#imageisking

I haven’t seen the news since the ‘News’! It seems more so now than ever that everything is in black or white. The once ‘dreaded’ gray area has gone out of our lives. You are either on the ball or you have missed the boat…you are either with us or against us…I hear these and their likes and start to feel the urge for the bliss of confusion we were in before. Call me insensitive but I just want to say, ‘fudge it,’ to all and sundry.

Let’s talk about rock and roll. For the fear of sounding completely off key to the current situation lets talk about responsible rock…a genre made famous by Bob Dylan and his type of electric folk tunes. To many it was a revolution in the thought processes of the youth…a kind of passing of the torch from the establishment to the twenty-something baby-boomers of the sixties in terms of defining the ethical boundaries of the society. It failed. It became the backdrop. It became a nice conversation piece. It lost its universal appeal. It was overrun by the greed.

So when one sings about the forest being run down by rampant industrial growth, or offshore wars being fought and their after-effects, or gross injustices being handed down to masses, or whatever else that is unacceptable behavior the marketability factor is almost always the decision-making criteria in terms of whether the song will sell or not. So the idea, which was pure at its core over time, became a source of immense income for corporations and individuals alike. Not a bad deal at all!

In the meantime, however, the idea also became an end in itself. It became a thing to be: “I am a socially conscious singer;” the image was very palatable. The idea became the image and hence also everything associated with the image. And suddenly one realizes within it all, the reality is missing. What happened to the idea borne out of reality?

This question becomes more pertinent when one looks at the living examples, the stalwarts, if you will of the enigma that is the socially conscious singer. The Dylanesques, the singer-songwriters that defined the term responsible rock, were really vocal in the post hippy era: what with the Vietnam War and all, the oil spills in the oceans, the ozone layer depletion, the rain forest destruction, the list goes on. It became very clear that these were the events that needed to be talked about so that the world becomes a safer place to be. Fortunately for these singers, these events also were fashionable issues, the ‘in’ subjects, the cash cows, the epitome of political correctness. The image is king.