This Is Not An Ideal World…Mick

Yesterday, Mick Jagger warned about political lectures at rock concerts. In an ideal world, I think many of us might agree with that, but this is far from being an ideal world. The political machinations of the far right over the past few decades have led the world to where we are today. It’s a re-run of the 1930s in Europe, with an additional level of tyranny taking US politics in a direction nobody would ever have expected.

The term ‘rinse, repeat’ is commonly used these days, but in the case of contemporary global politics it appears we forgot the ‘rinse’ bit. There’s very little clean about 21st century politics, at every level. One of the reasons for that is that everybody expects everything to happen instantly. Life, history, and human development all show that political quick fixes rarely work. In an ideal world, they might, but this is not an ideal world.

While all countries are being encouraged to dramatically increase defence spending, ostensibly to replace arsenals that are being exhausted by 25+ armed conflicts around the world, the true essentials of life are being appropriated by sinister commercial forces: water, agriculture, power, property etc. And bugger the climate! This is our far from ideal world today.

It’s also the case that while government spending is thus diverted, spending on music and the arts (but not the high arts) is like the sponge you just squeezed dry. Yet is to the arts that the medical profession turns to for ‘social prescription’, and it is the arts which lifts us after our working week, and it’s to the arts that successive governments have turned to attract a younger vote. That art has further been devalued by multinational streaming platforms and cyber-plagiarism, is just a further kick in the teeth that we’re all having to deal with.

I’m not necessarily linking these two issues, nor am I saying that Mick is living in some kind of fantasy bubble, but there is good reason why some musicians choose to get political. It’s why flower power rose in the 1960s. It’s why the punk revolution happened in the mid-70s. It’s why Band Aid happened in the ‘80s…It’s why Pete Seeger happened. It’s why Bob Dylan happened…and it’s why Bruce Springsteen has taken a stance against the current US regime. He was already a political writer way before Renee Goode and Alex Pretti were murdered in plain sight by ICE, but those killings really stuck in his throat in ‘the land of the free’. So I applaud him and others of his celebrity for using their massive platforms to say “Enough is Enough”, because most decent human beings on this planet have really had a gut full. Politicians need to start taking note.

Sometimes, it isn’t just about ticket sales and people having a good time. Those things still happen anyway.

Peace.

John