Two weeks before Richard Nixon left the White House in August 1974, Stevie Wonder released an album, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, which contained the toxic goodbye You Haven’t Done Nothin’. “We are sick and tired of hearing your song,” Wonder scolded the departing POTUS. The 43rd president demands no such hurrying. Even though he doesn’t step down until tomorrow, US President W. George Bush’s song has been all but inaudible for the past year. As his opponents have sublimated Bush hate into Obama love, he has become a ghost president, hardly worth the bother of attacking.
If you require a good-riddance sound track, however, there are plenty to draw on from the preceding years. Between Dixie Chick Natalie Maines telling a London audience in March 2003 that she was “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas” and Kanye West declaring on a live telethon in September 2005 that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” the president’s approval rating halved and the trickle of critical songs became a torrent. You could construct a decent box-set of anti-Bush songs — Songs in the Key of W, perhaps — covering ground from Bright Eyes to Eminem, Pink to Public Enemy, Jay-Z to Elbow. Neither Nixon nor Ronald Reagan attracted such consistent and wide-ranging personal opprobrium.
Bush was a gift to songwriters because he allowed so many lines of attack. To Public Enemy in Son of a Bush (2002) it was an alleged coke habit (which Bush had previously denied) and execution-happy record as governor of Texas. To the Beastie Boys in In a World Gone Mad (2003) it was his bellicose posturing: “George Bush, you’re looking like Zoolander/Trying to play tough for the camera.” To Pearl Jam in Bu$hleaguer (2002) he was a “confidence man” who “got lucky.”
But these artists, along with fellow early critics REM and Zack de la Rocha, were longstanding liberals and leftists who cut their teeth during the eras of Reagan and Bush senior. One mark of a truly bad leader is the ability to stir outrage among artists who usually leave their politics at the studio door. Just before the 2004 election, Eminem labeled Bush a “weapon of mass destruction” in his stirringly surly anti-war record Mosh, and Green Day released American Idiot, which, if it wasn’t specifically about the president, didn’t bend over backwards to discourage that interpretation. Evidently, though, no artistic efforts mobilized enough younger voters to put John Kerry in the Oval Office. After Bush’s
re-election, and with Iraq’s continued descent into chaos, the songs grew more bitter. As the second term began, Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst memorably depicted Bush as a deluded religious maniac in When the President Talks to God (2005).
Rob Tannenbaum, music editor of the US music magazine Blender, heard Oberst sing it at New York town hall that January: “I can’t think of many occasions when I felt an audience was so engrossed in the drama of a song and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a singer project as much sincerity. There was a point when I thought he was going to start crying.” But over the next few months, echoing Bob Dylan’s painful efforts to disentangle himself from politics in the 1960s, Oberst fled from the song. He later complained to the Guardian: “I guess they see some kind of glimmer in you, the left, and they want you to be an activist full time.”
It was a forgivable reaction. Since the early 1960s, more politically outspoken musicians have backed down through fear of leftwing expectation than rightwing persecution. It takes overwhelming conviction to do more than record a one-off protest song, and to stay the course at the risk of disappointing or, worse, boring your fans. Among the few who took up the anti-Bush cause in earnest were Pearl Jam with their Riot Act tour, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young with their Deja Vu shows, and the Flaming Lips, who included a fistful of protest songs, including The Yeah Yeah Song, on 2006’s At War With the Mystics album and attacked the president from the stage at show after show. “The frustration was coming out of us in the songs,” says frontman Wayne Coyne. “But the other side of that is just dumb cheering along. We really do love having someone we can all hate.”
And yet when Neil Young was promoting his Living With War album in May 2006 and said: “I was hoping some young person would come along and sing some songs about it, but I didn’t see anybody, so I’m doing it myself,” nobody rushed to contradict him. That such a patently inaccurate statement passed unchallenged raises the question: despite so many voices being raised against Bush, was anybody really hearing them? A protest song is like the theoretical falling tree: if nobody hears it, does it make a sound?
If Iraq saw an escalation in Bush-burning songs (as Coyne points out, “the reason we hate George Bush isn’t because he’s a dumb shit: it’s because he’s sending these young guys off to war”), then Hurricane Katrina was the tipping point.
While one should be wary of comparing hip-hop to the broadly conservative country music scene, the impotent right-wing outrage that followed Kanye West’s telethon outburst paled beside the boycotts and death threats that greeted the Dixie Chicks 30 months earlier. With much of New Orleans under water, criticizing the president became less a risk than a civic duty. Houston duo the Legendary KO immediately adapted West’s hit Gold Digger into the protest record George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People, New Orleans’ own Lil’ Wayne moulded a Ray Charles sample into Georgia Bush (“We should’ve called it Hurricane Georgia Bush”) and Jay-Z weighed in with Minority Report.
And yet, unless one is moved to seek out examples, it doesn’t feel like we have just lived through a boom in protest songs, because there was no melding them into a persuasive cultural movement. Only American Idiot and the Black Eyed Peas’ soft-focus anti-war song Where Is the Love were major hits; most were tucked away as album tracks. The two most significant musical comments on the Bush administration weren’t songs at all, but the off-the-cuff comments by Maines and West.
Tannenbaum sees something significant in that: “They found a different kind of medium rather than getting a song on the radio. What’s the point of writing a protest song? [US radio giant] Clear Channel isn’t going to play it. MTV doesn’t play videos. What you need is something far more viral and guerrilla. I think there’s a distrust of the traditional mode of protest songs.” One culprit, he suggests, is the cultural fragmentation of the digital age. “If you wanted to reach alienated young people in 1968 you got a song on the radio and they would all hear it in the same week. Now there isn’t one station that everyone is tuned into — I don’t just mean a radio station, I mean a central media station.”
Wayne Coyne points out another significant difference between the 2000s and the 1960s: “My older brothers knew guys at high school who got drafted [Coyne is 47], went to Vietnam and two weeks later they were dead. That’s a powerful experience. When Green Day are singing a song, you’re like, “Cool song dude, I got my new iPhone.” That’s not a powerful experience. The youth aren’t dying in the same way. A lot of people didn’t really feel the effects of Bush. They weren’t powerless — they just didn’t give a shit.”
Looking back on all the songs opposing the Bush presidency, it seems that what was missing wasn’t passion, but cohesion. Until Obama provided a flag to rally around, musical dissent was so diffuse that to the average listener it could become inaudible. Conversely, the tidy narratives of the 1960s or punk exaggerate the significance of previous protest songs. As Christgau observes, “Cultural reach always seems to get romanticized and overstated in retrospect.” One day, perhaps, the Bush years will benefit from this effect and the many musical dissenters will get credit for their efforts.
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