But what if politicians actually started paying attention to issues of interest to the music community--because young people actually started getting off their ass to vote? What if you were suddenly allowed to get loaded, go to a show, and express a political opinion? What if, in other words, our decrepit--and boring--political culture fundamentally changed?
If that sounds like a pipe dream, it's not. At least not to Molly Moon Lewis and her cohorts at Music for America. And, with a roster of rock shows around the country, they're setting out to prove it.
Rewind back to June of 2003. Lewis, a 25-year-old unrepentant liberal, is married to a member of local rock act Mines, and all her friends are part of the Seattle music scene. She believes George Bush is a far-right freak but also that the Democratic Party is dying in the grip of pathetic Bush-lite wussies, and she wants to do something to change that.
So, like many others, Lewis fell hard for Howard Dean's dream of a new kind of Democratic Party, one bristling with self-confidence, built on progressive principles, and concerned with the issues that animate young people--inside and outside of the band world. She decided to use her connections to Seattle's music scene to try to help Dean win because what she saw at the shows was political gold, in the form of countless untapped progressive votes, to take the country back from the stiff-collared squares who are running it into the ground.
Lewis partnered with three young Dean guys in Brooklyn who had this crazy idea for an offshoot of the Dean for America campaign that they called Music for America. They'd tried the antiwar protests, stood around with the aging, irrelevant hippies, and so learned the hard way that the protest thing wasn't working. Then they hit the Dean meetups, and recognized the potential. MfA was born, though initially it was sort of a concept-in-progress: It was going to be a PAC that used web-organizing and rock shows to forge a progressive national music community that would "bring the party back to politics" by fostering political awareness and activism among young people. Or something like that.
They put on their first Seattle show at Chop Suey on September 4, 2003, to promote the Dean campaign (disclosure: I spoke there briefly), and maybe 250 people showed up. One who attended was a rich California venture capitalist who happened to have a thing for music and politics. He loved what MfA was up to, and next thing they knew he'd cut MfA a $250,000 check. And for reasons not worth explaining, pretty soon MfA wasn't a PAC anymore, but a new and sexy sort of political nonprofit called a 527. Suddenly, they were in the game.
MfA set up a very intuitive, interactive website (www.musicforamerica.org), with free music downloads, political updates, and blog entries. The site has received well over 3.5 million hits since mid-October--45,000 unique visitors in January, and 40,000 more in the first 11 days of February alone. The organization also co-sponsored more than 200 shows around the country since September--De La Soul in Cambridge, Massachusetts; GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan in Brooklyn; Medeski, Martin and Wood in New York; Ryan Adams and the Stills in Minneapolis--including five locally, with bands like Low, Numbers, and Del Tha Funkee Homosapien in the week before the Washington caucuses, four in Seattle and one in Longview (organized by Krist Novoselic, who's totally on board). And there are nine full-time people on staff, and nine interns, with a main office outside San Francisco--but Lewis, who is based in Seattle, they're calling "Molly Boot Camp," because as the newly minted executive director, she has to crack the fucking whip sometimes.
Just in the week before the Super Tuesday states voted on March 2, MfA sponsored 60 shows from coast to coast, attended by 19,000 people and adding 4,000 more names to MfA's e-mail list.
Between now and November, it's all about using rock 'n' roll for political consciousness-raising. The goal is to get one million new, young, liberal voters out to the polls. The method is simple: Get bands--MfA will have a presence at all 50 dates of Death Cab for Cutie's spring tour, for instance--around the country to talk up the importance of political involvement. MfA will be a big force at the shows, passing out information about relevant issues--the Bush administration's oppressive tactics in the drug war, say--in order to show why politics is relevant to audiences at rock shows.
It's a tough task. Only about a third of voters between 18 and 24 bothered to participate in recent presidential elections, but there are positive signs of change. Twenty-five percent of Howard Dean's record fundraising came from people under 30. Punxfordean.org organized 10,000 punks to support the Dean bid before the former Vermont governor's campaign went belly-up. And there are other organizations MfA is teaming up with: Punkvoter.com, also out of San Francisco, is spending $100,000 on a national campaign to get punk rockers to vote, and MfA will do the voter registration at Punkvoter's NOFX tour.
Now in March 2004, Lewis is a little frazzled--she was bumming pretty hard that Dean flamed out--but all in all she's feeling pretty good about how things are working out for the long-term plan of beating Bush. "We are about bringing politics to culture and to music," she explains. And there's a pretty good quote from Neal Pollack posted on the MfA website that sums up the ideas of Lewis and the organization pretty well: "Politics can rock, and it can involve great quantities of beer, and it can still mean something."
