Living at home under quarantine for the past fifteen weeks has roused in me sensations with which I suspect many can relate. My happenstance living conditions have worsened the usual tensions with family. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in the classic discussions of political liberalism that Carleton families often have.
My parents are of a post-civil rights generation for whom liberalism was, if not the hallmark of the American left, a certain essential component of it. Coming into full adulthood with the rise of a President Clinton, raising kids under Obama, perhaps these have given liberalism a meaning different from what I have seen as, graduating, I enter the tatters of that world.
These conversations naturally lead me to remember the immortal words of Phil Ochs’ best known composition, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Here Ochs, a self-identified leftist and a Jew, rips to shreds the political views of what Dr. King called white moderates—many of whom constitute Ochs’ key audience. “But now I’ve grown older and wiser / And that’s why I’m turning you in,” culminates the lyric.
My brother and I shared this song with my family to illustrate a point. The divide is clear: ultimately, liberals side with conservatism, not change. Progressivism, if you want to call it that, has no place in their worldview, let alone upheaval: “Don’t talk about revolution / That’s going a little bit too far.”
But the joke, it appears, is lost on the audience. In the most prominent recording of “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” guffaws burst out from the concert hall at critical lines. The first time Ochs sings the refrain, he punctuates, “Get it?”
The audience goes wild. Whether they recognize themselves in the song or merely like the line is unclear, to us and perhaps to themselves. “I go to all the Pete Seeger concerts” gets yelps of appreciation, bafflingly without recognition of Seeger’s liberal connotations in the song.
Political music, like court jesting, carries this particular power to garner appreciation even as it mocks its own audience. The difference is that it is always clear to the audience whom the court jester mocks. My family loved “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” when my brother and I shared it, and they even understood the distinction it made, but I was surprised they did not feel offended.
Ochs, of course, meant his work to be provocative. That such a trenchant song could become his most enduring standard, even among those whom it attacks most, demonstrates this deceptive ability of music to conceal its message even as it cannot be more obvious.
Ochs is by no means alone within his generation in this respect. Across the pond and the channel, France’s Georges Brassens garnered fame with Randy Newmanesque, irreverent, anarchist, satirical pieces. One of his early standouts, “Le Gorille,” showcases a sexually predatory gorilla that escapes imprisonment to attack a judge.
Brassens’ hatred of the state apparatus is clear, here as in other songs, but apparently not enough to turn off the French, who have lauded him as a national poet. This, of course, despite the obvious irony in canonizing an anarchist in any form.
But we would, collectively, much rather have Good Art than Art That Means Something. Take a more contemporary example. Childish Gambino/Donald Glover’s 2018 single, “This Is America,” immediately became a cultural phenomenon when Glover released the song and music video.
The song depicts gun violence in the United States, especially as it affects Black communities. Its meaning could not be more clear, from the lyrics to the video to the title: “This is America.”
And yet, among those who recognized the work as among its time’s best, many seemed so focused on Glover’s excellent artistry—or the internet memes it inspired—that they failed to pay more than lip service to Glover’s political messages. In becoming an artist, it seemed to many that he could not be a spokesperson. Or, the opposite: for more conservative opponents, “This Is America,” like any protest song, was little more than a tract of agitprop with no place in the artistic world.
Critics are a notoriously opaque bunch, most of them old white people not unlike Ochs’ audience. Whatever the critical establishment, or the white American public by extension, found in Glover’s song, much of it missed the point entirely.
Where Glover created a song that stared the United States in its hideous face, most of them saw only the artistic statement of one Black man. For white audiences the song became a token, a thought-terminating cliché, a conversation ender rather than starter. From Carleton acquaintances to the front pages of music reviews, King’s white moderates embraced the song rather than its message.
I’ve thought about the tenor of conversations about songs like these in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder even more than quarantine already made me think. Artists, generally a radical bunch, have much to say about the state of the world; if they did not, we would give them far less credence. But we tend to fetishize the message to the point that it ceases to function.
There is an upshot to all this, of course—if people hear “This Is America” enough times, perhaps they will come to recognize what Glover means. But more likely, I believe, is that in divorcing a work’s artistry, not only from its creator but more so from its thematic content, we lose sight of its more important aspects: what it means.
This is, of course, my creeping sentimentality as a student of literature. But I think it is critical for our understanding of artists and songwriters in general. We must remember that they are, after all, songwriters: they not only perform for our entertainment and coin, but for our edification, our inspiration, and likewise their inspiration, their hope, their rage.
Perhaps it is not possible to change the overall reception of a work of art. But it is, however, certainly possible to change how one person receives it. When I was a child the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” was a nonsense song, a generic Ringo-ism, whose sexual meaning I only realized years later when I revisited it. Grimes’ neo-futurist aesthetic feels very different now that she is raising a child with apartheid beneficiary Elon Musk.
It is possible for songs to change with us. And not only possible but encouraged. What would art be if it were only one thing? Even the catchiest of tunes is no good to hear on repeat.
OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” is one of my lifetime’s most popular party songs, and though its unhappy themes are now relatively common knowledge, most listeners I have polled still miss the line when André drops the beat into silence: “Why oh why are we so in denial when we know we’re not happy here / You all don’t hear me, you just want to dance.”
Then the music returns in triumph, and people keep dancing, just as André predicted. We like our music that way.