One of the notions offered in this series of diaries is that "political music" matters. Now, of course, the politics of music is indistinct, because the point of music in this era is the "hypnopaedia" of which one reads in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, operating according to the logic of the culture industry as suggested by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Music workers thus become instruments of a music industry interested in maximizing sales receipts (of some sort of physical product; the proliferation of mp3s has changed the scene a bit).

Most music, then, like most movie production, is culturally unimportant. Perhaps people play popular music while doing something else, but it doesn't really matter, because even if we were to pay full attention to popular music (or for that matter Disney movies or whatever), it would have the same effect upon us. And this is how we arrive at the situation we have now, in which the popular music of the Sixties and the Seventies has become the content of sound systems in department stores. Which brings us back to Huxley's "hypnopaedia" -- the popular music of the Sixties and Seventies influences us subliminally, being part of our culture without us really knowing it. This, then, is how political music matters. The popular music of the Sixties and Seventies was a gateway, wherein we designed our own soundtracks. The soundtracks that have come along since, well, ultimately since Miles Davis and Frank Zappa died in the early '90s, have not been the same -- but Eighties music was already relatively unimportant.

Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd remains monstrously popular to this day. There were three Pink Floyds -- there was the band with Syd Barrett, cutely psychedelic, there was the classic band, with its Waters-Gilmour struggle, and then there was the post-Roger Waters band, which appears in the Eighties sounding like the triumph of finance capital.

The Syd Barrett incarnation appears entirely as a product of the Sixties zeitgeist. Early Pink Floyd appears as a set of collages of quaint musical gestures:

The classic band starts out fishing for an identity and ends up with the profundity of Dark Side of the Moon. DSOTM is definitely college-level stuff, Meaningful Music 101. Listening to classic Floyd, then, is like taking a high-quality core course.

The interesting figure in classic Pink Floyd was of course Roger Waters. Waters, the bassist and lead lyricist in this incarnation, is very good at critiquing the injustices of capitalism without specifying any superior alternative. DSOTM, Wish You Were Here and Animals offer, in places, spot-on critiques of the system. "Dogs" is really memorable in its skewering of careerists, with a hat-tip to George Orwell's small book Animal Farm:

Unfortunately, an alternative to capitalism is not immediately available to the masses, and so the goal of do(ing) the right thing sometimes appears elusive with Waters. It's clear, though, that he sees a benefit in having $300-plus million to (among other things) donate to worthy causes. To be sure, Waters doesn't pretend that the system is something it's not. The virtuousness of not having illusions about the system (if you're not Larry Ellison, that is) can't be underestimated.

However:

Denouncing bad stuff on an album or in a concert isn't going to stop said bad stuff from happen. The way you get traction is by organizing, and it doesn't seem that Kshama Sawant or George Galloway are planning to improve their chances by becoming popstars. I don't know, do they organize at Waters concerts? Here one remembers from the top of this diary that our background noise influences us subliminally, and that as regards background noise in general, many of us would be happier if we were exposed to a bit less of it. Perhaps if a credible alternative political party is started in the United States, Roger Waters can make a donation to that party.

Led Zeppelin. This was the "heavy metal" version of popular rock music, courtesy of guitarist Jimmy Page. They produced much of their interesting output in the Seventies, and the project collapsed when drummer John Bonham died in 1980. Led Zeppelin appears to have been motivated by basic hedonism. So, yeah, college dropout audience, with an economy to support them. Or one might think of an Emma Goldman quote while listening to Zeppelin: "If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution." I suppose the Zep made passable dance music. The band members looked like they had fun on stage:

Though we might ask about how fun heightened tolerance is. Just before John Bonham died, he supposedly drank 40 measures of vodka, which points to an enormous tolerance. I might get drunk on a pint of stout, or wired on a couple of wafers of 80% chocolate.

Here one recalls an old cliche: eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die. But the last part of that cliche appears as a reflection of nervousness rather than euphoria or carpe diem, as the Canadian popstar Bruce Cockburn reflects:

Elton John. Elton John began his popstar adventure with Bernie Taupin writing his songs. I guess his genre was originally "glam," or more succinctly "wear gaudy stuff when performing." A lot of the melodies were great, but I can't claim a big interest in Taupin lyrics. Saturday night's all right for uniting against the owning class, but not for fighting.

Though it must be added that in the future it will be fun explaining a particular lyric in the classic song "Bennie and the Jets": "You know I read it in a magazine." The explanation will go as follows: you see, back in the day people used to read these things called "magazines"...

The closest Taupin came to poetry (in my opinion) was in stuff like this:

A lot has been made of Elton John's sexual orientation. He came out as bisexual in 1976 in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine, which was pretty early in the chronology of LGBTQ rights. I suppose it's interesting because there are social forces which use matters of sexual orientation, i.e. identity politics, to divide us against each other.