In a world where Madonna takes her ammunition cache to a political situation already accustomed to its meaning, I examine pop music's fascination with political exploitation.
It seems that in pop music there is a symbiotic relationship between the star and its audience. Ever since the idea of marketing a hit-maker originated, the amorphous mass of gasping, grasping fan-consumers took their implacable place in society at large. For decades this seemed fair game. Times were innocent and the world was saccharine enough to accommodate the two.
However pop music and its audience shares the world with darker elements and it is when these collide then a third group enters the pop world illusion. That group is the political activist, a group hell-bent in pointing out the sometime idiotic tendencies pop wanders into.
Last week Madonna - pop's perennial scratch on the roof of the mouth - went to Tel Aviv to perform the first date on yet another world tour. The problem was she took some guns with her. A bigger problem was she was waving them about in a politically-burdened country that is both used to seeing guns in equal measure to being absolutely sick of the sight of them.
For performers like Madonna controversy is a luxury she is safe behind. From shopping for Third World children, to pornographic coffee table books, a throbbing PR campaign is maligned to pop's biggest rival: reality.
Most pop star's lives are an escape from reality. They try to sing their way out of it so that they take their place on a stage where hats travel alone in first class and wind is told to quieten down. (This is the entire point of the slew of talent shows on mainstream television.) Drugs often expedite this transformation, however other spurs are aggressive schedules and budgets, supply and demand and, of course, an encompassing global public image.
These misnomers were familiar to the band Queen, who, in the early 1980s, bit off the hand that offered them a lucrative tour date in South Africa. The country wasn't a particularly safe or savoury place to exist in at the time. Death squads roamed about with a very finite appetite for the black man's destruction. Queen were, to many at the time, apartheid's loyal pop servants. Worse still, they appeared unapologetic amidst the casual "pop is pop" attitude.
The main problem when pop and politics clash is the apparent crass path the situation takes. It is unsurprising that such incidents occur when an artiste is on tour, as pop music is at heart the bumbling tourist that stumbles ungracefully into something it cannot and will not deal with properly. Even when the musician attempt to legitimise their presence in these situations they come across as someone who has quickly skimmed the country's tabloids on the way to the same-day stadium.
On the whole pop-star-as-politician seems like a very soggy-bottomed concept. When politicians attempt "cool" they are derided out of town. Often they're the antithesis of cool and generally stay well away. So why do pop stars feel comfortable in doing the reverse?
A glaring example is Bob Geldof, a man who seized upon the multi-layered problems of Ethiopia and single-handedly offered himself a second career coming. Geldof admittedly generated both cash and attention to famine in Africa (ironically wiping out Queen's baleful attempts in the same continent and era). However, when we look back at the bluster of his denim jacketed approach to politics was the issue completely tackled? Again, we have to look at the core principles of pop music and how, in the cold light of stark reality, they don't fit the purpose.
The Band Aid single and the Live Aid concerts were two monsters that needed to be packaged and delivered in order to capture a mood before it would be lost. Undoubtedly this is where Geldof got it right, as the image of solvent, middle class, Middle-England crying during The Cars' starving children video still lives with us. But they are only fragmentary - pop-sized like Elvis, Mop Tops or tartan flares. They take part in pop's reflective collage. What doesn't stay with us is the eternal drag politics has on our day to day lives. What was never trumpeted during 1985 was the politics behind the famine in Ethiopia. The Derg were not iconic in people's minds, nor was the issue of Ethiopia's rights to independence. Ethiopia's situation, like most in the African continent's, was largely complex and toxic to side sweep in the space of seven months. Geldof's involvement, in terms of a pop impact, therefore had the bitter legacy of any western crusade.
So is pop music another agent for spreading western ideals, like Christianity was in the pandemic of Empire? Pop is undoubtedly a strong force in corruptible influence - certainly more so than Christianity ever was. The reason for this is pop's all-inclusive secular appeal. When something is Godless then money and profit is the first born.
Without doubt Madonna has tapped the Israeli market as it is a burgeoning, if not controversial one. Bands who add the country to its touring roster are instinctively implored not to play. But they do without recourse, as rock cliches The Red Hot Chilli Peppers are prepared to do in their latest tour. Israel, I would imagine in the mind's eye of the pop star, offers something unique: a white population, with a West-friendly religion to legitimise it, amidst an unfriendly, foreign opposite. Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire the West has had a Lawrence of Arabia complex towards the Middle East. Its charm is mysterious; however like most complexes it has that odious sense of superiority. Since Zionism sunk its claws into Palestine that same level of superiority exists daily.
Affluent, arrogant agents of postmodern pop do not help matters when they incite situations further. It is a grey area they try to colour with unnecessary irrelevance. One thing we should familiarise ourselves with pop stars is they're acting out fantasies on stage for two hours, of which they repeat the following night in cities or countries that are not politically unstable. Pop music can enthrall us at times; it packs a power of changing a mood or creating an entirely new one. What it cannot do is move implacable situations that even the people paid to sort them out struggle to do. This should be an idea that we could all move our hips to.
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