DALLAS � Jamie Laurie, one of two frontmen for the suddenly successful alt-rock/rap kit Flobots, is onstage at a crammed Pontiac Garage, the littler room at the House of Blues, explaining his choice of neckwear: an American flag.
"It's not approximately blind nationalism or desecrating the flag," says Laurie, who likewise goes by the more than lyrical nominate Jonny 5. He then quotes the late poet Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again" and says it's all about the America of the future.
"We ar building a movement!" he shouts.
Such sloganeering might be easily laid-off as stone 'n' twine bravado, merely the Denver-based Flobots are doing something that hasn't been seen in a while: bringing overtly political, message-oriented music back onto the Top 40. Their outwardly offbeat "Handlebars" single � with its lyrics warning of guided missiles, political assassinations and nuclear holocaust � has just broken through that threshold. Flobots' full-length album, "Fight With Tools," has already hit the Top 15 on the albums chart.
"Handlebars" stands out at a time when pop wireless reverberates to the teen-scream shenanigans of Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers, the post-crunk club grooves of Flo Rida and Lil Wayne, and all things "American Idol."
From listening to pop out radio, few would know that the United States is involved in iI wars and a heatedly contested presidential election, or that economical worries abound. The nigh pressing issuing on Katy Perry's mind seems to be telling everyone "I Kissed a Girl," the song that has dominated contemporary-hit airwaves this summer.
Where's the beef?
It's a far cry from the recent 1960s and early '70s, when Top 40 made room for explicit social-issue songs from both ends of the political spectrum, ranging from Edwin Starr's "War" and the Guess Who's "American Woman" to Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Berets" and Gordon Sinclair's "The Americans."
In the '80s, the Clash climbed into the Top 10 with a pinch at a Middle Eastern crackdown on rock 'n' roll ("Rock the Casbah"), and U2's Martin Luther King Jr. tribute, "Pride (In the Name of Love)," went Top 40.
Aside from such post-9/11 tunes as Alan Jackson's "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)" and Paul McCartney's "Freedom" in 2001, and Toby Keith's 2002 fist-pumper, "Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue (The Angry American)," not a great deal else dealing with our jittery life and times has crossed over to mainstream pop success.
It's an omission that many citizenry have noticed: "Radio serves you meat loaf, and you know there's steak back in the kitchen," observes socially conscious rapper Scott Johnson, wHO has a haunting unreleased track, "The Messenger," about a soldier whose duty is to tell families their loved ones take died in Iraq. "But no one wants to bring the steak out."
Of course, the question becomes whether there's anyone out there making steak and, if so, whether there's consumer demand for it in a world of sugarcoated pop. Some hoi polloi aren't so sure.
"The scale of the casualties of the war, as annihilating as they are today, was greater back then [in Vietnam]," says Jeffrey Hyson, history professor and pop-culture reviewer at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. "Plus, there was a draft. Young people, and so and nowadays, are consumers of popular music, and there would have been more urgency [back then] about stream events. And that would be felt in the kind of music they'd be demanding."
He points to the failure of any of the Iraq-themed Hollywood movies to find an audience. "[People] want to be able-bodied to escape when they go into a picture show theater, put on their ear buds or pick up a trash novel. Were the stakes higher, it wouldn't be as easy to simply escape, and you might see more willingness to engage things that address the state of the world."
Can't touch this
Others suggest that shifts in radio-station ownership in the '90s let narrowed musical choice and shaped attender demand for material that's not sledding to rock'n'roll the gravy holder. Longtime North Texas DJ Redbeard, host of the nationally syndicated "In the Studio" show, believes one and only effect of broadcast deregulating � which lifted the cap on the number of stations of the Cross one caller could own � has been to put more emphasis on the bottom line.
"It causes radio to become more than of a mirror sort of than a leader," he says. "So when something comes down the pike musically that smacks of controversy � and that may brag either way politically and might move people to feel or react � that's considered a risk. And, with shareholders, danger is a bad word."
Redbeard says there's even an unofficial idiom to identify a station's passing on a birdcall that raises too many red flags. "In my business, there's a term called 'being Dixie Chick-ed,' " he says, referring to the tumult over Dixie Chick Natalie Maines' 2003 statement that she was "ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." Many wireless stations dropped the group from their playlists.
Stephen Brackett, the co-frontman of Flobots who likewise goes by the make Brer Rabbit, says radiocommunication initially didn't want to touch "Handlebars." "Every single radio place that we gave 'Handlebars' to, their initial reaction was, 'Oh, hell no.' "
At Current TV, the cable station co-owned by Al Gore that explores the lines 'tween pop culture, politics and social activism, music programming vice chief Executive Deanna Cohen says she's having an opposite problem: For a coming election-related special, she's having trouble finding artists who appeal to Current's 18-34 demographic and wHO openly support John McCain.
"Even if some artists might support the war or McCain, it would be an unpopular decision to say so, and that translates into what you're seeing in music right now � a lot of fear," she says.
Make room for the message
Yet for all of that, political music continues to be made, even if it doesn't cross o'er to pop radio. Neil Young's 2006 album, "Living With War," was a scathing verbal assault on the Bush administration, piece in the same year, Springsteen recorded a protection to pioneering protest vocaliser Pete Seeger with "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions." Green Day's best-selling 2004 "American Idiot" disk also had social themes. Yoko Ono's dance remix of John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance" is now No. 1 on Billboard's Dance Club Play chart.
Foo Fighters won a Grammy and other herald for last year's "The Pretender," which got widespread airplay. Frontman Dave Grohl has only when alluded to the meaning of the song, only it's commonly viewed as a condemnation of the Bush administration.
Punk bands from NOFX to Sick of It All have recorded anti-war tracks, and "conscious hip-hop" � whose to the highest degree popular exponents are Kanye West and Common � has delved into politics. In fact, the super political unexampled disc from rapper Nas � formally untitled because he precious to call it a racial epithet but bowlegged to pressure to modification it � crashed into Billboard's Top 200 record album chart last week at No. 1, selling more than cc,000 copies in its first week.
Certainly, the Internet and digital distribution make it easier for people to get their music heard, with or without radio. And some intend there could be a sea change happening.
"I hear it all the time on a consumer level � a lot of people are getting federal Reserve up with the type of medicine being played," says Larry Griffin Jr., better known as Symbolic One, or S1, the rapper/producer of the North Texas conscious hip-hop radical % Fruit Project. "It's all the same."
Flobots' Brackett says pipeline and a growing fan base in the band's native Colorado persuaded spooky stations to try "Handlebars." (No doubt, it helped that the band had signed to Universal.)
"They played the strain once, and they'd get a flood of speech sound calls," he says. "[The stations] are still later on ratings, only there ar songs that will come through and will alter what's acceptable and force the boundaries. ... I'd be very surprised if we didn't embark on seeing more than of this."
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