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You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/23/what-does-music-say-about-politics
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| What does your music say about your politics? | What does your music say about your politics? |
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| Labour MP Stella Creasy is recruiting a parliamentary researcher. Aside from the generic skill requirements of "excellent communication skills" and the "ability to prioritise tasks", Creasy has said that applicants would benefit from a "knowledge of mid- and late-90s indie music". On the face of it, Pulp's Common People and Blur's Country House might well fit the politics of the Labour party, but it got me thinking more broadly about the relationship between my politics and my taste in music. | Labour MP Stella Creasy is recruiting a parliamentary researcher. Aside from the generic skill requirements of "excellent communication skills" and the "ability to prioritise tasks", Creasy has said that applicants would benefit from a "knowledge of mid- and late-90s indie music". On the face of it, Pulp's Common People and Blur's Country House might well fit the politics of the Labour party, but it got me thinking more broadly about the relationship between my politics and my taste in music. |
| Something rather wonderful happened to me on Monday. I walked into the green room before my appearance on Woman's Hour and found myself shaking hands with Dionne Warwick. I have just about everything she has ever recorded in my CD collection. Don't Make Me Over, Make It Easy on Yourself and Walk on By were always played by the female DJ in the back room of a grotty pub in Leeds at our fundraisers for Lesbian Line, the support and friendship network I helped set up in the early 1980s when it was very isolating and scary to be out as a lesbian. | Something rather wonderful happened to me on Monday. I walked into the green room before my appearance on Woman's Hour and found myself shaking hands with Dionne Warwick. I have just about everything she has ever recorded in my CD collection. Don't Make Me Over, Make It Easy on Yourself and Walk on By were always played by the female DJ in the back room of a grotty pub in Leeds at our fundraisers for Lesbian Line, the support and friendship network I helped set up in the early 1980s when it was very isolating and scary to be out as a lesbian. |
| Flicking through some vinyl I find David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust (1972). In my early teenage years, when I was being bullied at school, I would imagine how wonderful it must be to dress and behave against the grain and be revered, not laughed at, for it. | Flicking through some vinyl I find David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust (1972). In my early teenage years, when I was being bullied at school, I would imagine how wonderful it must be to dress and behave against the grain and be revered, not laughed at, for it. |
| Bowie gave me my first insight into gender bending and the sense that difference was a positive. By the time Gloria Gaynor's I will Survive came out in 1978 I was a young feminist, hearing stories of the most horrific abuse of women and children at the hands of men. | Bowie gave me my first insight into gender bending and the sense that difference was a positive. By the time Gloria Gaynor's I will Survive came out in 1978 I was a young feminist, hearing stories of the most horrific abuse of women and children at the hands of men. |
| I took the words to mean surviving all kinds of atrocities (as opposed to heartbreak in a love affair which is what the song is about). Every fundraising and celebratory event we hold for Justice for Women ends with that song. It makes me cry. | I took the words to mean surviving all kinds of atrocities (as opposed to heartbreak in a love affair which is what the song is about). Every fundraising and celebratory event we hold for Justice for Women ends with that song. It makes me cry. |
| There is opera too, which is always a surprise to me. I used to be all class war about it until a friend dragged me to an outdoor Tosca in Italy, where nobody dressed up and they all ate ice cream and drank fizzy wine out of plastic cups. I came to love the melodramatic storyline and the tragic endings. It is like listening to an episode of Eastenders with beautiful singing. | There is opera too, which is always a surprise to me. I used to be all class war about it until a friend dragged me to an outdoor Tosca in Italy, where nobody dressed up and they all ate ice cream and drank fizzy wine out of plastic cups. I came to love the melodramatic storyline and the tragic endings. It is like listening to an episode of Eastenders with beautiful singing. |
| I hate R&B but have a load of rap and hip hop, from Salt-N-Pepa, to Trina and Lil' Kim and, oh, Snoop Dog. Yes, me, a radical feminist, loving an artist who raps about bitches and hos. What does that say about my politics? That sometimes music should be played while waiting for the revolution, not for bringing it on. | |
| So, what does your taste in music say about your politics? | So, what does your taste in music say about your politics? |