Bruce Springsteen - a sign of things to come?

Yesterday I drove with some friends to Mt. Chocorua in New Hampshire to do some hiking, and on the way we listened to Jefferson Airplaine's Volunteers. It's a good album, but the lyrics were hilarious in most cases. Judging from their morphing in to a band that produced "We Built This City On Rock n' Roll," I can only conclude that the band is a bunch of opportuniusts, capitalizing on the whatever spirit might be pervading the times...anyway, it was a good hippie rock album.

But it got me to thinking, again, of how music and the arts in general have largely failed in responding to the political, social, and economic situation that we live in today. I don't want hippie music or flower-power art, but stuff that will in some way bring the reality of the U.S. today into the national consciousness. I think the time is right for this to happen, while from the early 90s until recently artists, actors, and musicians were widely criticized for bringing politics into their music, etc., at all.

This article about Springsteen performing in New Orleans gave me some hope. He's fantastic, and undismissable. He's upset with how things are, and uses his music to show it. Hey, if you're a celebrity musician, have something to say, and people will listen, why not? Maybe this is a good sign in the trend towards massive popular disgust with the Bush administration. Last time I checked, Dubya was at 36%...Congress at 22%.

I found this quote from Mike Stipe about music and politics-
--------------------------------------
QUESTION: Is REM a political band?

MIKE STIPE: Not at all. I consider the 3 of us to be extremely political, as citizens, and I separate our necessity, who we are is public figures, and what we do is musicians, as creative people, for who we are, we’re private citizens. However there’s overlap of course. And so I don’t sail out to write as a lyricist, and a frontman, I don’t sail out to write songs that are political natured, infact, with this last record, it was my desire not to… but I couldn’t get the events and the aftermath of September 11 out of my head. And I was trying to write songs that would be beautiful songs, and all I could think about is how f**ked up the world is. I finally collapsed under the way, just quit thinking about it, and got advise from a lot of people who do what I do, and moved forward. I don’t think politics and art mix very well. I certainly don’t think politics and music mix very well. I can understand, as a music fan, listening to a song and feeling like someone sat down with the intension of teaching me with their lyrics, that to me is really uninteresting. The songs that have moved me and motivated me are the ones where, you might have a back story a little bit later, I’m thinking of this song ‘One’ by U2, I’m thinking of ‘1959’ by Patti Smith… the music is what moves me, and I feel there’s a story behind it, and I’m interested in knowing more about the song, than just a surface… it’s good to have that there.
--------------------------------------
I don't agree with him that music and politics don't mix very well. Hello? "World Leader Pretend"? "Orange Crush"? A bunch of tracks from Document? He has it right in the last part of his answer-it's about the music, but the lyrics have a story, one which you might want to know more about. I'm not talking preach-rock a la Jefferson Airplane, but exactly the type of rock that U2 used to write, which I never considered to be heavy-handed. Foreboding, maybe, but not so much that it got in the way of the enjoyment of the music.