Talkin' 'bout regeneration: politics, pop culture, and teen spirit

Reason, March, 2004 by David Weigel

Dispatches From the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit, by Danny Goldberg, New York: Miramax, 336 pages, $23.95

WHEN THE DEMOCRATS narrowly lost the House and Senate ha 2002, party activists launched a blame game. Presidential candidate Howard Dean claimed the party had lost its liberal raison d'etre; some of his rivals scoffed and blamed the losses on their lack of national security strategies. Liberal congressmen and left-leaning journalists blamed big money, voter apathy, and a corporate media that never called Bush on his nefarious lies.

But for record executive Danny Goldberg, the problem was simpler: Democrats didn't know jack about hip-hop. In the opening pages of Dispatches From the Culture Wars, Goldberg relates with astonishment that in 2000, when the tapper was becoming the biggest star in music, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), had never heard of Eminem. As shocking, "one of New York's most progressive congressmen" was unfamiliar with Russell Simmons, the wildly successful Def Jam mogul who recently spearheaded Musicians United to Win Without War. To Goldberg, such ignorance was a disgrace. "Political activists don't always respect or understand artists" he writes. "And the resulting failure to communicate has haunted progressive American politics since the sixties."

As "save the Democrats" messages go, Goldberg's thesis is more fun than a prescription drug plan. And it definitely comes from the gut. But in the end, Dispatches From the Culture Wars fundamentally misunderstands politics, pop culture, and the connections between them. By equating aesthetics with ideology, Goldberg makes a common but serious mistake: He thinks you can tell a person's politics from the music she listens to.

Dispatches From the Culture Wars is a memoir that see-saws into political theorizing. (Imagine Witness if Whitaker Chambers had palled around with Jackson Browne.) In the late 1960s, after dabbling in New York City politics and dropping out of Berkeley, Goldberg landed a job at Billboard picking prospective chart hits. He was already interested in progressive and anti-war politics, and new pop stars such as Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin fueled his passion. "The carefully detailed political position papers that radical groups labored over so strenuously," he writes, "paled in comparison to the visceral power of songs that made manifest shared political beliefs."

Goldberg credits pop music with influencing every part of '60s politics. Quoting Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), he claims that R&B music kickstarted the civil rights movement and that records such as "Give Peace a Chance" helped recruit kids to march against the Vietnam War. But by decade's end, Goldberg got his first look at "tone-deaf mavens"--leftwing politicians who thought pop culture should keep out of the serious stuff. It reminded him of the reaction when Dylan went electric and outraged folk fans: It "foreshadow[ed] schisms that would haunt the political left for decades to come."

The great schism took a while to happen. In 1976 the manager of the Allman Brothers raised money for Jimmy carter, who quoted Bob Dylan on the campaign trail. Goldberg himself managed the star-studded No Nukes concert in 1979, which featured performances by Browne, Bruce Springsteen, and other rock luminaries. By his lights, the children of the '60s were forging ahead during the Me Decade. But then came 1980, and Ronald Reagan's entry into the White House. Suddenly, according to Goldberg, the right wing had learned how to use pop culture. "Media wizard Reagan [could] masquerade as an outsider," he writes, "even though his policies were aimed at protecting and reinforcing the wealth and power of the superrich."

For Goldberg, the divorce between Democrats and pop culture was finalized in 1985, when Tipper Gore and some other Senate wives formed the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). Goldberg, a lifelong Democrat, was dumbfounded. Conservatives were the ones who tried to ban music, not Woodstock-generation liberals. How could people like Al and Tipper Gore, who'd smoked pot in college and grooved to the Grateful Dead, turn on Prince and Frank Zappa? It seemed like cold calculation to Goldberg, who writes, "Tipper legitimized to many liberal baby boomers the snobbish, indeed arrogant, notion that their children were being exposed to music far less moral than the songs they'd grown up with."

The PMRC saga gets thorough treatment in Dispatches From the Culture Wars (albeit with Goldberg figuring more prominently than most of us remember). Since then Goldberg has viewed the Democrats as "running against the sixties" to win votes. More important, he sees them losing. He uses the 1988 Dukakis campaign as a bellwether, ignoring the Democrats' takeover of the Senate in 1986. When a Democrat wins, Goldberg attributes it to pop culture savvy. In his telling, Bill Clinton won in 1992 by appearing on MTV and taking the youth vote by 12 percentage points. Al Gore lost because he allied with the schoolmarmishJoe Lieberman, then split the 18-to-24 vote with George W. Bush.