To Art or Not to Art

The world is losing its shit right now.

I’m finding it hard to focus on anything else. I’ve been spending hours in front of my computer, binge-reading article after article, getting myself more and more worked up, and feeling more and more powerless to do anything about any of it.

You too?

I was all set to write a piece about how average music pisses me off. Actually, I’ve got a lot of it written already. It’s essentially a hit piece on the band Train. But my heart’s not in it. As I was writing it, I kept asking myself, Is this really necessary right now?

Of course it’s not. But then that got me thinking, what is necessary right now? Does popular culture have a role to play? Can art have an impact? What kind of impact?

I’m not talking about my own writing, and I’m certainly not talking about my piece about Train; I’m talking about creativity in general. In the face of insanity, of terrorist attacks, of random, senseless killings, of a political class too fucking cowardly to act in any meaningful way, what should creatives do?

Distract us? Sure, there’s that. I used to dismiss this out of hand. I remember one time, I was at a friend’s house watching TV with him and his parents. We were flipping channels, and we stopped on the video for Pearl Jam’s song “Jeremy.” It’s the one where the kid gets up in front of a classroom and shoots himself. My friend’s dad asked what was going on there, and I told him what I had heard, that it was based on some deaf kid that Eddie Vedder had gone to school with, that everyone picked on him so much that one day, he came to school, stripped naked in front of the class, pulled out a gun, and blew his brains out.

“I have to work all day. Why the hell would I want to come home and watch that?”, my friend’s dad asked.

I was in the idealistic phase of my 20s at the time, so I think I politely said nothing while having a judgmental field day in my head: “Because this is life, man. Art is about life. Life can be ugly and painful and we shouldn’t be afraid to look at it.”

Yeah. I was fun then. I’ve toned it down somewhat over the years. Sure, we can turn to art to distract us. Life is often hard to bear for many people, so why not have something you can escape into? Hell, I just told you I’m writing a puff piece about how much Train sucks. Sometimes a little distraction goes a long way.

But what about the higher-minded stuff? I will say right here that I believe good art is good art, and I don’t really care what its motivation is, only that it resonates. But of political work, I can confidently split it into two categories: The overt and the covert.

I used to believe that any art that was overtly political was de facto Bad Art. I’m talking about the vast majority of protest songs (let’s say, off the top of my head, “Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City”), or a lot of the work that was commissioned by the WPA during the Depression (“The Cradle Will Rock”), or even a lot of what Bansky’s been doing lately. I think what sets my teeth on edge is that it’s telling you what and how to feel. There’s also a drop-dead earnestness. Earnestness always renders something two-dimensional, creating a binary world of black and white out of a world that, in my opinion, is almost exclusively made up of shades of gray.

For what it’s worth, this is why there are almost no conservative artists; conservatives think in black and white. (I realize this is a black and white statement. It’s called irony. Deal with it.)

But then there’s Goya’s “Third of May 1808.” There’s Picasso’s “Guernica.” There’s Public fucking Enemy. And where the overt really gets cooking is in comedy. Our best political truth-tellers have been humorists: Mark Twain. Norman Lear. Lenny Bruce. The Onion. Jon Stewart. (Although I had to stop watching the Daily Show the last couple of years it was on, because I couldn’t laugh at Fox News clips anymore. I actually think Jon Stewart felt the same way, which is why he decided to retire.) Humor makes the medicine go down, because it sidesteps earnestness. To quote Homer Simpson, “It’s funny because it’s true.” (He was talking about a comedian who was making lame jokes about the differences between black and white drivers, so, the black and white thing again. More irony.)

Admittedly, the Greeks were pretty overt in taking on the political, but they get a pass, because, hey, they were the fucking Greeks. They invented this shit.

And then there’s the covert. Likewise, I used to give a pass to art that was covertly political, because I like stuff that’s subversive. And, to be fair, most of our best political art (and a lot of our best art in general) falls into this category. You can put pretty much all of Shakespeare in there, along with vast amount of Renaissance and Enlightenment art and writing. The Existentialists, the Dadaists, the Weimar Republic. The collected works of Don Delillo, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller. And on and on.

Some of the best films are covertly political. M*A*S*H* was about the Vietnam War, set in Korea. In fact, pretty much all of the great films of the Golden Age of American Cinema (roughly 1968 through 1980) were in one way or another addressing the political turmoil of that period: “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Easy Rider,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “Taxi Driver.” I could go on, but you get the idea.

But then there’s “The Crucible,” by Arthur Miller, a play so ham-fisted in its metaphorical assault on McCarthyism that you’re almost insulted. “See?,” Miller seemed to shout. “The witch trials? Blacklisting? Get it? Get it?” Really, Arthur Miller? You wrote “Death of a Salesman,” one of the greatest covertly political pieces of writing maybe ever. You sure you don’t want to take that one back? I’ll give you one do over.

Actually, you want to know how to take that one on? You make “On the Waterfront.” It’s full of nuance and shadows and… What’s that? Elia Kazan named names? Never mind.

Ahem. I started this piece thinking about music, and for the life of me, I don’t know why there hasn’t been much decent political music, covert or otherwise. (Go ahead and say Dylan, though I’ve always thought of Dylan as a writer first and a musician maybe third or forth. After opportunist.) Maybe it’s because music wears its purpose pretty conspicuously. And a lot of it is written by people in their 20s, an age when we’re way too concerned with politics or not concerned at all. I don’t know.

Great music, generally speaking, is a pretty inward affair. To anyone thinking about writing A Song That’s Going to Change the World: Stop. Back away from the notepad and the guitar. Go out and get drunk and get laid and then come back. Man. Think about how much trouble we would have saved everyone if Bono had done this. Or, really, if he’d never written any of his shitty ass music to begin with.

Hey! Look! I’m saying snarky things about shitty musicians. Clearly I’m feeling better. Thanks for being there for me.

But as to whether or not art has a role to play in the political, I believe that it does. It’s best to keep things on the covert side, though that’s not a guarantee of success, nor is tackling something overtly a guarantee of failure.

The bottom line is this: great art asks more questions than it purports to answer. Pretty much everyone is agonizing over what’s going on in the world right now. If you’re moved to create something out of that, great. Present things in a way that’s truthful to you and let people fill in the blanks for themselves. They’re going to do it anyway. Check Facebook if you don’t believe me.

The world is losing its shit, and there’s no sign that it’s going to stop doing so any time soon. I think art of all kinds can make things, if not better, then at least more bearable.

What do you think?