While reading Dennis McNally's excellent biography of The Grateful Dead, I kept musing at how naive the members of the band were. Insisting they were "apolitical", they nevertheless played for the students striking at Columbia University; after meeting Eldridge Cleaver on an airplane ride, Garcia became a good friend of the Oakland-based Black Panthers. Even the bands surging popularity in the late-1980's was a stark counterpoint to the dullness of late-Reaganism.
I have always been fascinated by the link between culture - art, music, literature - and their social and political dimensions. Just a glance at American art - our literature, our painting, most especially our music - since the end of the Civil War, you can see how our artists struggled not only to understand what "America" was, but (far more important) what America could be. Whitman's poetry, the music of the blues, Ragtime pianists, Twain's Huckleberry Finn (which is one of the great statements about race and humanity to emerge in the English language); the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood not only wrap up previous ideas of what it means to be America. They also push us to think what America might be should we surrender to the better angels of our collective history. Especially with the rise of "Ragtime" music in the years just prior to American entry in to the First World War, and the various attempts by white cultural gate-keepers to keep the invasion of Centaurs at bay, we have a dress-rehearsal for the overwhelming, and largely on-going, fight between those artists who continue to push the boundaries, not just aesthetically, but socially and politically, and the countervailing tendencies, commercial and social and political, to contain these forces (and maybe make a buck off them, too). Why else, just as a "fer-instance", do we now have attempts to make of Norman Rockwell some kind of subversive "artist", even more subversive than, say, the abstract expressionists?*
Cultural phenomena - painting and sculpture, the novel and poetry, music and dance, even public landscaping and architecture - all have as their primary intent the desire on the part of their creator to communicate. The best artists, musicians, architects manage to communicate not just feeling, but present actual thought in a non-linguistic "set" that forces us to render it linguistically. Even the novel and the poem, the "text" apotheosized, become "non-textual" as we turn to our consideration of them, objects in their own right, ripe for study (I owe Richard Rorty's essay, "Texts and Lumps", for this particular notion).
Consider the murals of Benton. Part of Benton's mastery was a presentation, one might say an over-indulgence, of imagery that offered not just a view of America, but an opinion, a perspective on that view that challenged the viewer.
Consider Frank Lloyd Wright's reconceptualization of space.
Consider Billie Holliday's "Strange Fruit".
All of these - paintings, buildings and open spaces, songs - not only summed up their moment. They pushed us, challenged us, sometimes even enraged us. They did so because the best art is "representational" (mimetic, to borrow a fancy term to which I was recently reintroduced) precisely as it repackages our received ideas, and adds a further, "But, what about this?"
Thus, it is naive of anyone to believe that a musician has no impact on society or politics. It is naive to think that politics has no impact on our culture. The "cultural politics" of the right over the past quarter century has been a dismal failure precisely because those on the right believed that Americans have always rested contentedly within the bosom of certain cultural comforts. Even a casual glance at American cultural history shows a far more dynamic interchange, including the efforts to subvert subversion (as it were) through hyper-commercialization. In other words, some business folks see an opportunity to snag the main chance. While this has produced casualties, and a few people become filthy rich at the expense of the originators of this or that particular cultural product, American culture has never rested on its laurels. It has never settled for commercial profitability, or popular appeal, as defining what makes it a success. We Americans are Romantic enough at heart to be far more satisfied that something one or another of us has done has impacted the life of one or two other persons.
Sometimes, though, a song, a painting, a park, can spark not just some happiness; sometimes, it can change the way we live our lives.
*One Saturday Evening Post cover has a young man standing and looking quizzically at a Pollock-like painting. I love it precisely because the juxtaposition of the droll illustrator actually rendering a piece of art makes this particular sketch something more. It is a rare instance of Rockwell, who enjoyed modern art, going beyond his own limitations.
