"Where’s the voice of protest? It’s in MTV’s trash can."

From the Progressive:

Even Neil and his team posted it front and center on his blog for the entire week.

What prompted my letter and the outpouring was Young’s comment about why he felt compelled to write his new anti-Bush album, Living with War. “I was waiting for someone to come along, some young singer eighteen-to-twenty-two years old, to write these songs and stand up,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I waited a long time. Then I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the ’60s generation. We’re still here.”

As the first protest singer to rise from the streets of anti-war and WTO protests and get a major worldwide distribution deal, I felt compelled to explain that today’s Dylans, Ochses, and Neil Youngs are here, but they’re being silenced by an industry that has for years derived its profits from kiddy porn and dreamy boys.

Just two days after my article came out, MTV, which has refused to play anti-war videos even by the biggest stars, published an article addressing the need for political consciousness in mainstream music. In a flourish of Bush-like hubris, one of the country’s chief purveyors of military recruitment ads to youth posted the article, “Where Is the Voice of Protest in Today’s Music?” The webpage boasted an Army video game in the bottom right corner. (MTV, by the way, refuses to air anti-war ads produced by organizations like Not In Our Name and Win Without War.)

Click here for more.

Of course, as the article makes clear, it's not simply MTV: it's the entire recording industry. There are no popular anti-war or protest songs because that's the way they want it--the 60s were something of an historic aberration. So, if there's money to be made, why is the business so dead set on burying protest music? In addition to the industry's conventional wisdom that controversy is bad for sales, which is strange when you factor in gangster rap and all those quasi-pornographic female "singers," the vast majority of opposition culture's venom is aimed at the corporate world. Needless to say, since bigass corporations started buying up all the smaller heavies back in the late 70s, "corporate" defines the recorded music business extremely well. That is, why would the recording industry produce and promote a product that stands a chance, granted a small one, of altering public attitudes about the way they do business?

Over a decade ago, when I realized that my own songwriting was steadily drifting in a political direction, and that I didn't really feel good about writing bland love songs, I decided that it would be foolish to ever think seriously about trying to go professional. I might be able to pull off some club gigs, maybe an idie record deal if I played my cards right, but I would never, ever, ever be signed to a major label. It was obvious that they wouldn't like my stuff.

So, yeah, Neil Young, although I love him to death, was extraordinarily wrong about younger artists not stepping up. They can't step up. They've been blackballed.

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