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Samizdata quote of the day I see that former Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker was spotted at a Georgia Tea Party protest, telling a local reporter that she is “furious about the way we are being led towards socialism.” Prefix magazine calls this “depressing” news that will “bring you down” before the weekend, because it’s incumbent upon all musicians – especially those in seminal proto-punk bands like VU – to have roughly the same, boring lefty politics.
– Michael C. Moynihan, linked to and already picked out as a nice little nugget by Instapundit, which is where I saw it. I know, I know, who gives a defecation what ex-music-celebs think? Or for that matter current actors. Well, I like it when they talk sense, if only because the people who talk nonsense get so miserable and angry about it.
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I like it when anyone talks sense, but it’s even better when they are famous.
Minor quibble –
Q. What do you call a person who hangs around with a bunch of musicians?
A. A drummer.
Clearly it is not incumbent on Moe Tucker to adhere to boring lefty politics, since Moe Tucker is not a musician, but a drummer.
Simples.
divisionary tactics are a staple of long term solutions by individuals or groups hoping to stay little noticed.
the use of talking heads is a long held tenet of celebrity culture to form popular opinion.
find out who ‘isn’t’ talking and what they tend to think about things rather than quick shots from a mouthpiece ‘speaking from the heart’ (gag).
If you want conclusive evidence of the cognitive disability of musicians, here it is….
http://www2.labour.org.uk/leadership-affiliates
Yes that’s right, the Musician’s Union chose Diane Abbott as our potential future prime minister.
Velvet Revolution?
Hmmm, an awful lot of non-musicians here… first, one of the hardest parts of every band I ever put together was finding a good drummer. A good drummer is a top notch musician and they lay down the rhythmic pattern you build on… and unlike a effing-drum-effing-machine, they feel the feedback from the the rest of the band and adjust tempos and riffs accordingly.
Second, musicians and artists are a hell of a lot more important than many people understand. Artists manipulate symbols and emotions at a very deep level and that is why socialists get so upset if one gets away or goes off message. They have been one of the major tools of the left for much of the last century. We need a lot more of them on our side, putting a message of liberty out on those subliminal, non-rational, lower brainstem channels which make a joke of rational argument. You can argue until you are blue in the face, and rationalism does matter, but if you get someone in their reptile brain…
Dale’s right. The statists seized the commanding heights of the culture. Rather then lamenting the fact that people actually take what celebs says seriously, harness that and get a pro-liberty message out there.
Although, I’ll always cherish the memory of a conversation I had with 8 or so punks. They were arguing over who was the most authentic punk. I offered Johnny Ramone. Why? Because there’s nothing more punk then accepting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction with the words “God bless George W. Bush, and God Bless America.” If punk is about nonconforming, about standing out from the crowd, then saying something like that to a mangy pack of aging rock stars and celebs is more punk then anything else.
I was pleased with reading this information until this part:
leftists really are out of touch if they have never experienced the depression of a beloved artist saying something completely dumb, but god forbid an artist actually says or does something completely reasonable like attend a tea party. boy that’s gotta be so depressing huh someone expressed an opinion not held by the elitist liberal crowd my whole day is ruined etc.
you know what depresses me? people who say they are depressed to hear that someone has an opinion on something that doesn’t agree with their own.
Rock’n’roll Board of Compliance.
Wasn’t it Iggy Pop who wrote a song called I’m a Conservative? The usual crowd like the NME mistakenly assumed he was being ironic
The reaction shows the contradictions at the heart of the left – especially the culturally left.
It is “depressing” and will “bring you down” to hear that someone is taking part in a local protest (by ordinary people) against the growth of government power.
But the left are supposed to be in favour of protests, and they are supposed to be in favour of ordinary people, and they are supposed to be in favour of freedom – at least the freedom of putting on cultural “happenings” (surely a Tea Party protest is precisely this sort of cultural “happening”).
In reality the left are not in favour of voluntary nonprofit cooperation (for all their talk of communes) – for a Tea Party event is the classic example of a volutnary nonprofit coperative event. And it is made up of the people in a community who are most likely to give their money and their TIME to help the poor.
The numbers are very clear on this – in the United States it is Tea Party type people (not leftists) who tend to help the poor. All the left do is scream that the government should help the poor.
Nor are the left in favour of the local autonomy they say they are – on the contrary they want everything centralized in Washington D.C. (the capital of a country of some 300 million billion) or even on a world level.
Compare to big protests:
The “Restoring Honor” event and the “One Nation” event.
The Restoring Honor event had vastly more people (look at the photographs taken from the air), but that is not the most important point.
The left (and their extention – the MSM) kept asking “who is financing” the Restoring Honor event. The idea that hundreds of thousands of people would turn up AT THEIR OWN EXPENSE (and many of these people were quite poor) did not even enter their, supposedly “anti commercial”, minds.
For their own “One Nation” event – the left had some 400 organizations (mostly run by paid professionals – perhaps the openly Marxist organization among the 400, such as the Communist Party USA, are actually LESS dangerious than some of the others). And vast funding from the AFL CIO (the unions) and the Tides Foundation.
How many Hollwood films have been made about spooky political/cultural organizations funded by billionaires – yet that is exactly what the Tides Foundation is.
The whole event was almost a parody – lots of people denouncing “bigness” and saying they support local communities.
Yet financed by big (indeed vast) unions, and by international billionaries, and all in favour of vast and centralized government – on a national and indeed international scale (which the vast union and business interests both seem to think they can profit from).
“But Glenn Beck also knows billionaries to Paul”.
Yes he does – but people like Jon Huntsman do not give money to get people to protests, they prefer to give money to build cancer hospitals.
Two sides really are facing off – but they are not “the rich and the poor” the two sides are pro freedom people (pro freedom both commercially – and in coperatiing to help people) and anti freedom (pro vast and CENTRALIZED government) people.
Really it is the oldest conflict of them all – good versus evil.
It really is that simple – and, in her heart, the one time drummer of the Velvet Underground has guessed rightly which side is REALLY in favour of “voluntary cooperation”, “localism”, “autonomy”, and (of course) “freedom”.
Both sides often use the same language – but only one side (our side) means it, the other side means the exact opposite.