Slyngstad | Bluesky
Transcript
A three-panel political comic by Slyngstad highlighting the long history of political activism in music. In the foreground of all three panels, two audience members are seen talking in profile.
Panel 1:
On Stage: A modern musician holding a microphone calls out, “FREE PALESTINE!”
Foreground: One audience member complains, “UGH, WHEN DID MUSICIANS START TO BE SO POLITICAL?”
Panel 2:
On Stage: Freddie Mercury performing at the 1985 Live Aid benefit concert, with the “Live Aid” global logo in the background.
Foreground: The second audience member replies, “START?”
Panel 3:
On Stage: Folk singer Woody Guthrie playing an acoustic guitar with his iconic slogan written across it: “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS”.
Foreground: The second audience member continues, “MAYBE YOU JUST WEREN’T LISTENING.”
I blame the 90s. I guess because of the sudden end of the cold war everything was more or less euphoric and apolitical for a while and people got used to it.
Yes very apolitical decade 🤤
Compared to the like 200 years before it and two decades since
It was basically the single most apolitical point in history. It was a MASSIVE calm before the storm.
That's not to say it didn't have its politics but geeze
Gen X just sucked at rebelling against their parents
I think the point was that politics calmed down to the point the majority could ignore all of politics except Clinton's sex life.
I would give it more to the 80s, as most pop music was overtly Ra-Ra America and good vibes. The political Big Bads were the Soviets and Apartheid South Africa, and then LiveAid was a fund raiser for Ethiopia. Everything was external-facing.
Pop music is often / always shallow. But, the 1980s to me feel / felt like the lowest common denominator kind of music. Not only were the lyrics of the songs vapid, but the musicality was sucked out of them too, with the rise of drum machines and synthesizers.
There was good music in the 1980s, but you had to look for it. And, back then, that meant knowing someone with good musical tastes, or spending time in a record store. The stuff that you'd just encounter in pop culture was just... dire.
Meanwhile, the stuff that wasn't part of the mainstream white culture in the 1980s was very political. Take the emergence of rap. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five had a big hit with "The Message" which was nothing but social commentary, and then came the rise of Public Enemy.
That's a very US-centric view
Yeah. Not going to argue with that, but US media also flooded most of the world in the 80s.
Having lived through the 80s and 90s as an adult, I can confirm that none of it was apolitical or euphoric.
That's a great take for anyone who wasn't alive in the 90s. Anyone who was there however knows it's bunk.
Its a liberal myth that the end of the Soviet Union somehow brought in an era of peace.
I wasn't talking about peace. I was talking about euphoria and apoliticalness in culture
Having lived them, I can tell you the '90s were nowhere near apolitical. Hell, half the examples here are '90s bands.
Of course there still was political music. But it was the rise or high point of the apolitical bland commercial pop culture. I am thinking of Britney Spears and the countless boy bands