NEXT week, Bob Dylan releases his 46th album, Together Through Life, an event which will remind us, surely, of how politically motivated rock stars can be. Dylan is perhaps the most searingly politicised rock star of all time, who always puffs his moothie, sings like a demented kazoo and poetically sticks it to The Man. Recently, however, he made an announcement which shows that some of us may be living in the past, but the 67-year-old rock star is not. "Politics is entertainment, a sport," he declared. "It's for the well-groomed and well-heeled. The impeccably dressed. Party animals. Politicians are interchangeable. Politics creates more problems than it solves. It can be counter-productive."
The Manic Street Preachers, the most searingly politicised rock band of the 1990s (perhaps the only), fully echoed this statement. "Politics is entertainment now," said singer/songwriter James Dean Bradfield. "It's much harder to write a political song now because nothing's black and white, It's all grey areas and disillusion. Now, when I watch the news it's like a good soap opera. People have a great time being in conflict."
Noel Gallagher commented on the infinite political hyper-drama emanating daily from our TV screens: 24-hour news. "The doom and gloom is outrageous," he barked. "Recession, stabbings, corruption, murder, desolation, despair. They actually have a debt counter on-screen constantly monitoring The Debt'. Whose debt? Yours? Mine? You know it's bad when the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, Kay Burley, is interviewing pensioners on the deserted streets of Britain. Production of war materials is up. And sales of chocolate are up! War and chocolate!? It would seem our government have an iron fist and our people have a sweet tooth."
Cynicism, suspicion, defeatism, powerlessness, media saturation generally and 24-hour rolling news specifically have all contributed, it seems, to an era in which politics is no longer considered a matter of life and death. Or, if we know deep down that it is, then it's also as removed an emotional experience as watching the most visceral films, melodramatic soaps and sinister TV dramas, many of which are direct reflections of, er, whatever's happening in the news. The Daily Mirror's new advertising campaign promises Real News, Real Entertainment, as if the concepts are identical. Meanwhile, Charlie Brooker reviews the news on Newswipe (BBC4) with "you tune in these days and it's like you've stumbled across episode 908 of a soap that's been running for ages".
It was in the mid-1990s when TV news coverage of landmark events first became all-encompassing, breathlessly updated docu-dramas, from the OJ Simpson trial to the death of Diana. Twelve years and several thousand 24-hour global news channels later, we've had 9/11, endless major city bombings, climate catastrophes, bogus elections, incompetence by local councils, colossal corporate negligence, infinite "human interest" stories - usually involving children and violence - and a government/police/intelligence scandal every 20 seconds. No wonder we can't see the news for the drama as, desensitised and stupefied, we tuck into another bucketful of popcorn. Perhaps this is merely yet another symptom of intoxicating digital technology. Where The News, once, was Dreary Hour For Dads, today it's a sensory extravaganza for all the family, a thundering, whizzing, CGI-dazzling, preposterously sensationalised and catastrophically negative tabloid spectacular.
Meanwhile, Dylan is unperturbed, hopeful ... and anticipates a shift in priorities from global to local, perhaps back to ourselves and the people standing next to us, who we might remember existed if we occasionally switched the waffle off. "The real power," concluded the sometime protest-puffer, "is in the hands of small groups of people and I don't think they have titles."
It Seems that he hasn't, after all, lost all of his 1960s idealism.
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