Reposted from My Substack
Over the New Year’s holiday, the Right-wing became amazingly triggered by Punk Pop Group Green Day changing one word in their seminal protest song “American Idiot” from “I’m not a part of the redneck agenda” to “I’m not a part of the Maga agenda.”
Because how dare they?
On Fox they argued “What does that mean? They’re not down with lower crime”(Although Blue States already have lower crime than Red States) “Does that mean a secure border?” (Although the Biden administration has arrested and expelled over 4 Million people at the border) “Does that mean they want a better economy?” (Although unemployment is at a sustained record low that hasn't been reached since 1969, inflation has dropped by a historic amount, wages are up, the GDP is up, and the Stock Market is up.)
The MAGA agenda isn’t about solving any of these issues, it’s about lying about them
The MAGA can’t stand that Green Day dared to criticize them because of course, they are above all criticism.
How dare Green Day suggest the MAGA Agenda is a bad thing. How dare they make their song political, even though that song was always political. That song criticized George W. Bush and the Iraq War which was 20 years ago. How dare they update the song to reflect the current times and equate the jingoistic and dogmatic War Mongering of that time to the MAGAs who would violently and viciously attack their own Capitol because of yet another Authoritarian Leader.
How dare they point out that one pack of violent assholes are just like another pack of violent assholes.
For this Green Day has to be punished and shunned. Just like Taylor Swift who had the temerity to register voters during her recent Era’s tour. Just like the Dixie Chicks dare to point out that they were embarrassed that George W. Bush was from their home state of Texas 20 years ago which resulted in their records being pulled off Country radio and burned.
They want to silence Green Day, they want to silence Taylor Swift, they want to silence the Dixie Chicks. They can’t take the criticism, they can’t take the pushback, they can’t take being told the truth.
But when musical artist lines up on their side of the political aisle, they don’t tell them to shut up and sing happy songs. They don’t tell them to stay in their lane. They don’t say “shut up and sing.” They highlight and celebrate that artist even if they don’t make any damn sense.
Artist like Kid Rock.
A rich kid from 50 miles from Detroit who used Hip Hop as a way to break into the music business even touring with NWA, then flips to Rock and Country while using the N-word, displaying the confederate flag, and campaigning for McCain and Romney, even writing the theme song for the Romney Campaign. Then he goes full-on Trump, and goes after Budweiser.
Artists like Jason Aldean and his pro-lynching song.
Directly invoking video of BLM riots and arguing that if you do that in a “small town” you’ll be taken out and “taken care of” which brings up direct images of Racist Lynchings, which actually did take place at the court house he filmed the video in front of.
And Oliver Anthony - and his racist classist song about “Rich men.”
In this song, Oliver complains about “Rich Men” wasting tax money, but instead of talking about the military-industrial complex which wastes $billions out of their $842 billion budget he then shifts and starts punching down at welfare recipients (when SNAP has 1/5th their budget with just $183 Billion) for being “400 pounds, eating fudge rounds”, and talking about Epstein island while complaining the people don’t care about it as much as they do coal miners.
Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy have grown to add $1.1 Trillion to the deficit every year since 2016 — so exactly why are you giving the poor and the hungry a hard time for the meager benefits they receive instead of talking about those “rich men”? Part of the reason people on SNAP eat crappy food is because they can’t afford to buy anything of quality, and if they did buy high-quality low-calorie food these people would be talking shit about them for that.
So is the right-wing telling Kid Rock, Jason Aldean, Oliver Anthony or Ted Nugent to shut the hell up? Or at least get their facts right? Are they losing their minds over them speaking out and sharing their political views?
Not. A. Chance.
Going back you had Woody Guthrie, you had songs like “Hurricane” by Bob Dylan, you had the music of The Clash with “London Calling”, in the 80s you had dozens of artists get together with “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, “We are the World” and to protest Apartheid in South Africa with Little Steven’s “Sun City.”
[This is a copy of “Sun City” that I transferred from the VHS to digital myself.]
And then you had one of strongest political protest bands ever, Rage Against the Machine, and their guitarist Tom Morello has a response to Fox over Green Day’s lyric change.
[Full disclosure, Tom is an old friend of mine from when we were both members of the Black Rock Coalition in the early 90s]
This is about more than one changed lyric. What you see consistently is that protest music from a progressive perspective has been virtually shut down for decades, particularly since Rage Against the Machine broke up in the 90s.
Rage directly addressed police brutality with their very first single “Killing In the Name”. Later they performed and protested in front of the Democratic National Convention because they felt the Democratic agenda was too corporate. They performed in front of the New York Stock Exchange and shut it down for a day.
They pulled no punches and accepted no quarter.
Nobody since then has stepped forward to really present the progressive perspective, not even the Dixie Chicks have done that. Generally, Taylor Swift’s music isn’t about promoting progressive values or issues, she may personally feel that way as we have seen when she stood up against the re-election of Marsha Blackburn who voted against the Violence Against Women Act, but she doesn’t sing about it.
And you can see in this clip that even speaking out was frightening for her. She and her parents had some real fear over it, and her dad talks about purchasing armored cars — the fear is palpable for them.
Speaking out against the Right can be like literally taking your life in your hands. They issue death threats like eating popcorn, they’ve swatted people like Jack Smith. So Swift may believe in these issues, but she doesn’t sing about them. She doesn’t make it a song or an anthem of any kind.
