April 2, 2006
FAST TRACKS
New songs of protest and rage
By Chris Lee, Special to The Times
BETWEEN the president’s plummeting poll numbers, widespread public dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq and the poetic potential of all that angst in the air, it was only a matter of time before pop music caught up with popular discontent.
Now, three high-profile acts offer pointed social critiques, an upswing in the kind of politically minded pop music that top-of-the-charts acts have addressed only sporadically from any perspective since the beginning of the war in Iraq three years ago.
The Dixie Chicks recently cracked the country Top 40 with “Not Ready to Make Nice,” a single that amplifies and elaborates on band member Natalie Maines’ 2003 Bush-bashing comment (on the eve of the war, she told a London audience that the group was “ashamed” it shared its home state with President Bush). In May, Paul Simon resurfaces with “Surprise,” his first album in six years, one that includes the song “Wartime Prayers.” In a disheartened meditation about psychic war wounds, the 64-year-old sings of cleansing his “soul of rage.”
Pearl Jam’s antiwar anthem “World Wide Suicide” has been on fire on rock radio since last week.
“Medals on a wooden mantle, next to a handsome face,” lead vocalist Eddie Vedder seethes on “Suicide,” “that the president took for granted, writing checks that others pay.”
That song’s anti-establishment stance won’t come as a shock to anyone familiar with the band’s campaign-year efforts in 2004, when it mounted the overtly political Vote for Change tour designed to promote regime change at home. Vedder also hinted at his political leanings when he impaled a rubber mask of Bush on a microphone stand in 2003.
“Pearl Jam is a band who throughout [its] career [has] been known for making some politically charged statements,” says Bill Burrs, vice president of rock music for the RCA Music Group, Pearl Jam’s distributor. “Given what’s going on in the world today, maybe that’s why some radio has embraced the song.”
