Writings in the Sand

The Politics of Music

Way back in the early eighties (the 1980s for those who didn't come about until the 21st century) I worked in a small room that adjoined a larger room. The large room was filled with industrial-sized laundry machines. There was spinning and swishing and running water, occasionally punctuated by the shout of "bag coming!" followed by the thud of a large sack of soiled laundry landing in the bottom of a huge plastic bin. The walls of the small room were lined with metal shelving that held stacks of linen. The small room also had a table and a chair, and a boom box.

A boom box was a portable radio/cassette player with decently-sized speakers. And in those days, one turned on the radio, tuned into a station and listened to whatever music they played because it was really too much trouble to change the station to find a better song if one didn't care for the current selection. Do they do that anymore? It was a matter of finding the radio station you found least objectionable and letting it play. In this way, I became familar with many songs from many artists even without buying one album (buying individual songs was pretty much phased out by the advent of cassette tapes and the fading away of 45 vinyl records).

In this way I became familiar with U2 and many of their songs, this one included. Even though we had MTV at that time - and they still played music videos back then- I had never seen this video for New Year's Day.

I was always vaguely aware that much of U2's music was political but I didn't always subscribe to their political opinions. This was different, because it referenced the worker's struggle in Poland led by Lech Walesa. Who couldn't get behind that? But still, the song played on the radio all the time and I barely noticed, The words went in my ears and were memorized by my brain without any attempt to assign great meaning to them. I was working, I was young. Music was background noise meant to preserve my sanity.

Listening to this song again reminds me that music doesn't have to be about drugs and sex or be written to appeal to the most base aspects of human nature. Over the years, many artists have tried to raise political awareness through their lyrics. Before U2 we had Bob Dylan. Now there are songwriters like Oliver Anthony. I won't try to name all the artists who used music to express the populist political opinion, every generation has them. And that's how it should be. There have to be dissident voices and expression in art.

Not all may agree with the views expressed, but that's the beauty of free thought and free speech. We learn from each other, we learn from history, we learn from those who disagree with us. We might even learn from the music.