[Peace] IMAGINE THERE'S NO UNITY

[Charles Lipp]

[excerpt from the following as you wish -- Jay Mittenthal]

[The following is the lead article from the October Rock
& Rap Confidential. The entire October issue focuses on
music's relationship to war and terrorism. We would be
happy to send you a copy. Just email us at
rockrap at aol.com with your name and a postal address. If
you think what we've written here is important, please
forward it along to others. Thanks and peace--The
editors of Rock & Rap Confidential]

IMAGINE THERE'S NO UNITY
. "United We Stand," America's
ever-present new slogan, does have a ring of truth. Tom
Morello of Rage Against the Machine put it best four
days after the September 11 attacks. "Our deepest
sympathy and condolences go out to all the people and
their families affected by the attacks on Tuesday,"
Morello said. "The loss of innocent life is just
terrible
.The pain felt across the country demonstrates
the lesson of Tuesday's events: that the taking of
innocent life is devastating to a society and terribly
wrong."

In the wake of the terror, a spirit of togetherness
emerged from New York City and captured the imagination
of the country. "We, the gruff New Yorkers who reputedly
step over street people indistinguishably drunk or dead,
are doing heroic, selfless things," said a September 13
email from Sub Verse, a hip-hop label with offices a few
blocks from the World Trade Center.

But the unity built around sympathy, fear, or even anger
only goes so far, definitely not as far as unity around
giving the government a blank check for the bombing of
Afghanistan or for anything else. Steve Harvey, TV star
and the top-rated DJ in Los Angeles on KKBT-FM, has
repeatedly told his listeners that we cannot trust our
government to take us into war, that he will not allow
his own son to be sacrificed, and that we need to focus
on our own problems, such as homelessness.

How can we unite with a government that gave out $15
billion in aid to airlines that had refused to give
severance pay to laid-off workers? The same airlines
were silent when the Massachusetts governor's chauffeur
was made head of security at Boston's Logan Airport last
year and they still refuse to reinforce cockpit doors
because it's "too expensive" (what's that $15 billion
for?). For Chrissakes, the Department of Energy proposes
that we allow our food to be canned with radioactive
steel, while the Treasury Secretary calls for an end to
Medicare and Social Security. Who can unite with that?

The restless whispers over such facts might become a
scream if the American people knew how deeply their
government has been involved in the rise of the Taliban
and Osama Bin Laden, how hard the CIA worked to promote
a distorted Islamic fundamentalism at hundreds of
Pakistan-based religious schools attended by guerillas,
and how deeply our government has been involved in
international drug dealing (60% of US heroin now comes
from the Afghanistan/Pakistan border area and the CIA's
Charles Cogan admitted guilt in 1995: "There was fallout
in terms of drugs, yes. But the
.Soviets left
Afghanistan.")

The world is most certainly divided but not between
Americans and Arabs. The fundamental division is between
wealth and poverty. According to the UN, 35,615 children
worldwide died of hunger and hunger- related diseases on
September 11 and on each day since. 447 billionaires now
have more wealth than the poorest 2.75 billion people on
the planet put together. And it's not only everywhere
else. In America, this is reflected in millions of
homeless people, tens of millions of people with no
health insurance, and a shift in spending from education
to prisons.

In other words, the average American has a lot more in
common with the average Arab than with the people who
run the U.S. government. The average Arab has a lot more
in common with the average American than with the likes
of Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi construction tycoon who is
one of those 447 billionaires. If Americans and Arabs
could both divide from the governments, corporations,
and organizations that offer us only war and poverty,
then we could unite to imagine a peaceful and prosperous
world.

The first step in that process is communication, both
among ourselves and with the rest of the world. Our
primary means of communication is music. So it's no
coincidence that there has been a great increase in
music censorship. It began right after September 11,
when the 1200-station broadcast behemoth Clear Channel
Communications banned all music by Rage Against the
Machine and issued a don't-play list of 150 songs,
ranging from Nena's anti-nuke "99 Luft Balloons" to John
Lennon's sublime "Imagine," with its lyric "I hope
someday you'll join us/And the world will live as one."

Clear Channel protested that it wasn't really a ban but
its true colors were revealed October 1 when the company
fired Davey D from his post as Community Affairs
Director at KMEL/San Francisco. For over a decade, Davey
D, the world's foremost hip-hop journalist, has put
controversial issues and personalities on the air at
KMEL. Will Steve Harvey at Clear Channel-owned KKBT be
the next victim of the chain's sleazy quid pro quo with
the government? (On September 13, just before the Clear
Channel censors went into action, the FCC declared its
intent to lift all ownership restrictions on broadcast
chains).

On September 14, the Secret Service closed down Rage
Against the Machine's website. Other musicians who
voiced opinions not approved by the government came
under pressure to retract them. Kevin Richardson of the
Backstreet Boys apologized (kind of) because he asked
during a Toronto interview: "What has our government
done to provoke this action that we don't know about?"
Moby apologized (definitely) for saying that the people
of New York had been "failed" by the FBI and CIA who
"exist solely to protect us from this sort of atrocity."

There was also censorship by omission. On September 11
the highly political metal band System of a Down had the
most popular album in the world. But while right-wing
talking heads you've never heard of got unlimited face
time, System of a Down was ignored. Perhaps that was
because frontman Serj Tankian was insisting that we try
to actually understand world events: "No one in the
media seems to ask why did these people do this horrific
act of violence and destruction?"

As for hip-hop, it was invisible despite the fact that
rap stars donated millions of dollars to relief efforts,
while others organized concerts or town hall meetings.
As Davey D put it in his FNV newsletter
(www.daveyd.com), "Because of the narrowcasting in news
coverage, the average person has no idea what Mos Def,
Common, Talib Kweli, or KRS-One is thinking."

Now we are officially at war. Music, which is
fundamentally for peace, will come into increasing
conflict with the government. That's all to the good,
but if we don't find effective ways to support
musicians, the sound of silence will become deafening.