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Of all the arts, music has the best claim to be an agent of change. I mean no disrespect here to radical theatre troupes breaking down the fourth wall with hard-hitting dramas about sex work, or visual artists decentring western notions of perspective, or dance companies exploring the liberatory potential of embodied consciousness. But none of them will ever start a revolution.
Music, on the other hand, has midwifed several. One happened in 1830 when an audience at a performance of Daniel Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici in Brussels was sufficiently stirred by its nationalist songs to march out during the second act and seize the city. Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011 is another example. Vast crowds called for President Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow by chanting a song called “Irhal”, which means “leave”. Its creator, rock musician Ramy Essam, is celebrated as “the voice of the Egyptian revolution”.
Popular uprisings need anthems. Books can provide the blueprint for a new society, but music is the catalyst to make it happen. The singalong is an act of mass mobilisation, powered by the heightened feelings that music induces. One moment you’re all chanting an aria named “Amour sacré de la patrie”, the next you find yourself in the utopia of a new state called Belgium.
There was a lot of flag-waving and chanting at this year’s Glastonbury. Most of it was innocuous, as with the quirkily emblazoned flags that fluttered while people exercised their lungs to dear old Rod Stewart as he wiggled his way through “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”. But other instances were rather more inflammatory.
The most incendiary set actually began in a droll fashion. “We’re going to start as usual with some light stretching and meditation,” said Bobby Vylan, aka Pascal Robinson-Foster, frontman for Ipswich punk-rap duo Bob Vylan, as if leading a wellness session in the healing field. He proceeded to do a sweet punk duet with his daughter and successfully attempt the longest crowd-surf I’ve ever seen, carried 40 metres or so over people’s heads while cracking jokes about losing his shorts.
It was all very good-humoured — apart from the aggressive polemics that the frontman also delivered in songs and stage talk about class war, sexism, racism, police brutality and, most neuralgic of all: Israel-Palestine. Quirky flags were thin on the ground, but there were many Palestinian ones. At one point Robinson-Foster launched a chant of “Death to the IDF” and denounced a former record label boss as a “Zionist”. BBC cameras broadcast all this live.
According to your perspective, the result was either politicised punk at its fiercest or a despicable exercise in hate speech. Keir Starmer called it “appalling” and the UK’s chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis labelled it “vile Jew-hatred”. The police have launched a criminal investigation into both Bob Vylan’s set and the one by Irish rappers Kneecap that followed it, which was also laced with pro-Palestine sloganeering. The BBC’s boss Tim Davie is under pressure to resign and the US state department has revoked Bob Vylan’s visas for a planned tour.
The furore is real and raw — but it also has a rehearsed aspect. The boos that rang out when Israel or Starmer were mentioned during Bob Vylan’s and Kneecap’s shows weren’t a million miles from the booing at pantomimes. Their aggressive music and messaging were sucked into the contained violence of the mosh pit. In that both groups reached a vast audience with their insurrectionary songs, as they would see it, their twin Glastonbury appearances could be judged a triumphant example of agitpop. But I am dubious about its effectiveness.
In the US and Europe, popular music is stitched tightly into an entertainment industry that dates back to the 1890s, when the first record labels got going. The idea that songs can change the world has become a USP, a consumable characteristic. As Rod Stewart curtly announced at the start of his Glastonbury set, as though dispatching a necessary piece of flummery: “Music brings us together!”
The ultimate metric for agitpop’s success is action. By that yardstick, the sticker on Woody Guthrie’s guitar saying “This machine kills fascists” hasn’t proved terribly accurate in the long run. In fact, I would venture to say that the opera arias that rang out amid the revolutionary ferment of 19th-century Europe were much more powerful agents of upheaval than the vaunted political energies, in the west at least, of folk revivalism, rock, punk, rap and so on.
That ubiquitously chanted riff from the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” — you know: “duh der-der-der-der-der duh” — has become emblematic. Endlessly mutable, it can be used to soundtrack almost any chanted name, from favourite political leaders to footballers. Music mobilises us, but its claim to be a harbinger of change has grown thinner.
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