ARTISTS ON POLITICS: WHY SHOULD ANYONE LISTEN?

From my buddy Matt's blog Caffeinated, a quick missive on a recent Bruce Springsteen interview:

O’BRIEN: There is a whole school of thought, as you well know, that says that musicians – I mean you see it with the Dixie Chicks - you know, go play your music and stop.

SPRINGSTEEN: Well, if you turn it on, present company included, the idiots rambling on on cable television on any given night of the week, and you’re saying that musicians shouldn’t speak up? It’s insane. It’s funny.

The question is not if Bruce or Bono or Angelina are qualified to talk politics, it’s why Ann Coulter, Chris Matthews, Bill O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, et al are assumed to be qualified. They work for entertainment companies. They are entertainers, too. Bruce has just as much right to sound wise or foolish as anyone else.

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Matt is so extraordinarily correct: whether or not artists have valid political opinions is essentially a moot point now that it's obvious that the corporate news media are simply so much entertainment. But, being an artist who speaks out on politics myself, I just can't help but throw in my two cents.

Never mind the fact that actors are part of a four thousand year old theatrical tradition which has always, from the civic minded plays of ancient Athens, through the state-craft oriented themes running through virtually all of Shakespeare's work, to the socially conscious scripts of American playwrights like Arthur Miller or Tony Kushner, directly concerned itself with that which is political. Never mind the fact that musicians like Springsteen, the Dixie Chicks, or Neil Young, are coming, to some extent, out of an American folk music tradition that has been explicitly political since at least the 1930s, if not earlier. Forget all that for just a moment. Just consider the fact that all these artists who have felt compelled to speak out during this time of national insanity are American citizens: it is their patriotic obligation to make their opinions known; without such citizen injections into the marketplace of ideas, democracy is certain to fail. That is, everyone should be proclaiming their political vision and analysis from the highest mountain peaks. That's what America is all about. That's what democracy is all about.

The real problem here, if there actually is one, is the massive soapbox that the corporate media provides for celebrities. If big stars weren't treated as gods, with an entire sub-industry of news media devoted to their every waking breath, there wouldn't be any controversy to speak of. In other words, famous artists who speak out on political issues are doing exactly what we should all be doing--it's not at all their fault that their celebrity status gives their voices more weight than yours or mine. Hell, if my career ends up being successful enough to make me famous, you can totally bet that I'm going to mouth off about my views every opportunity I get, which I do now anyway.

The only real response that a famous artist should have when asked by a hostile reporter or pundit why his opinion matters is something along the lines of, "if my thoughts are so unimportant, why are you interviewing me?" I wonder how the hell Bill O'Reilly would respond to that.

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