Should music stay out of politics? Should every protest anthem blow your mind? And is it really fair to expect a chart-topping banger to double as a political manifesto?
Anthony Fantano, host of The Needle Drop and one of the internet’s most influential music critics, says no – and thinks our expectations around political music might be the real problem.
“I think advocating that art should avoid any topic generally speaking, like broadly speaking, is just kind of lame,” says Fantano on a recent episode of Joshua Citarella’s Doomscroll podcast.
But that doesn’t mean political music gets a free pass. Fantano argues that while injecting big ideas into your art is a good thing, it’s also incredibly hard to pull off – especially when fans expect deep ideology and catchy hooks in the same breath.
“Making political art is difficult because not only does that require you to put yourself in a position where you’re saying or advocating for something that you know may automatically turn off,” he explains.
“But also in terms of the people that do actually agree with you… you’re faced with the difficulty of putting it in such a way where it’s said well and advocated for well and doesn’t come across as just like some dumb sloganeering.”
In short, it’s tough to strike the right balance. Fantano adds that even when an artist and their fans share the same worldview, disappointment can still set in if the message doesn’t go deep enough.
“There’s a lot of people that have the expectation that… even though this band may align with me ideologically, they didn’t say anything that blew my mind or caused me to have a revelation… which I feel is kind of an unfair expectation especially if you are somebody who’s politically well read.”
His advice? Don’t expect a three-minute track to change your life: “We have to kind of like set our expectations a little bit when it comes to a song,” says Fantano. “It’s not a political dissertation. It’s not an article. It’s not a think piece. Not every song is going to be like System of a Down’s Prison Song where they’re rattling off statistics or whatever.”
Watch the full interview below.
