Headlines, North America

/ARTS WEEKLY/U.S.: Anti-Bush Musicians Hit the Road

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Aug 17 2004 (IPS) - In any other election year, having some of the biggest names in U.S. popular music sign up for a tour to defeat the incumbent president might provoke little more than yawns from all but the headline hungry media and the singers’ most loyal fans.

But in 2004, when the Nov. 2 election is set to be decided in just over a dozen key states, in some instances by only a few thousand votes or less, the ‘Vote for Change’ tour could echo long after the last concert is played.

”Generally, such tours don’t move many votes,” says David Schultz, a professor of electoral law at Hamline University in Minnesota, echoing other experts who spoke with IPS.

”The critical thing to think about is that the election now is really down to 15 states where a very small number of people could determine the outcome. Generally, moving only a few votes doesn’t make a difference … but moving a few hundred votes in Florida last time would have,” adds Schultz.

U.S. President George W Bush finally won the bitterly divisive vote in 2000 after taking Florida State by just over 500 votes in a court-contested decision.

Florida is a strategic battleground again in 2004, and the final stop in the ‘Vote for Change’ tour, which is scheduled to hold concerts in six cities across the state Oct. 8.

Leading the weeklong, 34-show tour of nine key states are rockers Bruce Springsteen, the Dave Matthews Band, Pearl Jam, REM and John Mellencamp, country music performers the Dixie Chicks, and folk singer James Taylor.

The event is being organised by the political action committee of MoveOn.org, an online advocacy group that is working to defeat Bush. Proceeds from the concerts will go to Americans Coming Together (ACT), a group whose aim is to register voters who will kick the incumbent out of office.

”We’ve always believed that popular culture and populist politics go hand in hand,” said MoveOn’s Eli Pariser announcing the tour earlier this month. ”For our 2.5 million members and far beyond, the ‘Vote for Change’ tour will have a seismic cultural impact.”

A cultural impact perhaps, but not a political one, says Allan Saxe, who teaches politics at the University of Texas-Arlington.

”The music invigorates the faithful, but rarely attracts new supporters,” he said in an email interview, citing the protest tunes of the counter-culture 1960s. "The songs of the civil rights era and the Viet Nam years were wonderful and pointed, but (it is) doubtful if they really swayed the vote, (Republican candidate Richard) Nixon still swamped (George) McGovern (in the 1972 election)."

Saxe predicts an array of forces will muffle the 2004 tour’s call for change, including a political attack from the president’s camp pointing out that the millions of dollars behind MoveOn and ACT come out of the pockets of wealthy individuals like financier George Soros; that performers will be singing to audiences that largely already oppose Bush; and that most young people in those crowds will not bother to vote anyway.

Saxe’s colleague, history professor Jerry Rodnitzky, told IPS that surveys of attendees of so-called ”issues” concerts found that ”70 percent of the people didn’t care what the song said.”

Even Springsteen was muted in predicting the tour’s impact: ”I don’t know if people go to musicians for their politics. I doubt that they do, you know, but you can rally people to think on serious issues together, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” he told host Ted Koppel on ABC’s ‘Nightline’ on Aug. 4.

Schwartz also pointed out that some of the concerts will be held days after voter registration will have closed in those states, so the chance will have been lost to sign up new voters. In the 18-22 age group only about one-third of those eligible cast a vote, he added.

That is why Schwartz thinks schemes like Sean Combs’s Citizen Change ”is actually taking the right strategy – get them registered to vote.”

Hip-hot artist Combs, once known as ”Puff Daddy” and now called ”P. Diddy,” launched a campaign in July to get young black and Latino voters to the polls.

”Citizen Change is a non-partisan, non-profit organisation that will educate, motivate and empower more than 40 million minority voters, also known as the ‘forgotten ones,’ who are eligible to vote on Nov. 2, and who will ultimately decide who will be the next president of the United States of America,” he said at the launch.

Other projects to get out the young vote preceded Citizen Change, including Rock the Vote from the MTV cable music channel and a grassroots endeavour called Music for America, inspired by the founders’ experience after the global anti-war protests of February 2003.

Keeping track of them all is a new website – airtrafficontroltower.net – which was launched Friday and includes a calendar of all events that include ”music activism.” More than 400 of them were listed as of the launch, said a news release from the group Air Traffic Control.

Music for America co-founder Michael Connery says he and his friends formed the group after the experience of the anti-war protests, where ”Bush dismissed, basically, our entire generation, which had gotten politically active for the first time.”

”Our generation went to the protests, we weren’t apathetic – we wanted to do something. We figured that using music and showing people how politics affects culture and how politics affects every-day lives would be a great way to give our friends and families a way to take action.”

Attendees at Music For America concerts can pick up glossy, postcard-sized cards containing facts on issues like health care, the war against drugs and the economy, they can register to vote or volunteer to work at future events.

Connery says the group, which has offices in Brooklyn, New York and west coast San Francisco and Seattle, wants to ”build little communities” of politically empowered citizens who will be active for many years to come, but he also predicts that the younger generation could make a big noise Nov. 2.

”The big X factor is how young people are going to vote … if the turnout is huge, it’s our generation that’s going to cast the deciding vote.”

To date, Music for America has registered at least 12,500 voters and counted 370,000 at their large and small concerts nation-wide, he says, adding that those people have not heard the last of his group.

”Everyone who we have contacted or has signed up for our list will get emails, text messages, phone calls, things like that, in the week leading up to the election reminding them to vote, so we’re hoping that for all the people we’ve actually touched, it will be a much higher turnout rate,” said Connery.