Tony's Music Blog

• Henry Rollins is detained at an airport because he was caught reading a book about Islamic terrorism on the plane.
• Morrissey interrogated by the FBI and British intelligence because of his opposition to the War on Terror.
• MIA is denied a visa and put on the "no-fly" list because of her father's connection to Sri Lankan resistance movement.
• A high school band perfoming at a talent show at a high school is detained and interrogated by the Secret Service for singing Bob Dylan's "Masters of War."
• At the same time, Dylan's anthem "The Times (They Are 'a Changin')" now connotes middle-aged wellness for a national HMO.

Meanwhile, "Disco isn't dead. It has gone to war." I mean, any mother could tell you that Barney's "I Love You" was malicious, and that part of Eminem and Christina Aguillera's appeal is their parental aversion factor, but Bruce Springsteen and Rage Against the Machine as well?--how fucking ironic! Sure, all kinds of jokes leap to the fore, but where is the outrage? Standing in the back like a jilted wallflower?

We can expect the assholes from Metallica not to have a problem with the schlock they produce being used to undermine the American Way—after all, their avarice derailed the revolution Napster launched in the nineties. Metallica music, like most consumer goods, is disposable at best. But surely not The Boss--whose music is as iconic of the American Experience as music can get. Has he, or anyone of integrity, taken steps to stop the animals at Gitmo from hijacking our culture for their salacious purposes? Is putting out an homage to Pete Seeger enough to help us forget the utter embarrassment of his playing the Pied Piper?

While We Shall Overcome--the Seeger Sessions seems like just what the country needs right now, it is actually an uncomfortable album. A compendium of great folk tunes, reminiscent of marches and vigils, smacks of a nostalgia annexed by the right. Springsteen's voice comes through just great--and his big-band assemblages are top-notch. But there is something counterrevolutionary in the production--something that makes us liberals a little queasy after being lambasted so much for our affinity with "Kumbaya" and "Puff the Magic Dragon."

Likewise with another American music icon Neil Young. His Living with War is true-to-form Neil Young: caustic and ascerbic, pitching against the sea. Here is a man who climbed out of a stroke to hand the country another set of topical tunes. "Let's Impeach the President" made a few headlines, but failed to rally the people like his previous anthems did, though. Personally, I bought the album out of a sense of solidarity, but listening to it was like reading an editorial cartoon. However, Crosby, Stills and Nash's "Freedom of Speech" (2006) tour is featuring much of the album, as well as their long-time standard anti-war songs. Of course, success of the tour depends on where you read about it or where you see it.

Is it possible that the forces of empire can manage to emasculate our culture so? Is media complicit in propagandizing the culture? If so, then perhaps hope rests in our leadership's utter incompetence. As badly as they have managed our domestic prosperity and international relations, they have fucked up their cultural conquest as well. Their social agenda is in tatters: Social Security has evaded their jackboots; gay rights are gaining in more states; Roe vs. Wade, while sharpening in snipers' sights, is still the law of the land; legislation challenging separation of church and state continues to be struck down; right-wingnut political candidates are being voted out or indicted. After squandering their 9/11 dividend on crappy imagery and pedantic country music, the cigar-chompers have to put up with the success of the Dixie Chicks' Taking the Long Way Home.

After failed attempts by the Republican Party Headquarters to pull their songs from airplay, and others to cancel their concerts (the Red Cross, in 2003 even reportedly refused to accept a $1 milion donation from the group!) Emily Robison, Martie Maguire, and Natalie Maines have come back swinging--in a very big way. Taking the Long Way debuted at #1 on both the U.S. pop albums chart and the U.S. country albums chart, selling 526,000 copies in the first week, making it a gold record within its first week. Listening to this album takes me back to the days of Dylan's Blood on the Tracks. Rick Rubin's production may explain it--capturing that same virsimilitude of simple authenticity so de riguer in country music. The album's lyrical poigniancy in a time when most country music is dessicated and artless may have something to do with it. Hell, the ladies' reputation probably helps too, but I think it is the emotional depth of these songs that make this album a classic.

While Blood on the Tracks takes an occasional misogynistic tack at times (in all fairness--to support the album's concept,) Taking the Long Way Home celebrates American womanhood. Each song is a declaration of the pioneer woman's strength, the antislavery/pro-union marcher's fierce determination, and the suffragette's moral certainty. This is an album is an affirmation of the mothers who burned their bras, the sisters who petitioned for abortion rights, and the daughters who fight globalism. This album is the exaltation of the wife who stands beside her man instead of below him (though she could carry him is she had to!) This music makes me proud to be an American, and makes me doubly proud of the women who helped build our land.

In the final episode of How Art Made the World, "To Death and Back," host Dr. Nigel Spivey asserted that images of death help fuse a culture's set of values--particularly the inhuman value of wholesale slaughter. The Aztecs were specifically effective at this sort of propaganda, and their impact still haunts the continent. This might be why our leadership is trying so hard to control the media--when the cost of oil will soon be measured in citizens' lives insted of petrodollars. While they have been unimaginably effective with journalism, they haven't managed equal success in the entertainment industry. By and large they fail to understand the mechanism by which American imperialism assimilates conquered cultures, and it is this process which will win the citizenry's hearts and minds.

