Rebel yell must still ring loud and clear

STRANGE bedfellows. The head-on collision of rock music with the advent of no-platforming and politics generally is a relatively new development and symptomatic of the growing weaponisation of popular culture.

For quite some time, it has seemed to me that the very same people shouting the loudest about ‘divisiveness’ are the ones actually causing it.

Whether this is brought about by an explosion of irony deficiency or a mass attack of collective autism, it’s difficult to say.

While it’s true to say that politics have always maintained a presence in popular music, there does seem to be a new and disturbing trend as the following examples would indicate.

In recent times, gigs have been cancelled and stark warnings issued by veteran rockers. And yet… despite this new Age of Outrage, Bob Vylan duo’s vile, antisemitic outburst at last year’s Glastonbury festival merely resulted in the usual middle-class heads sagely nodding their tacit approval.

Contrast this with punk rocker Michale Graves’ outburst in America six long years ago when those same middle-class heads angrily shook - and are possibly still continuing to shake - their disapproval. Stinks, doesn’t it? You know… that old familiar nostril-melting, clinging stench of rank hypocrisy.

However, I suppose it’s not that much of a mystery, for these days any dissent expressed in song – and there’s precious little of that, it would seem - must be from the same predictable, shouty-group-think perspective. But why?

Of course, there has always been a political element in some folk songs. Those concerned with the injustice and cruelties of, say, transportation for minor crimes committed in centuries past, readily spring to mind.

Mind you, the ‘enemy’ was easily identified in those days - the wicked squire, parson, village constable, landlord, gamekeeper and bailiff. Easy targets. But what happens when the battle lines are blurred and the self-appointed champions of ‘ordinary working people’ arguably become the new oppressors?

Why not songs about them? Illegal wars, MPs’ second jobs, a Labour Party investigated for antisemitism, one of its grandees consorting with convicted paedophiles, speaking engagements by ‘socialists’ that earn the equivalent of a year’s wage for an ‘ordinary working person’ in a single night… all this sounds like perfect material for song lyrics. So how about trying this line for openers, in the interests of creating ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’…

The working class can kiss my arse I’ve got the foreman’s job at last… OK, OK maybe that needs some work.

The blues, of course, is more stoical in its approach. There may indeed be heartfelt commentary on life’s setbacks but rarely does a demand for change via the political process enter the equation.

The late Country Joe McDonald memorably sang his Vietnam Song to the Woodstock generation at that famous festival, and then there’s Bob Dylan. Well, anyone who has seen the excellent Martin Scorcese film will soon realise that as soon as American politicos Joan Baez and Pete Seeger tried to politicise Mr Zimmerman, he ran a mile to plug in his solid Fender guitar and start rocking the joint.

Just as Mick Jagger seems to have done when the late MP Tom Driberg tried to persuade him to stand as a Labour candidate. Bless. It’s only rock and roll, Tom.

Interestingly, when Dylan was booed at gigs both in America and Britain, the audience’s disgust was probably as much about ‘political sell-out’ as finger-in-ear folkie orthodoxy and its tiresome opposition to any form of amplification.

Recently, I shared a post on my Facebook page in which the ‘shock’ rocker Alice Cooper exhorted musicians and fans alike to keep politics out of music. Don’t expect everyone to think like you just because that’s how you’d like it to be, he opined. Let people follow their own consciences. Hmm, that’s radical stuff, Alice. But I doubt if it will catch on.

Rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest poet was Chuck Berry. Harnessing black blues and white country music harmonic structures, he wrote eloquently and convincingly about fast cars (No Money Down, Too Much Monkey Business, You Can’t Catch Me), poor boy on wrong side of the tracks working his guitar fingers to the bone and eventually becoming famous and making shack loads of money (Johnny B Goode, Bye Bye Johnny), and poor (again) young man leaving home and hoping to make a pile in the sunshine state of California (Promised Land).

So - what’s all that about if it’s not pure, devil-takes-the-hindmost, no-holds-barred, aspirational capitalism? Surely that’s why rock exploded as this great, noisy liberating force in the early 1950s, with working class kids hearing its clarion call promise of riches and fame coming over the airwaves and rallying to the cause. Politics didn’t get a look-in. Politics? That’s for squares, man.

Rock music was originally a black, later white working-class music form that shouted out hope loud and clear, echoing the singer’s desire to have more than just a few crumbs dropped from the boss man’s table.

Tragically, it didn’t last forever. For the rot started to set in when the middle classes became involved and started to take control, as the middle classes have always done with everything since like forever.

They insisted that the ‘message’ had to move on and become relevant to the rapidly changing society of the 1960s. The result was that rock became word-heavy and splattered with the kind of doggerel you might find in a sixth form poetry society, the more obscure and absurd the better.

If there was one good thing about the 1970s punk movement it was the fact that the music was stripped down to its basics, shed its shackles of pretention, and broke free from the tampering and meddling of people who had little real connection with the rock music story.

Before the punk revolution of that decade, rock had been hijacked by the likes of Yes, Genesis and assorted bands with ever-increasing ludicrous names. It had become over-intellectualised, overblown, homogenised, sterilised and emasculated by middle class parvenus who not only dismissed rock’s earlier incarnation but also probably secretly despised it, too.

The ghastliest example was most surely Tales from Topographic Oceans, a lumbering, double disc of a monstrosity that should have been instantly euthanised at birth.

Little wonder then that this spiritual stagnation led to a fightback and growing calls for rock music to return to The True Faith.

The most notable development came about on May 15, 1976, when record producer Stu Colman led a protest march to the BBC building in London, calling for more genuine rock ‘n’ roll and rockabilly to be played on Radio One.

Incredibly, the BBC not only took note, but also gave Stu his own vintage music show, soon to be aired every Saturday afternoon, and which quickly became required listening for all devotees. Imagine that happening now – oh no, you might offend someone.

I’d known Stu since my hometown Rugby days when he played bass for local hitmakers Pinkerton’s Assorted Colours and then Flying Machine. As a junior reporter on the Rugby Advertiser newspaper, I once interviewed him at his tiny, vinyl-crammed bedsit in the town’s Bath Street.

But those days might have been light years ago. For nearer the present, here in Worcester, we recently witnessed the grotesque cancellation of a concert at the city’s Marrs Bar due to be staged by the punk rocker Michale Graves.

This initially came about because of political pressure applied by a single individual who was soon joined by a social media rent-a-mob.

Graves, it was claimed, had supported far right movement The Proud Boys six years ago when they laid siege to the US White House. Controversial, yes. But what would punk music be without causing outrage? Obviously, this was the wrong sort of outrage.

The final nail in the coffin of the Graves gig was hammered home because the musician had been dubbed ‘a fascist’ – potentially a libellous statement, a lifetime in journalism tells me - on the flimsiest of evidence, and that was it.

He could not be allowed to perform, and so the venue owner was obliged to pull the gig at the last minute. The censors had won... yet again.

It seems to me that the moral of this miserable tale is that politics should be kept well clear of all forms of popular music and vice versa. Music must be allowed the freedom to do what it does best, neither bowing nor scraping to anyone or anything, and certainly not held hostage to a political ideology or the superstitions of a religious belief system.

Of one thing we can be sure. Rock ‘n’ roll most certainly doesn’t have any obligations to joyless, meddling local politicians and camp followers only too eager to jump on the latest banned wagon.