or past or whatever, if that’s what they’re bringing to the table, then it’s kinda like folks (including myself) need to do their fucking homework … period. If those are the people that you’re bigging up and raising up as heroes as they are. It needs to be recognized that when that issue came up, they were not on the wrong side of history. They came correct and were like ‘no those people are oppressed too’. We need to stand in solidarity with them … homosexuals.

So in my music, I try not to call out specific emcees and I want to make that clear … ‘cause the way that I approach hip hop and I know that all artists don’t do this, but I realize that I have more in common with them, then I’ll ever have in common with the label head or the corporate people putting that music out. Right? My beef is not with other emcees … period.

I listened to Killa Mike the other day … and he’ll say some ill shit, like some sexist shit, some homophobic shit, whatever … but when you read the interview and listen to some lyrics you’ll see that there’s a revolutionary consciousness that’s there at the same time. It’s not as well defined as Immortal Technique’s, but it’s there and I’d rather see those brothers as my comrades whom I can build with as opposed to people I need to chop down and diss and all that bullshit. Immortal Technique, I respect him and I have a small feeling that Mumia sees that the same way, or else Mumia wouldn’t have done the intro for Tech’s album. So for me it’s never about calling out this or that emcee ‘cause there’s much bigger fish to fry than being like crabs in a fucking barrel …You know …

I wanna hear more revolutionary hip hop … I need to hear that shit and when I hear it, I don’t want it to be clouded with bullshit like revolutionary emcees talking shit about each other, ’cause that’s bullshit. So for the record … Son of Nun did not call out Immortal Technique.

SleptOn.com: What’s your Myspace page?

S.O.N.: Myspace page is Myspace.com/socialistmc, check it out … there’s music, videos all of that stuff.

SleptOn.com: You also have a website right?

S.O.N.: Yeah … http://www.sonofnun.net

SleptOn.com: You can also access the Son of Nun website by going to the Links page on the SleptOn website and if you look a bit, you’ll see that it’s one of the banners. He’s in there somewhere …

S.O.N.: In there … like Ragu

SleptOn.com: Haha … Ragu
It’s in there … I think it’s actually from the Prego commercials.

S.O.N.: Either way, that’s corny as shit hahaha

SleptOn.com: S.O.N, thanks for coming and talking with us at SleptOn.com, man.

S.O.N.: Thanks for having me. I’ll see ya’ll in the struggle …

On his long-awaited followup The Art of Struggle, released August 6th, he manages to do both extremely well. A committed socialist and revolutionary, SON admits that the album is “a reflection of the time that I’ve spent working with different movements. The Art of Struggle is a political album that encompasses my perspective on a lot of different issues: from immigrant rights to the death penalty to the way that children are impacted most by issues like debt on the African continent… and also pride for the rebels that are in my heritage…”

This is far from being “just another political album,” though. It is layered, intricate, often subtle, defiant and a lot of fun to listen to. SON’s skills as a rapper and lyricist are substantial, and unlike many artists willing to sloganeer into a mic and call it “political,” SON simply allows his firebrand radicalism to infect every rhyme, note and beat.

That’s evident on songs like “My City,” where he seamlessly weaves together the stories of an inner-city kid pressured into joining the army and the Iraqi insurgent he’s sent to kill. Lines like “my high-school never had many computers / but they always had plenty military recruiters” are the kind of “oh, snap” moments that fill this album, where SON isn’t so much speaking truth to those in power as schooling power itself.

DJ Mentos’ beats add real power to these moments. Whereas Blood and Fire’s beats showcased SON’s own affinity for drum ‘n’ bass, The Art of Struggle employs Spanish guitar, string sections, even woodwind samples for a more organic sound, adding a visceral intensity to SON’s already stellar story-telling and wordplay.

Tracks like “Speak On It” are driven by thick, menacing undertones. As the lyrics draw parallels between struggles taking place half a world from each other–from New Orleans to Oaxaca to Beirut–there’s a clear sense on this track that resistance is far from an isolated phenomenon, and always has the potential to become a full-fledged global explosion.

It’s here that Son of Nun’s skills as both an activist and lyricist collide. While describing his process for writing “Speak On It,” he asked says he asked himself, “how can I open up these issues and in some way try and put them up against each other in one piece… and try and do it in a way so you can’t get around the way that this same administration, this same system, is responsible for all of them?”

At its core, this is a track with a simple message: where there is oppression, there will be resistance. And really, this could also be said about the album itself. “The Fire Next Time” is the pinnacle of this theme, taking a confident, almost threatening beat and putting it under SON’s recounting of Black resistance through history, ending with the possibility of soldiers in Iraq today.

“You can call Bectel on your Nextel
And tell ‘em that their pipeline’s about to catch hell
If they think I’m gonna die for them they ain’t well
I’m the fire next time and I’m at their doorbell!”

