Ryan Against The Machine

Mr. Blue and I have been having an audiobookclub over the past several months, focusing primarily on literary classics of one stripe or another. So far, the one that most gripped me was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

I’m a white guy. Whiter than white. My heritage is British and German, for heaven’s sake. I don’t know when my ancestors got here, but it wasn’t any time recently. Though most of my heritage is rather humble, and it comes with an accent that bespeaks ignorance to many, I nonetheless come about as far from the background of the book as one can imagine.

Yet my appreciation of the book was not on the basis of better helping me understand the African-American experience. I mean, there were ways in which it gave me some appreciation, but it was more personal than that. I related it to my own experiences and perceptions. In ways that deviated from the sociopolitical contexts of the book greatly.

If I were running for president, and this bit were to make the presses, critics on the left would probably scoff at the notion that a whitebread white guy like me could really connect to such a work and that it is indicative of some fundamental unseriousness on my part. Critics on the right would say how my appreciation relates to some misbegotten white guilt or something suchlike. I fancy myself an articulate guy, but I’m not sure how I could describe the whole thing in a way that wouldn’t seem presumptuous or silly among those predisposed not to like me.

(If I were to try, it would be something along the lines of relating to the struggle to find one’s own identity among a greater social movement with brush-filled pathways and a sense of disconnect even with those that would forge the same ultimate destination.)

A lot of people have been getting a kick out of the fact that one of straight-laced arch-conservative Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s favorite bands is Rage Against the Machine. I mean, Ryan is the Machine, isn’t he? Frontman Tom Morello sure thinks so. This is a relatively superficial reading of the situation, in my view.

First, it has to be said, the overwhelming liberalness of the artistic world means that if you are a conservative, you’re going to have a hard time finding great anthems for your cause. Unless you’re willing to consign yourself to country music, or entertainment hermitdom, you’re going to be either consuming art that is apolitical (which is, of course, most of it), art by artists that oppose you, or both. If you’re a politically-minded bloke, you might actually find political things that you disagree with more worthwhile than apolitical things that are inoffensive.

Now we can say, “Yes, but Rage Against The Machine?!” Yeah, superficially it’s awkward. Maybe his appreciation is entirely superficial. I don’t know. It doesn’t take too much of a stretch of my imagination, however, to see how RATM might touch on a particular nerve even as the actual context of the art deviates enormously from his worldview. Ryan may see himself in the context of someone who is fighting against a culture that he sees as problematic and that, to him, is more important than the wild divergence between the problems with culture that he sees and the problem that RATM sees.

Given how comparatively little that conservatives have to hang their hat on as far as singers singing their anthems, it’s not hard to see how one might take a singular aspect of someone’s music, combine it with the energetic sound, and enjoy it a great deal. There is a dearth of talented musicians wanting to sing starkly political anthems of a conservative nature. You take what you can get.

He certainly has a better excuse for Rage than I do for Ellison.

It’s partly because of the above that I see a lot of the “HAHA! Paul Ryan loves Rage Against The Machine and Tom Morello hates Paul Ryan!”

As I say, if conservatives limited their artistic appreciation to those artists who were on board with them, it’d be some country, Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, and not many others. Even Blues Traveler has given up. This strikes as perhaps indicative of a political (or political culture) problem for the GOP, but not really a substantive one. It comes across to me as pointing out how unpopular the unpopular kid is with the in-crowd.

Every four years or so we get some articles about how so-and-so has asked a Republican politician to stop using their music. It occasionally happens the other way, but not often. Truthfully, though, when Springsteen snubs Christie or (though to a lesser extent) Morello criticizes Ryan (to a ludicrous extreme, the author of a book on the history of salt seemed angered that GWB was reading his book), it speaks as much about the artist as it does about the uncoolness of the politician that likes them.

That being said, of all of the cases where this has happened, I would probably give Morello more leeway than the others since he is a far-afield political enthusiast. By and large, though, some sort of insistence that your art be consumed on your terms strikes me as short-sighted. If David Duke found something I wrote to be riveting, I’m mostly just be curious as to why.