The failure to contain the Dixie Chick is indicative of the dominant culture's ignorance of its own power; similarly is the failure of of Sprinsteen's project to energize a progressive wing. Up until now, the dominant culture has intentionally brought to bear the tactics that has won it the press's fealty, without significant impact. Up until now, it has relied on serendipity, happy accidents, through which to quell African-American agitation, progressive movements, and third-world uprising--without realizing the mechanism for effecting positive social change. Now, with many thanks to Meera Nanda and Robert Nola, here is how to properly use the culture to conquer dissent:

Have you noticed how much Persian and Arab music is infiltrating our Pop these days? It is this same process--a backhanded form of neocolonialism often called "neoliberalism" or "reactionary modernism"--often evangelized by well-meaning bleeding-hearts and neofeudalist kleptocrats alike. Missplaced multiculturalism victimizes minority cultures as maliciously as the "White Man's Burden" of a century ago did. Fortunately for at least 80% of Americans, the dominant culture has yet to learn how to wield it against its own people.

When Robert Johnson stepped into the San Antonio recording studio in 1936, he essentially murdered the Blues. He surrendered its soul to Baal's corporate maw (was this the wage for selling his soul at the crossroads?) And the African-American community never even noticed--rather, it played along, swearing that Blues music and its descendent idioms were completely under their aegis. Until you get a corporate entity in the guise of Russell Simmons or Jay-Z, happily knee-slapping like porch-monkeys on watermelon. Harsh? Not half as harsh as pigs like Richard C. Young, who uses the megabucks he siphons off of innocent would-be investors to enrich his personal Jazz collection with recordings you and I cannot afford. Or the harshness of the plethora of unnamed suburban bands populated by republican ofays convinced the Blues originated with Stevie Ray Vaughan. But the harshness really scratches when a new generation of fans sincerely believe that the shit being peddled to us is actually "our" music!

So believe me when I tell you this: India.Arie is just as culpable as those mentioned above. Her touchy-feely, I-only-need-my-angels, my-ancestors-speak-though-me attitude on her new album, Testimony: Vol. 1 is just as dangerous as creation science and nationalism. It is seductive, enchanting as that honey voice and silky guitar, yet ultimately as effective at destroying rational scepticism as self-esteem workshops were at destroying public education. So wonderful that seduction is an eschewed art to the neocon kleptocrats.

Hey, Dylan was just as complicit in selling out Folk music as well. By turning Folk away from "topical" to "confessional" formats, he invited the wolf right in to the cabin. No more would Folk be used to chronicle the struggle against Moloch. At best, Folk would become an encyclopedic archive of "Roots" music, a vain attempt to save indigenous sounds before their annihilation by the New World Order--atruistic as it may be, it essentially participates in the subsummation of that culture.

Thank God, then for Bruce Cockburn. He has managed to bring folk-rock into the 21st Century. Cockburn is the only artist who comes readily to mind who can balance the confessional and topical; nay--no less than the spiritual and the existential. Ever since his magnum opus, Nothing But a Burning Light in 1991, I've been worried that, like many of his peers, he had lost his muse. I've been reassuring myself that, in his maturity, he was delving into the guitar and leaving lyrics for more energetic or idealistic youth. But his new album, Life Short, Call Now is stupendous! Okay, it isn't as spectacular as ...Burning Light, nor nearly as stupendous as Humans or Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws, but it is a far sight better than his last decade's moribund releases. Furthermore, the guitar-work and arrangements still show considerable growth, as if Cockburn still harbors maestro ambitions. Like the loftiest Pop, repeated listening is required in order for his songs to reach resonance, and I still have more years ahead to fully realize the import of this album, but immediately "Beautiful Creatures" reduced me to tears and chills. Bravo Bruce!

God bless 'em--they try. They would rather trot out a teary-eyed bald eagle, even let Condoleeza Rice play a little piano for you. But in the end, just as they cannot trust anyone who speaks Farsi, so they fall back on their black bag of nixonian tricks. Everyone is probably familiar with John Lennon's harrassment by the FBI, but did you know that folk singer Buffy Saint-Marie's records would mysteriously dissapear from their distribution dock? In a recently filed lawsuit against George W. Bush, Charles August Schlund alleges that "...American citizens had been kept under constant surveillance by the Office of Special Services ("OSS"), CIA, DEA and others because they were considered enemies of the state..." The short list includes Lennon, among Buddy Holly, Karen Carpenter, and Doris Day!

Fortunately, even when the roadmap is laid before them, they cannot harness the liberating power of music. For now, we are safe listening to the few though-provoking, gut-wrenching artists like Meshell Ndegeocello and the Roots.