This is not because, to use a widely-recognised example, Josh Groban's passionate performances of well-constructed popular motifs disgust me at a technical level. It is because the songs themselves attempt to belie the struggles of our forebears to maintain access to welfare and produce bread for the workers of the state.
In a study of popular song since the age of digital, the recording choice of the true egalitarian, we at Art In Macro have found repeated examples of work affirming our socialist nature, with the attendant corollary of the forces of neoconservatism smashing these subversive messages and incoporating them into the milleu of the bourgeoise.
Here we have 'Everything Counts', the 1983 hit from English pop group Depeche Mode. A subversive take on the nature of consumerism, the pitfalls of the monopolies and mergers commission and Hegelian dialectic. "A handshake/seals the contract/from the contract/there's no turning back." Martin Gore understands the dichotomous life of the professional, presenting a human face, a handshake and a smile, knowing that lurking beyond are shackles.
Even the visual plays these two contrasting ideologies against each other. Clearly Dave Gahan is portraying a man trapped in a hendonistic self-centred free market agenda, as if on drugs, whilst the other three represent a collective voice rising up on a new dawn. The musical agenda heightens this, with the abrasive synth tones contrasted against Gahan's sweet voice, in and of itself Gore's way of sugaring the one-word message: revolution!
Heightening this sense of burgeoning collectivism in both the physical and metaphysical was noted pop phenomenon Belinda Carlisle. Her hit '(We Want) The Same Thing' not only speaks to the proletariat in a literal way, but in a Jungian one as well. Carlisle believes in mass mind; when she tells us 'we dream the same dream' she is not simply referring to the hopes of the people but in the symbolic value of struggle unspoken for fear of repression.
These messages became increasingly part of the language of commerce. True innovators and iconoclasts such as Bronski Beat (the later line up of 'Hit That Perfect Beat', a march for modern youth resistance), The Communards and Frankie Goes To Hollywood woud wither away in confused interpretations of their struggles. All groups who heavily featured idiosyncratic visuals of men together at meetings of radical minds, it was perhaps ironic that such reliance on collectivism scuppered them. Countering these challenging and compelling arguments would be groups like Talk Talk ('it's my life', an individualist clarion which would prove decisive), Visage (pacifism) and Ultravox (themselves an inversion of Brechtian theses).
However, leftist themes were not completely ignored in the recent era. This song by Vanessa Amorosi is arguably the clearest call-to-arms since The Communist Manifesto. Let us examine the lyrics.
Everybody needs a hand to hold,
Someone to cling to...
I am just the same,
A player in the game
Amorosi understands that advantages cannot be made in an individualist mindset, that in the political act of being born she cannot escape the necessity of others. Here the hand is not merely the hand of a lover or a mother, but the hand of welfare and commune. She is part of the 'game', an obvious codeword for a sister of the revolution. However, her precious gift, which could not be simply co-opted, was smothered by the increasingly fascistic media value of popular music.
In these increasingly stressful times we turn to entertainment for guidance but find only Zach De La Rocha. We would therefore be amiss to forget the words of Vanessa Amorosi, surely a Rosa Luxembourg of our times.
Every boy and girl,
Every woman and child.
Every father and son.
I said now everyone
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