These are much more than images and stories; they’re invitations to rebellion. During the song’s hook, SON encourages the listener to join in with a call and response: “when I say ‘fire,’ y’all say ‘next time’ / We the fire… We the fire…”

If the listener can stop themselves from actually shouting back, I recommend they check their pulse.

This sums up The Art of Struggle: the idea that a fundamentally different planet isn’t only possible, but necessary, and that instead of waiting for some Moses to create it out of thin air, it’s ordinary people who have the only power to create it. Radical? Of course. But at a time like ours, when a growing people are searching for some alternative to the status quo, it’s also very much needed.

Nine or ten years ago a friend of mine whom I had not spoken to since 1982 called me. After a minute or two of establishing our current situations vis-a-vis our place of domicile, employment and family situation, my buddy (whom I’ll call C) asked if I still imbibed in the cannabis. Despite my aversion to speaking of such things on the telephone, I answered yes. “Hard to believe,” he responded. “We thought the stuff would be legal by now and look at it. People getting busted for it and seeing time like they did in the 1950s. That utopia we dreamed about and threw rocks at the cops for sure took a nosedive. Instead, we have a Brave New World drug scene where doctors pass out pills whose sole role is to homogenize our emotions and our essential beings.” I listened and agreed. “Besides the weed thing,” I said. “Look at the political spectrum. From authoritarian neoliberalism to authoritarian neoconservatism.” The far left is microscopic and the so-called progressives are unable to move beyond their moneyed sponsors.”

We continued on this track for about half an hour before bidding each other goodbye. Since then, C and I stay in touch via email and occasionally visit each other in person when I am in the DC area for a protest or family visit. His cynicism does not seem greater or lesser than mine and neither of us engage in political organizing as much as we did back in the early 1970s. Like many of our contemporaries who were engaged in left organizing back then, we are following the current US presidential campaign with a special interest in the Obama phenomenon. Being grounded in both leftist analysis and the aforementioned cynicism, Obama’s rapid swerve to the right once it became apparent that he had clinched the votes necessary for the Democratic nomination did not surprise us. It did, however, make voting for him less likely.

The remaining members of the Grateful Dead regrouped before the California primary this year and endorsed Barack Obama’s run for the presidency. In addition, they performed a benefit concert for his organization. The setlist was fantastic and recordings I have heard of the concert prove that the band still has the ability to turn in some good sets even with other guitarists playing in Garcia’s place. However, the endorsement of a candidate by the group was uncharacteristic. Garcia once commented when asked about voting in the US elections: “Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.” He wanted no part of such a choice, preferring instead to put his money and energies towards grassroots causes. It seems he understood that once one makes an allegiance with evil–even the lesser one–they risk becoming part of that evil themselves. The more active the allegiance, the greater the risk. Just look at the major national antiwar organization United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and their public stance regarding the desire of organizers of the protests at the upcoming Democratic convention to stage a large antiwar march at the convention. According to a recent press release from some organizers of the march, Leslie Cagan of UFPJ told some Denver organizers, “We don’t think it makes sense to plan for a mass march that might not end up being all that mass!” In other words, UFPJ is refusing to help build support for the march.

There can only be one reason for UFPJ’s stance. That reason is UFPJ’s allegiance to the Democratic Party. This allegiance is not an allegiance found among the grassroots of UFPJ but at the top. It involves a political misunderstanding of the Democrats’ role in maintaining the US empire and a fear of losing funding from elements of UFPJ that are tied to the Democratic Party. Ignoring the fact that it is the Democratic Congress that has kept the Empire’s wars going, UFPJ continues to call the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “Bush’s Wars.” Besides the attempts to silence the antiwar voice in the streets, there are also ongoing attempts by Democratic Party manipulators to keep antiwar language out of the Party’s platform. This is in spite of a statement signed by the progressive wing of the party demanding that the language be included. If 2004 is any indication, there will be no antiwar language in the 2008 Democratic Party platform. At least in 2004, there was a candidate (Kucinich) whose supporters struggled to get such language included until Kucinich rolled over and called off his supporters. It is unlikely that the battle to include such language will even make it to the convention this year. On top of that, one can expect some rather bellicose statements in support of Israel and against Iran. Not exactly the antiwar party you might have thought it was, huh?

I know Jerry Garcia was not a politician or even a politically inclined guy. Perhaps that was why he could see the bullshit that passes for representation in this country for what it is.

At the same time, though, it’s an album that conjures up a profound sense of longing and nostalgia for days long since past when Phair’s brand of personal expression could gain much more of a hearing.

In the early-to-mid 90s, “alternative” actually meant something. It’s cliched to talk about what a shift it was when Pearl Jam and Nirvana forced their way into the mainstream because, in many ways, the word “shift” is something of an understatement. After years of pop-dominated airwaves, the rise of grunge and indie was a catharsis of mammoth proportions. Music was allowed to be gritty again: loud and pissed off. And by proxy, so were we.

