What's political music? All music is political, right? You either make music that pleases the king and his court, or you make music for the serfs outside the walls. It's what music (and culture) is for, right? To distract or confront, or both at the same time? So many of us know already that shit is fucked.
In a lot of crucial ways, it's easier to find common cause than it was 10 or 20 years ago. You talk to strangers in bars or on the street, and you realise that we're all up to our eyeballs in it, right? So that right now, there's more of us than ever. It's a true fact. Every day it gets a little harder to pretend that everything's OK. The rich keep getting more and we keep getting less. Post-9/11, post-7/7, there's a police state that tightens more every day, and in our day-to-days, we're all witnesses to the demeaning outcomes of debauched governance – random traffic stops, collapsing infrastructure, corrupt bureaucrats and milk-fed police with their petty intrusions. Our cities are broke, they lay patches on top of patches of concrete, our forests cut down and sold to make newspapers just to tell us about traffic that we get stuck in. You get a parking ticket and you waste a day in line. Cop shoots kid, kid shoots kid, homeless man dies waiting to see a doctor, old men lay in hospital beds while a broken bureaucracy steals away what's left of their dignity. Folks flee to our shores, running from the messes we've made in their countries, and we treat them like thieves. Mostly it feels like whatever you love is just going to get torn away. Turn on the radio, and it's a fucking horror show, the things our governments do in our name, just to fatten themselves on our steady decline. Meanwhile, most of us are hammering away at a terrible self-alienation, mistreated, lied to and blamed. Burning fields and a sky filled with drones. The fruit rots on the vine while millions starve.
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