Politicians and Pop

Generally speaking there exists an easy symbiosis between manufactured cultural icons and manufactured political icons, provided that the latter are of the garden-variety center-left sort.

When speaking of right(ish) wing politicians, however, the picture gets more complicated. Leaving aside the political preferences of Megadeath's Dave Mustaine and Kid Rock (a topic which deserves a post, if not a dissertation, in its own right), there is often a bizarre dissonance between the stated political ideals of right(ish) politicians and their musical preferences.

This topic came back into the news this week in two different places an ocean apart - the Times ran an article on the complicated relationship of Chris Christie and Bruce Springsteen and David Cameron confessed his affection for a Swedish folk (?) / rock (?) / bluegrass (?) / pop (?) duo called First Aid Kit.

These two cases, I think, seem to suggest opposing explanations. In the case of Christie and Springsteen, one can see a kind of continuity between what Christie perceives as his natural base of support and the sort of so-called everyman extolled in Springsteen's music. Not everyone would make this connection, of course, but some people who care enough have made a passionate case for this reading of his music. I don't personally care - but I would point out here that the commercial machine that manufactured Bruce Springsteen is very precisely calibrated to fabricate precisely the sorts of lyrics and musics that simultaneously appeal to opposing political groups as well as opposing inclinations in one and the same listener. Our music is just like our politics - seeming unbridgable divides are mere illusions to give an appearance of depth to a single, extraordinarily shallow ideology.

Now Cameron offers a different case - there is certainly no electoral benefit to professing a preference for Swedish folk/rock/bluegrass/pop, and the duo, who "sound like a couple of troubled, leathery old weather-beaten back porch bluegrass pluckers from Kentucky", according to the Guardian, in question is unabashedly ideological - environmentalist, feminist, etc. etc. etc., a living caricature so obvious it has even made it into Parks and Recreation:

So why did this carefully curated tidbit of Cameroniana appear in the interview?

Dave has never met a principle he wasn't eager to sacrifice for the sake electoral politics or personal advancement. His new friendly Tories seem like a bunch of posers trying to show the cool kids how they should fit in too. The easy, lazy explanation is that such politicians are so little affected by the cultural products they choose (!) to consume that it makes no difference to them at all. Their miserly little souls remain so shriveled as to be utterly impervious to the psychical effects of music, how it enters, as Plato says, the innermost parts of the soul. And there is probably a bit of truth to that.

On the other hand, Swedish folk (?) / rock (?) / bluegrass (?) / pop (?) duos shouldn't be let off the hook either - ultimately they are bit players in the same economic/cultural machine designed to enrich Dave's friends. Insofar as they are useful at generating interest (which equals pageviews which equals ads which equals money), as long as anybody listens to them outside of, say, in a bar in Enskede or Stockholm, the system is winning. Left wing cultural producers are as much stooges as their right(ish) wing consumers.

But Paul Ryan and Rage Against the Machine? Maybe we can just chalk that one up to a touch of unreformed adolescent depravity and a fairly sad case of arrested development. But what can we say? Par for the course, I expect.