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October 17, 2001
Chris
Kromm
Operation
Infinite Disaster
Susan
Block
Sex
Not Bombs
David Vest
Osama Speaks
October 16, 2001
Steve
Perry
War
Without Frontiers
Douglas
Valentine
The
CIA and Anthrax
Patrick
Cockburn
The
Battle of Mazar-i-Sharif
John
Troyer
Return
to Normal?
Moji Agha
A
Jihad Against Ignorance
October
15, 2001
Tariq
Ali
Alternatives
to War
John
Pilger
War
American Style
Umberto
Eco
The
Roots of Conflict
Marwan
Bishara
Clash
of Civilizations? Hardly
Patrick
Cockburn
Modern
War in
A Medieval Village
October
13, 2001
Carl
Estabrook
Letters
to Editors
Molly
Secours
War:
The Procter and Gamble Perspective
Alexander
Cockburn
War
Can't Save the Economy
October
12, 2001
Imran
Khan
Try
Them in Court
Vijay
Prashad
War
in a Passive Voice
Patrick
Cockburn
Bombing
the Taliban
October
11, 2001
David
Vest
Bob
Dylan and 9/11
October
10, 2001
Cockburn/St.
Clair
The
Empire Strikes Back
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Issue
Aftermath
Diary
Ashcroft's Onslaught
on
Civil Liberties
Ridge Long Groomed
for
Cheney's Job
Those CIA Killing
Bids
Never Stopped
The Not-So-Great
Mayor Giuliani
Crop Duster
Ban
Will Save Lives
Madeleine Albright's
Deadly Legacy
How the Bin
Laden Women
Fled Bel Air
Tom Ridge's
Vietnam
Same as Kerrey's?
A CounterPunch
Journey
to Ramallah
A Word About
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CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most Robust
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James
Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas
Valentine
Al
Gore:
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by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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New Stories:
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October
17, 2001
Music,
Censors and War
Imagine There's No Unity
By Lee Ballinger and Dave
Marsh
"United
We Stand," America's ever-present
new slogan, does have a ring of truth. Tom Morello of Rage Against
the Machine put it best four days after the September 11 attacks.
"Our deepest sympathy and condolences go out to all the
people and their families affected by the attacks on Tuesday,"
Morello said. "The loss of innocent life is just terrible....The
pain felt across the country demonstrates the lesson of Tuesday's
events: that the taking of innocent life is devastating to a
society and terribly wrong."
In the wake of the terror, a spirit of
togetherness emerged from New York City and captured the imagination
of the country. "We, the gruff New Yorkers who reputedly
step over street people indistinguishably drunk or dead, are
doing heroic, selfless things," said a September 13 email
from Sub Verse, a hip-hop label with offices a few blocks from
the World Trade Center.
But the unity built around sympathy,
fear, or even anger only goes so far, definitely not as far as
unity around giving the government a blank check for the bombing
of Afghanistan or for anything else. Steve Harvey, TV star and
the top-rated DJ in Los Angeles on KKBT-FM, has repeatedly told
his listeners that we cannot trust our government to take us
into war, that he will not allow his own son to be sacrificed,
and that we need to focus on our own problems, such as homelessness.
How can we unite with a government that
gave out $15 billion in aid to airlines that had refused to give
severance pay to laid-off workers? The same airlines were silent
when the Massachusetts governor's chauffeur was made head of
security at Boston's Logan Airport last year and they still refuse
to reinforce cockpit doors because it's "too expensive"
(what's that $15 billion for?). For Chrissakes, the Department
of Energy proposes that we allow our food to be canned with radioactive
steel, while the Treasury Secretary calls for an end to Medicare
and Social Security. Who can unite with that?
The restless whispers over such facts
might become a scream if the American people knew how deeply
their government has been involved in the rise of the Taliban
and Osama Bin Laden, how hard the CIA worked to promote a distorted
Islamic fundamentalism at hundreds of Pakistan-based religious
schools attended by guerillas, and how deeply our government
has been involved in international drug dealing (60% of US heroin
now comes from the Afghanistan/Pakistan border area and the CIA's
Charles Cogan admitted guilt in 1995: "There was fallout
in terms of drugs, yes. But the....Soviets left Afghanistan.")
The world is most certainly divided but
not between Americans and Arabs. The fundamental division is
between wealth and poverty. According to the UN, 35,615 children
worldwide died of hunger and hunger-related diseases on September
11 and on each day since. 447 billionaires now have more wealth
than the poorest 2.75 billion people on the planet put together.
And it's not only everywhere else. In America, this is reflected
in millions of homeless people, tens of millions of people with
no health insurance, and a shift in spending from education to
prisons.
In other words, the average American
has a lot more in common with the average Arab than with the
people who run the U.S. government. The average Arab has a lot
more in common with the average American than with the likes
of Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi construction tycoon who is one of
those 447 billionaires. If Americans and Arabs could both divide
from the governments, corporations, and organizations that offer
us only war and poverty, then we could unite to imagine a peaceful
and prosperous world.
The first step in that process is communication,
both among ourselves and with the rest of the world. Our primary
means of communication is music. So it's no coincidence that
there has been a great increase in music censorship. It began
right after September 11, when the 1200- station broadcast behemoth
Clear Channel Communications banned all music by Rage Against
the Machine and issued a don't-play list of 150 songs, ranging
from Nena's anti-nuke "99 Luft Balloons" to John Lennon's
sublime "Imagine," with its lyric "I hope someday
you'll join us/And the world will live as one."
Clear Channel protested that it wasn't
really a ban but its true colors were revealed October 1 when
the company fired Davey D from his post as Community Affairs
Director at KMEL/San Francisco. For over a decade, Davey D, the
world's foremost hip-hop journalist, has put controversial issues
and personalities on the air at KMEL. Will Steve Harvey at Clear
Channel-owned KKBT be the next victim of the chain's sleazy quid
pro quo with the government? (On September 13, just before the
Clear Channel censors went into action, the FCC declared its
intent to lift all ownership restrictions on broadcast chains).
On September 14, the Secret Service closed
down Rage Against the Machine's website. Other musicians who
voiced opinions not approved by the government came under pressure
to retract them. Kevin Richardson of the Backstreet Boys apologized
(kind of) because he asked during a Toronto interview: "What
has our government done to provoke this action that we don't
know about?" Moby apologized (definitely) for saying that
the people of New York had been "failed" by the FBI
and CIA who "exist solely to protect us from this sort of
atrocity."
There was also censorship by omission.
On September 11 the highly political metal band System of a Down
had the most popular album in the world. But while right-wing
talking heads you've never heard of got unlimited face time,
System of a Down was ignored. Perhaps that was because frontman
Serj Tankian was insisting that we try to actually understand
world events: "No one in the media seems to ask why did
these people do this horrific act of violence and destruction?"
As for hip-hop, it was invisible despite
the fact that rap stars donated millions of dollars to relief
efforts, while others organized concerts or town hall meetings.
As Davey D put it in his FNV
newsletter, "Because of the narrowcasting in news coverage,
the average person as no idea what Mos Def, Common, Talib Kweli,
or KRS-One is thinking."
Now we are officially at war. Music,
which is fundamentally for peace, will come into increasing conflict
with the government. That's all to the good, but if we don't
find effective ways to support musicians, the sound of silence
will become deafening.
Lee Ballinger
and Dave Marsh are the editors of the excellent Rock
and Rap Confidential. This is the lead article from the October
Rock & Rap Confidential. The entire October issue focuses
on music's relationship to war and terrorism. They would be happy
to send you a copy. Just email them at rockrap@aol.com
with your name and a postal address.
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