Though it seems like authenticity only matters in music, it's a frequent subject in politics, too. One way of arguing about it involves discussing the importance of "informed voters." One side, stressing the need for citizens to be fully informed about the issues and candidates if they are to truly represent their interests through voting, argues that political preferences based on less rational things like appearance, group affiliation, likability, or character (what fancypants political scientists call
affective qualities) are bad for democracy. The other side—which I suspect may be made up of only me—thinks that being fully informed is not only an impossibility but a undesirable state of affairs, that picking a party and sticking with it is fine, and that affective qualities are a perfectly legitimate way to pick a candidate. As irrational as non-fully-informed vote choices may seem, they often end up at the same place a more considered choice would have anyway, and so in the end there's not much practical difference. But there is a difference in the authenticity of your vote, and this matters to some folks. For them, politics is only truly "real" when it is the outgrowth of a philosophical journey, rather than an expression of base and quickly considered self-interest. What would these people make, then, of all the musical events of late supposedly designed to support Barack Obama?
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Idolator
Visiting Prince's house is like visiting Kanye's future: "In the living room, he’d installed purple thrones on either side of a fireplace, and, nearby, along a hallway, he had hung photographs of himself, in a Moroccan villa, in various states of undress." Asked about the (at the time) upcoming election, Prince preached a pox-on-both-your-houses neutrality: "'you’ve got the Republicans, and basically they want to live according to this.' He pointed to a Bible. 'But there’s the problem of interpretation, and you’ve got some churches, some people, basically doing things and saying it comes from here, but it doesn’t. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum you’ve got blue, you’ve got the Democrats, and they’re, like, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ Gay marriage, whatever. But neither of them is right.'" Prince's view? “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out." Oh, Prince. Even when he's talking about religion, he's talking about sex. Now that he lives in California, though, let's hope he doesn't vote. [
Whatever you think of the man, it's fair to say that John McCain has not been able to catch a break in this election. I'm not talking about the self-inflicted wounds, but about all the things over which he genuinely had no control, like the economy tanking, a hurricane hitting New Orleans on the first day of the Republican convention, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki agreeing with Obama's pullout plan. The campaign has been a sort of running joke of failure for McCain, and one of the best was how musicians kept objecting to his campaigns' use of particular songs. Heart, Bon Jovi, the Foo Fighters, Survivor, John Mellencamp, and half of Van Halen were among the musicians who objected, and the campaign has largely given in to their terroristy demands. This would seem to be another strategic (tactical?) blunder, but the results of a study done by my partner Rachel Arnold and me suggests, rather, that politicians aren't just uninformed about music—they don't care about music. And as long as that's true, these sort of musical gaffes are going to continue.
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