Fitz

"This goes out to all the ICE agents out there. Quit your shitty ass job. Quit that shitty job you have. Because when this is over, and it will be over at some point in time, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Donald Trump -- they're gonna drop you like a bad f*cking habit. Come on to this side of the line."

Frank Zappa was decades ahead of his time. He said this in 1981:

"Schools train people to be ignorant... They give you the equipment that you need to be a functional ignoramus."

"They prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower."

"As long as you're just smart enough to do a job, and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're going to be alright."

JF: words mean a lot here. I think you could say political ideas inform and contour all of culture-making but culture-making is a very dynamic thing. Our values, ethics, morality, language, customs, history, habits, prejudices are affected by our personal perceptions of political (and/or social) justice. Even folks who say "I'm not political" are expressing a very strong, established political "know nothing" point of view-which is to say they are simply defending the status quo. They would preferred not to have to think, or defend, their position against other peoples concerns, or their own unexamined predicaments.

So I feel like art exists in a political context, because it's created and is received in a political/cultural world, but does all art (overtly/directly) express political ideas? I would say no....

I don't even know what our music means in the culture--I'm probably too inside it, and we all might be better off if TMBG just kept doing our thing...

But I do think about the how art and music has evolved in my life. In my older teen years the big trends were punk, which was presented and perceived as overtly political movement taking on the gate-keepers of the music culture with a hard anti-star, anti-corporate stance. Then there was disco music, which was presented as overtly populist--music for dancing, in discotheques designed for hooking up. 

Well, in the fullness of time the ultimate effect of these two music cultures--both with clear.... what would you call it... clear thesis statements?--feel like they swapped places. Disco music as a trend revealed a previously hidden gay subculture and brought it boldly into the mainstream, consequently changing the lives of countless people--and absolutely challenging a lot of political assumptions. Meanwhile a lot of punks influence seems far more etherial--a stance or a sneer that can be appropriated by actor, or tween performers, or bought in in the form of a t-shirt at Hot Topic. While among many other effects (including reintroducing the impact of the power of short pop song structures--which certainly meant a lot to me) one could make a strong argument that punk has become more of a fashion statement than a cultural revolution.