[Ed. Note: Please welcome Ezra Dulis to BH. He will be covering the music beat for us, commenting on the personalities, business, and doing an occasional review — all from the unique point of view of a right-of-center thinking young man who’s both passionate about music and a musician himself.]
Concerning actors and artists, “Shut up and sing” has become a conservative cliché long since due for retirement. For one, we’re inconsistent. We can’t applaud Jon Voight speaking his mind one day and then decry Sean Penn for speaking his the next day. Sure, we can point out how much his thoughts lack basic self-awareness, but to suggest that he should just do his job and not voice his opinion is a totalitarian thought. To entertain it is to betray our own principles and become exactly what we hate.
Today, though, I can’t help but entertain it.
Zack de la Rocha, the lead singer of Rage Against the Machine (who came crawling back to his band once it was clear his career as a solo artist was DOA), has organized a boycott of Arizona’s new immigration law, convincing plenty of well-to-do leftist bands to skip on performing in the state. Now, there’s nothing wrong with bands deciding where they’re going to play. The issue is the principle behind the decision, exploiting a cause célèbre to frame themselves as righteous racial crusaders.
Among these artists is Conor Oberst, the lead singer for the uber-pretentious “Bright Eyes,” a band which I have had the pleasure of never listening to, mainly due to Oberst’s liberal use of the lazily-singing, ever-so-profound folk songwriter archetype that even Bob Dylan figured out was boring. I’ll catch a lot of flack outside BH for that, but I’m extremely proud of my decision never to have plunked down $15 on an artist who names their songs “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and be Loved)” and finds this worthwhile material for a music video.
Oberst, in an attempt to stick out from the rest of his “Yeah, I’m not racist, either!” peers, has written an open letter to Charlie Devy, a music venue promoter who organizes hundreds of events throughout Arizona and New Mexico every year. Levy first wrote an open letter to de la Rocha’s boycott brigade, asking them to consider who they will actually hurt. Most likely, the evil racist gringo politicians won’t be affected a whit (unless indie hipsters stop diddling with iPhone apps and start calling their state representatives), while the hard-working people who feed their children with the money that comes in from concerts will likely go destitute.
Zack de la Rocha
These people most likely agree with de la Rocha and Oberst, yet they’re being punished with poverty for something they cannot control. Levy points out in his letter that instead of resorting to infantile behavior, these artists should come to Arizona and embrace open dialogue, tolerance, and all the other feel-good progressive buzzwords that suddenly became unpopular when unfettered federal power for their side became a possibility.
Oberst’s response is exactly what you’d expect: eerily paranoid, self-aggrandizing, and full of capitalized common nouns. As I quote from his first paragraph, consider the law he’s talking about, a near-copy of the existing federal law that allows police, once they have accosted a person for some other violation of the rules, to see whether they have broken another in their entrance to the country, just like police can ask, once you have broken some rule while driving, to see whether you are authorized by the state to be driving on their roads. Oberst says of the law and its makers:
The only thing, clearly, that these people care about is Money and Power, that and the creation and preservation of an Anglo-Centric Police State where every Immigrant and Non-White citizen is considered subhuman. They want them stripped of their basic human rights and reduced to slaves for Corporate America and the White Race.
The only thing? 24 hours a day, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Even Robert Byrd had to quit after a measly 14 hours.
As if this nonsense isn’t stomach-churning enough, Oberst goes on to gloss over the reality of what he’s doing. “Much of the Artist end of the boycott is symbolic, I acknowledge, and no real threat to the economics of the State.” The consistency is lovely: standing up for the lawbreaker individuals who have a demonstrable negative effect on “the State,” yet ignoring the minimum-wagers who sell t-shirts at shows so they can have some cash to buy gas and food.
As much as my gut reaction to this childish conspiracy-mongering is to shout “Shut up and sing!”, it’s not necessary. The more the Left speaks, the more we can speak. The more we both speak, the more the world sees how ill-informed, irrational, and self-serving this boycott is.
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