Margaret Thatcher was one of God’s greatest gifts to the pop music industry in Britain. Recall these songs: Pink Floyd’s “The Post-War Dream”, Crass’ “How Does it Feel to be the Mother of a Thousand Dead?”, The Beat’s “Stand Down Margaret”, The Blow Monkeys’ (in duo with Curtis Mayfield) “(Celebrate) The Day After You”, The Notsensibles’ “I’m in Love with Margaret Thatcher”, Billy Bragg’s “Between the Wars”. There was also Iron Maiden’s attack on the Iron Lady on the sleeves of two of their early singles, which, though tongue-in-cheek, was harshly criticised by the Scottish Young Conservatives.
But that’s in a democracy. Elsewhere, things were darker.
Prokofiev, whom we revere for his catchy tunes (remember Romeo and Juliet?), wrote Zdravitsa (Hail to Stalin), a cantata for chorus and orchestra to celebrate (“You are our beloved guide”) the 60th birthday of the dictator.
Hitler was head over heels over Wagner, and this was made known to everybody. The Nazi propaganda machine promoted Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana as they (probably rightly) calculated that it appealed to the same base instincts as their ideology and ideological objectives.
Mussolini had songs written about him and his regime to exalt his almost-divine image and his regime’s grandiose plans.
Franco did his best to use music to shore up popular support for his Estado Neuvo, the New State.
Mao Zedong explicitly claimed that “There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake” (implying that art, including music, is but an implement to attain the objectives of the Revolution), and Castro held that artists had no rights outside the Revolution.
Idi Amin wrote the music for his own biographical movie, and Kim Jong II, was portrayed in official propaganda as a musical connoisseur who even wrote six operas. According to his official biography, they “are better than any in the history of music” (L-Aqwa Mużika?).
The politics of the past were masculine and often in your face. The politics of our times are feminine, and thus softer and gentler, making use of make-up to hide their possible ugliness. Soft power, with its manipulative means aimed to infiltrate the minds of the people (particularly the less sophisticated), is a powerful, if not the most powerful, weapon in the politician’s arsenal.
Thus, from the hard, masculine, propaganda politics of the past we have now passed to the soft, feminine, endearing politics of the present.
Despite the shift in form, however, it still is politics. The objective is always the same and is abundantly clear for those with enough grey matter to see beyond the smoke screen of smiles, pseudo-culture, and glamour. As Machiavelli teaches us in The Prince, the objective of any prince – today we would say “politician” – is simply the attainment and maintaining of power.
No wonder The Prince was Mussolini’s favourite book. And Mussolini stayed in power for 20 years.
There are myriad questions to ask about the moral responsibility of musicians and their artistic integrity in this struggle for power and the quest to manipulate people’s minds in order to consolidate it. The questions should not be asked only by the (discerning) public, but also by the musicians and artists themselves.
In the USSR, artists ran the risk of ending up in the gulag, and nobody was keen on the idea. But in a democracy, artists don’t risk their life. Nothing happened to Roger Waters or Steve Harris, despite their criticism of Thatcher.
So questions about musicians’ artistic integrity assume an even more important dimension. Also, when you consider that, despite the threat of exile to Siberia or wherever the gulags were, Russian composers still tried to keep their self-respect and subtly insert a distance between themselves and the regime. During the rehearsals for the première of the Eleventh Symphony, Maxim Shostakovich asked his father, “Papa, what if they hang you for this?”
So one has to ask, why do musicians pander to politicians in a democracy?
There are so many other questions to ask on how music can be used to convey subtle and not-so-subtle political messages, to buttress popular support for ideologies and to construct personality cults for leaders. You do not need to be a genius to find the answers.