Rock Stars in the Whitehouse

I have this hideous image in my head, of a shirtless Dick Cheney on stage shedding a Fender Stratocaster as he prepares to take a stage dive. Luckily no one will have to endure the weight and nightmares that an event like this would provoke. Nonetheless I see something all to similar happening in the current media circus that is the 2008 presidential election. With primary numbers being reported like baseball scores people are losing sight of what matters and are treating the elections more and more like a red carpet event.
Artists are stepping out from behind the stage to directly endorse presidential candidates. Although music has taken to playing watchdog for our government, I fear the lines between provocative art and political promotion are blurring. The protest song has been a prevalent part of American music since the ‘60s when Bob Dylan forged his career writing songs like Subterranean Homesick Blues and Hurricane that were criticizing the faults and follies of American life and government, but I’ve never heard of him coming out on stage wearing an L.B.J. button or shouting campaign slogans.
Musicians play a vital role in the political process because they are in a unique position to serve as a call to action for a group of people that may be desensitized to the political jargon that gets regurgitated in every speech, debate and Fox news report that graces our television sets nightly. The ability to enhance and even guide the public’s opinion is not something to be taken lightly, especially when the group they are “preaching” to have the power to turn the tide of the election.
When artists like Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips poses next to Presidential Candidate Barack Obama wearing a booster button and rocking two thumbs up, how will diehard Lips fans will react? Could some diluted fan out there go to the polls and vote Obama simply because his idol “told him to”? Considering the power that celebrities have in this country this is not far fetched. At an Arcade Fire show front man Win Butler spoke directly to his fans and endorsed senator Obama. To the growing number of young people who have become disillusioned with politics these actions may weigh heavy on their choice for president.
This months Rolling Stone features Obama in a pose that’s fit for a deity next to the glowing caption, “A New Hope”. In a country so obsessed with instant gratification such a powerful image on a magazine as widely read and circulated as Rolling Stone can have a serious impact. That impact could be dangerous especially when so many people won’t even bother to read the words inside to actually learn something about the man they want running their country for the next four years.
Music has always had a certain quality that can cut through the blur of polysyllabic words that spill from the mouths of politicians and transform it into that ever-eluding truth that we are all searching for. Whether it be through the angst ridden revolutionary tunes of Rage Against the Machine, or the winding poetic ramblings of Mr. Zimmerman, they make us think about the issues and how we are going to solve them. In that context musicians are invaluable to politics, but an endorsement doesn’t say a word about why an artist likes a candidate. Just like crafting an opinion from the cover of a magazine, an endorsement only tells us what we should like, not why we must.
An artist hopping on a campaign bandwagon (no pun intended) will do nothing but distract fans from these issues instead of turning their minds. It skews the issues and makes us forget that when a candidate is in office it’s their policies that matter, not how many tour busses boast their bumper stickers.