It’s gotten so bad that a former FBI agent went on Fox News recently to claim that Swift is some kind of “covert agent” because she called for people to vote. Not who to vote for, just to vote itself.
Former FBI special agent Stuart Kaplan suggested on Fox News Tuesday evening that because pop star Taylor Swift posted a link to register voters, she may be some sort of covert asset.
"In modern times, with these people having such influence and such, you know, immeasurable amount of followers, she can potentially singlehandedly swing voters because of just the amount of followers that she potentially can influence," said Kaplan in discussion with Jesse Watters.
"Yeah, because when she posted the link to the Vote.org, like hundreds of thousands of young Taylor Swift fans all of a sudden registered to vote," said Watters. "I wonder who got to her, from the White House or from wherever. Who makes that initial handshake? Is it the binder?"
"The administration has what they consider a perception optics management team," said Kaplan. "And those are professionals that go out and identify those people who may be unsuspecting, whether with knowledge or without knowledge, to do these type of campaigns. Now it is quite possible, frankly, that Taylor Swift does not know that she is being utilized in a covert manner to swing voters. But the bottom line is that the Biden administration is savvy, identifying how many followers and how many voters, potentially, she can influence. With either right information or misinformation, she can swing the voters."
So now she’s an “agent provocateur?” Really? She’s a spy?
[And what do they do to spies when they catch them? That’s right, execution.]
The Pentagon has even responded to this issue which was also pushed by Jesse Watters.
Watters on Tuesday, during his show Jesse Watters Primetime, told viewers that “around four years ago, the Pentagon’s psychological operations unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset.”
He then showed a clip from a 2019 conference organized by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, where a presenter appears to name Taylor Swift merely as an example of a powerful influencer.
“It’s real. The Pentagon psy-op unit pitched NATO on turning Taylor Swift into an asset for combating misinformation online,” Watters said.
But on Wednesday, Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh pushed back against Watters claim, referencing one of Swift’s big hits by saying in a statement, “as for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off.”
“But that does highlight that we still need Congress to approve our supplemental budget request as Swift-ly as possible so we can be out of the woods with potential fiscal concerns,” Singh added, seizing the opportunity to slyly highlight a Swift song by telling Congress “I Wish You Would” grant the administration its supplemental budget request.
Even if she isn’t a PsyOps asset, the larger point is that someone like Taylor Swift could be very powerful at shifting public opinion - sadly though, she isn’t doing that hardly enough to make as much of a difference as she could. Not that I totally blame her considering the personal risk to her and her family.
Green Day did address some political issues involving George W. Bush on their “American Idiot” album, however their first hit song was actually about masturbating. It’s not something they’ve done regularly.
If you truly dare to do a progressive song, the world could literally collapse in on you as we have seen when the police took moves against NWA and Body Count for criticizing bigoted police violence.
In response, they threatened his record label, including calling in death threats to employees of the label. The police harassed and threatened the band with arrest, showing up at their shows and banning them from performing in their own home town. By the way, even in this report, they refer to “Cop Killer” as a rap song and only to Ice T as the artist. But it’s not a gangster rap song, it’s a Rock Song and the artist is the band “Body Count.” Yet again, this is all a lazy distortion of what was going on.
It’s been a long time since U2 wrote and performed “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “Pride (in the Name)” - we don’t have bands or artists really doing that anymore. U2 doesn’t even do that anymore.
But on the other side, you have these phony douchebags (in my opinion) like Vanilla Ice, Kid Rock and Ted Nugent and now Toby Keith, Jason Aldean and Oliver Anthony who automatically become celebrities of the Right Wing for essentially being racist classist assholes. Nugent has threatened the lives of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Eric Holder multiple times, which is just so “Totally ‘Merican, Yeah!”
When the Dixie Chicks spoke out — again, not in their music — not only were they kicked off country music radio, and their records were destroyed their lives were threatened.
All of this may explain why you don’t see or hear that many progressive artists. All you might hear is a little lyric change, or maybe they might speaking out between songs, but they don’t address things in their music.
Almost no one does that.
Fortunately, I can do more than just complain or comment about this from the sidelines. I’m a musician myself and take the issue of protest songs seriously. I’ve been making them on my own for a long time, like with this track “Tumbling Down” from 2008 which I wrote about the violence that was occurring at the end of the Bush administration and the bigoted Right-Wing attacks on Obama.
Or this song “Wannabe?” which addressed the issues of Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Hurricane Katrina.
I don’t plan to sit on the sidelines. I’ve started a Patreon for my new music which mostly focuses on cover songs right now — and I haven’t released another one for a while because I’m living in a hotel until we can buy a new home — but I’ve written and recorded about 20 brand new songs which I’ll be putting melodies and lyrics to over the next year.
I promise you — I’m going to address some issues, I don’t care about threats or the music industry which has practically collapsed in on itself due to apathy and corruption.
And if you see other artists who have the courage to speak out and withstand the corporate, police and right-wing backlash — support them.
Have a listen to my latest Vocal Cover — “Sober” originally by Pink
Check out my new Patreon where you can download copies of my covers and original songs.
Visit My Substack And You can send Funds to Support me via Paypal