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

17 Comments

  1. RATM is simple, modal hip hop for White Boahs, rolling neatly along through the changes. Rush for Gen X. Chuck D’s pale, droopy-eyed bastard child by way of the Beasties.

    It’s easy to see why Paul Ryan would like this stuff. You don’t need a brain to get the beat. He’s never evolved a sharp enough ear to understand hip-hop lyrics.

    • I’m starting to feel beleaguered (see what I did there) as a Rush fan in these parts.

    • Standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’ is raging against the machine from that point of view.

      Repealing Obamacare, or more archly, Nullification, is exactly saying ‘F You I won’t do what you tell me’

      • What’s the word for you’re critique, BP? “Scathing”? Hmmm. You might be right about all that, but isn’t their music fun to listen to?

        • Bulls on Parade was played as warm up music for the Marines prior to the assault on Fallujah.

    • Blaise, I will say here as I said elsewhere – I don’t know why, but I find it endlessly amusing and cool that in addition to your other areas of interest and long resume, you know about things like PE (who never had the mainstream chart success of either RATM or BB’s). I just have no idea how you ever find the time. Do you sleep?

  2. Not to totally let Springsteen off the hook, because it also bothers me when musicians pick on conservative politicians, but I think it matters what the politician is appropriating. Is he or she appropriating the band’s coolness or message? In that case, I side with the politician. But is the politician appropriating the band’s identity? In that case, I’m more with the band. And I think Christie is more appropriating Springsteen because he’s a New Jerseyan (or whatever they’re called).

    I don’t know. That’s all thinking out loud. It’s not a coherent argument, and it’s not really meant to be. Just an impression.

    • You should flesh that out into a post.

      I’m not sure I grok you, but it sounds like an interesting place to go.

    • Slightly tangential to the point you seem to be making, Ryan, but I’ll say Springsteen’s worn-on-his-sleeve liberalism/pro-Democratic-party-ism bothers me. Even if it is sincere, it seems almost like a smug posture that no one who sees things differently whatsoever is even within the pale, unless they’re Democrats, then that’s okay, in which case he’ll write an op-ed assuring us that “this time, the stakes are too high” if we don’t vote for the Dem.

      I say this as someone who likes his music (what I know of it) and who generally prefers liberal policies to conservative ones.

    • The Christie/Springsteen thing isn’t really about the appropriation of Springsteen’s work. More about Springsteen’s overall attitude towards Christie’s enthusiasm for his work. I mean, I *hate* the governor back home. But I would still probably treat him with more respect than Springsteen is treating his governor and fan.

      As far as appropriation goes, I think it’s just one of those things that you let slide unless they’re (also) using your physical likeness or something to indicate your (non-existent) endorsement. I think that playing your music as his rallies doesn’t really qualify.

      • Yeah, I’m not really aware of Christie actually appropriating Springsteen’s music for political uses; my understanding is more that he’s just a legit fanboy like most white males in this state. It’s more of a jilted lover relationship than it is tone deaf political ploy- it’s pretty much the exact opposite of Reagan citing “Born in the USA.”.

  3. I just want to say I loved everything about this post – everything.

    If you cross posted on the front page that would absolutely, positively not suck. At all.

  4. The difference is of course neither Nugent nor Kid Rock have explicitly political messages to their songs. You can enjoy ‘Cat Scratch Fever’ without caring about the fact Nugent is crazy.

    OTOH, pretty much every one of Rage’s songs are pretty damn political. Paul Ryan can be a fan of RATM. And we can find it amusing you can listen and enjoy Rage’s music and still turn out to be a right-wing Randian.

    • The difference is of course neither Nugent nor Kid Rock have explicitly political messages to their songs. You can enjoy ‘Cat Scratch Fever’ without caring about the fact Nugent is crazy.

      I don’t see what this has to do with the point that I was making. I wasn’t drawing equivalence between Nugent/KR and RATM. The lack of equivalence actually underlines one of the points that I was making.

      And we can find it amusing you can listen and enjoy Rage’s music and still turn out to be a right-wing Randian.

      It’s a free country, but I think it represents a blinkered understanding of how artistic enjoyment works.

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