To young people alienated by the world that sought to put a giant “X” on every single one of us, music gave us permission to experiment with the novel concept of having a voice.

For Liz Phair to release an album like Guyville was an expression of how wide the gates had been opened in modern music, but also how much wider they needed to be. Phair played in a music scene based in Chicago’s Wicker Park, a scene that produced great acts like Smashing Pumpkins and Urge Overkill, but like most others was incredibly male-dominated.

When it was released, Guyville (whose name was an obvious takeoff of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Mainstreet) quickly became a staple, a defining moment in alternative music. True enough, it was an album that brought a well-needed woman’s voice to the musical milieu, but it did so in a way that fit perfectly into its time and place.

Music journalist Alan Light, in the liner notes of the reissue states that “[o]f course, there had been female rock stars before, but from Janis Joplin’s blues mama to mystic shaman Patti Smith, they had always been larger than life in some way. Liz Phair, though, seemed alarmingly normal, utterly real.”

The album caused a small-scale frenzy in the media upon release. TV shows and magazines harped on the naughty language–lines like “I want to be your blow-job queen”–to rank Phair among the supposed rise of the “fuck-me feminist.”

Such lines were completely taken out of context. If journalists had actually listened to the album, they would have heard something much more complex: Phair’s struggle to find a voice as a woman in the “post-feminist” world, and how lyrics like the blow-job line were, to an extent, a skewering of the sexual politics so prevalent at the time.

Phair’s defiance against being lumped into any convenient category is evident from the first note on Guyville’s opener “6′1,” where she takes proudly declares that “I kept standing six-feet-one instead of five-feet-two.” It’s a statment that just about says it all. Like most of the album, the music is stripped-down, the distorted, loose guitar a nice compliment to Phair’s frank, I-see-right-though-your-bullshit delivery.

Her dressing-down is much more pointed on tracks like the sparse, airy “Soap Star Joe.” Much later in the album, it’s by now become clear that Phair hasn’t been taking on the blatant forms of male chauvanism so much as the subtle expectation that women are still willing to play the damsel to a knight in shining armor.

He’s just a hero in a long line of heroes
Looking for something attractive to save
They say he rode in on the back of a pick-up
And he won’t leave town till you remember his name

Check out the thinning hair
Check out the aftershave
Check out America
You’re looking at it, babe

At the same time, Phair shows a very different side in songs that like everyone else, in the end she too is looking for love. Or, as she puts it in songs like “Fuck and Run,” “the kind of guy who tries to win you over.”

The contradictory experiences that Phair expresses on this album–that desire to find someone who loves you but respects your voice, to be accepted for who you are but also to not give a shit what others think–was the very thing that made Guyville such an honestly human piece of work.

In the 90s, a full generation into the backlash against the women’s movement, women identified with Phair’s emotional quandaries. After all, men had been allowed to express such contradictions in their music, but to hear a woman go through the same was something different for the “slacker generation.”

“What Phair and the rest of the world didn’t expect,” wrote the LA Times‘ Ann Powers in a recent piece, “was just how many women would hear ‘Guyville’ and think, ‘Hey, I live in a man’s world too, and that’s a problem.’ In situations where equality is assumed but men still dominate, women occupy a strange space between the center and the margins. They can express opinions, but they’re not dictating the terms of the conversation.”

Phair wasn’t the only strong woman artist to force her way into the mainstream in the 90s. From Alanis Morisette to Lauryn Hill, strong women seemed to be gaining a large hearing. The Lillith Fair, the first completely woman-powered music festival, proved that the girls could rock out just as well as the boys. It was a perfect musical backdrop for a new generation of young women seeking to pick up where the movement had left off.

These artists clearly struck a nerve. Guyville would eventually go gold and be counted among Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums. Several other outlets have ranked it as an important and iconic record, and its lo-fi sound and brutal honesty was a schematic for countless indie acts in years to come.

Phair, however, has been unable to recreate the success or emotional connection of Guyville. Her most recent big hit a few years back, “Why Can’t I Breathe,” though thoroughly listenable and enjoyable, was like a night to Guyville’s day, completely lacking the inner turmoil that allowed the album to speak to a generation of young women. “Phair found a way to live with her own psychic disparities,” says Powers, “which is what women do when they want to get on with life.”

Phair has indeed evolved, both musically and personally. In a recent retrospective on NPR she admitted that the anger she once felt isn’t there anymore: “my heart goes out to the person I was.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that the kind of anger on Guyville isn’t still desperately needed. Today, as the backlash against women continues, the same strong female artists that abounded in the mainstream of the 90s increasingly find themselves sidelined in favor of a million Britneys, Christinas and Beyonces. A message is being sent that in order to “make it” in music, women need to aspire to a the frail and sexualized nightingale.

While it’s on some level tragic that Exile in Guyville is still relevant today, it’s also invaluable to have it back in print to inspire a new generation of women fight for their voice too.