Abstract
For many years, John Street’s work has been a major inspiration for my own, and I approached his new book with much the same sense of trepidation that many music fans approach a new album by an admired artist – a mixture of excitement combined with a slight nervousness about being disappointed. I needn’t have worried. Music and Politics is a very fine book and one which will add to Professor Street’s considerable reputation. There are very few contemporary scholars who can combine and traverse the seemingly disparate fields of politics and popular music studies so adeptly as he and there is ample evidence of his ability to do so here.
The book falls in to nine chapters which cover (in order): censorship, music policy, political representation, political participation, mobilization, taste, ideology, and political experience. In each case political theory is drawn upon to illuminate a number of examples of the politics of (mainly popular) music. This approach works well.
Street is confident that it will, as he argues boldly that: ‘The boundaries between the two realms of music and politics … are largely illusory’ (p. 1). As he admits, such an approach is not anything new, as authors such as Adorno and Attali have investigated the politics of music before. However, it seems rarer in the UK and, in essence, Street spends the rest of the book making the case for music as politics. He is rightly wary of approaches which claim that everything is political as they leave too little scope for what is particular about politics as an activity, and it is the particular forms of politics which music can take that dominate the book. However, while some time is taken up defining politics, it is disappointing to note that the definition of music is taken for granted. This is something of an oversight, especially when it is followed by a plea to investigate the meaning of terms such as censorship.
Street shows how all states have to adopt policies towards music, and that these can range from censorship through to regulation and promotion. He also notes that the propensity of musicians to become ‘political’ in their work is often the result of politics, rather than their biographies. Drawing upon his own work, Street suggests that musicians can play three key roles in participatory politics – organizing, legitimizing and performing – and he uses Live 8 as an example of how this might work.
A discussion of the UK-based Rock Against Racism (RAR) movement follows. This provides insights in to how musicians and elements of the far left can come together, but also points to the limits of what might be achieved. RAR has often been claimed as a success in that it contributed to the demise of the far-right National Front. However, as Street shows, the reasons for this alleged success remain contested. He suggests that any fruitful analysis must consider both the logic of collective action and how exactly musicians and music can contribute to a cause.
The next chapter suggests that part of this concerns how music can contribute to constructions of identity and imagined pasts. Examples such as Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and the Woodstock festival are drawn on to illustrate this. However, the links to political action become a little strained here. A chapter on taste follows, and while this makes the case for explaining the politics of review systems, it feels a little detached from bigger political issues.
The last two chapters bring the work full circle. The penultimate deals with political philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and Rousseau, noting that all of them saw the power of music as a potential force for both good and evil. Here the analysis often focuses on lyrics rather than music per se, and this reflects a broader tendency to underplay the significance of music’s power as sound. However, the chapter works well in (re-)establishing the role of music within political thought.
The final chapter examines the power of music, its use in deliberation, links to compassion, political imagination, organization, freedom, community and the experience of politics. Street concludes that he hopes that the book has shown ‘how we can think of music as politics, and politics as music’ (p. 175). Here the former is easier than the latter, but Street does show the seemingly distinct realms actually overlap, interact and finally become blurred. This is no small achievement.
Of course, like any album with an odd bad track, there are parts of the book which do not always satisfy. Perhaps the main issue is selection. There is little or nothing here on gender or race, but a lot on the politics of taste, and this raise questions about priorities. There is also a tendency to underplay the role of the music industries. In addition, the lack of references to cited work is annoying. The book also spends a lot of time trying to explain, when more forceful arguments would have been welcome. Its breadth also means that many issues have a somewhat surface feel to them.
However, none of these criticisms is meant to detract from my assessment that this book succeeds admirably in showing how music is politically important. In fact it goes further by showing that music can even be politics. It is to be hoped that the book’s publication marks a step forward in legitimizing the study of the politics of music and that both musicologists and political scientists learn from each other. Should they wish to do so, this book would be a very good place to start.