I think part of the difficulty with political songwriting these days is that musicians rely heavily on an audience that they have become interconnected to through the algorithm, and so the result of political songwriting is oftentimes what I will call “red meat” – music which is designed for the already-faithful. There is nothing wrong with red meat per se, except that it sits in tension with the concept of political songwriting as a vehicle for change. What political change is there if your music only goes to and is designed for people who have the same political viewpoints?
So social media changes (or reinforces) how many musicians write music – it would be naive to suggest otherwise – and I suppose also how music is reviewed, because both musicians and outlets look at metrics in deciding what to write and how they evaluate what they write about. Social media provides perverse incentives, and when you tell a generation of musicians that they *must* utilize social media as part of becoming a musician, it institutionalizes those incentives in a way that can be problematic. And this in turn makes a mess of what the standard for evaluation is. Because as soon as people are motivated to write about things based on the algorithm, then whatever independent evaluative standards they had for themselves beforehand, start to become compromised.
I wanted to talk about a standard for thinking about political music which concerns the extent to which a music embodies reasons for action. The thought is that great political music is best thought of as something that gives the listener insight into the thinking of the songwriter, which might in turn lead them to change their viewpoint on the world in some way. In the space of ethics or theory of action, another way of saying this is that great political music impresses upon the listener reasons for action.
Thinking about music in the context of reasons for action might seem odd in that you might think it portrays music as a form of cold logic. But reasons exist in the space of emotions as much as cold argument. For instance, we talk about reasons to be angry, to be jealous, and to have fondness towards someone, just as much as we talk about reasons to believe. It’s just that in the case of belief, reasons take the form of cold hard facts (or the beliefs about them), and reasons to be angry, to be jealous, or to have fondness towards someone inherently involve some kind of value or passion (using the word very loosely). So, for instance, the fact that the sun has come up every day for millennia is a reason to believe that the sun will come up tomorrow. And while facts may be part of a reason to be angry at Susan, for instance, the fact that Susan insulted me, a complete explanation of the reason to be angry at Susan involves something more – perhaps my prior fondness for Susan, my own feelings of self-worth or the like.
And reasons for feeling are not that far off from reasons for action. Reasons for feeling can themselves partly constitute reasons for action. My being angry at Susan for insulting me may provide me with a reason to insult Susan in turn. Or reasons for action may involve some other kind of value or passion – classically a desire, or some kind of special moral motivation, depending on who you talk to. This is all to say that reasons for action are hardly cold, and looking at how emotions and desires and moral motivation can move us to act, you can see how reasons for action might be very important when it comes to evaluating political songwriting, which purports to be an agent of change.
And the arts in general (and I think music in particular) is specially positioned to get a listener to understand the artist’s reasons for action, and take them on as their own. It’s no surprise, for instance, that a good breakup song can get a listener to understand and even feel the reasons that the artist feels despondent after a breakup, in a way that goes beyond merely telling them. And in the same way, I think that music can also get a listener to understand emotional and other reasons for a political viewpoint as well.
In fact, we want political songwriting to address listeners in the space of reasons for action instead of directly telling them what to do. One reason is purely motivational – a listener should do the right thing because they understand why it is right, and this involves addressing a political position on the level of reasons. Someone who does something for a political cause is more genuinely a part of the cause, and stays with the cause if they do it because they understand the underlying reasons for the political cause in the first place, as opposed to doing it for a paycheck.
Another reason is more artistic. Telling people what to do in political songwriting falls afoul of the general rule of “showing instead of telling” and can be a form of talking down to listeners in a way that is not very helpful. And as I see it, red meat songwriting, as a rule, fails to address listeners in the space of reasons and so additionally fails in the aforementioned ways. This is a problem because qua political songwriting, it purports to be a kind of agent of change, and so fails by its own standards.
Anyway, I wanted to just outline a particular way of way of thinking about how to evaluate political songwriting, because in an age where even writing from outlets is influenced by the algorithm, it helps to elucidate standards for evaluation. Because the algorithm is not a value-neutral mechanism for filtering music, and in fact it is expressive of a viewpoint that is itself both poisonous and utterly stupid.
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