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Interchange – The Political Power of Music: A conversation with Dave Randall

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We’re joined by guitarist, producer, composer and author Dave Randall. His book, Sound System, newly out from Pluto Press, is an insider’s view of the music industry, shedding light on the secrets of celebrity, commodification, and culture, and the system of music serving them. And yet music can be a force for social change, sounds made by us, for us. Randall’s question: how can we make music serve the interest of the many, rather than the few?

Dave Randall has toured the world playing guitar with Faithless, Dido, and Sinead O’Connor to name just a few. He’s also penned his own political song: “Freedom for Palestine,” released in 2011, and brought out pointedly political music with his own band Slovo, whose song “Flags” opens the show.

In the conversation that follows over the next 90 minutes Dave Randall asserts that “the political power of culture” is too important to leave to the academics and hence his book. The two questions that guide this important work–one from Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On?”, and one from V. I. Lenin by way of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, “What Is to Be Done?”–blend Pop music and politics to investigate the Sound System.

SEGMENT ONE
To begin I asked Dave for a bit of detail about his youth to see if their might be some clue there to his political interests. After that we discuss his song “Freedom for Palestine.”

SEGMENT TWO
In this segment Randall contradicts Theodor Adorno’s position on pop vs classical music and offers as an example the song that first caused him to think politically, “Nelson Mandela” by the Special A.K.A. We begin though with a further investigation of the terms we use to describe political music.

SEGMENT THREE
In this segment we’ll center on Disco as a kind of protest form, and the backlash against it–but before that John Lennon gets cheeky in the Queen’s presence.

SEGMENT FOUR
For this segment we’ll move from Disco to Rave which may have no explicit political program to Rock against Racism, formed in 1976. And we’ll close the music of the sovereign nation that is Fela Kuti–the Nigerian multi-instrumentalist and activist whose music addresses the post-colonial corruption of military governments in Africa. But first, is feeling good a political statement?

SEGMENT FIVE
For this segment we’ll take a look at music directed against oppressive governments, from the neoliberal incubator of Chile in 1973 to the Arab Spring of 2010 that unleashed counter-revolutionary violence that continues today.

SEGMENT SIX
Eric Clapton covered Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff” in 1974 reaching no. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100. In 2003 Clapton’s version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Perhaps that should read Hall of Shame. Clapton’s appropriation of and mainstream success with Marley’s song must be paired with his own right wing politics and his outspoken racism, shouting out at a concert in 1976 “Keep Britain White!”

Society needs the artist and it has a right to demand of him that he should be conscious of his social function. This right was never doubted in any rising, as opposed to decaying, society. It was the ambition of the artist full of the ideas and experiences of his time not only to represent reality but to shape it. – Ernst Fischer, quoted in Sound System

GUEST
Dave Randall is a musician and activist. He has toured the world playing guitar with Faithless, Dido, and Sinead O’Connor to name just a few.

RELATED
Sound System—music and the fight to change the world (The Socialist Worker)
Sound System – a fascinating book of raves, riots and revolution…(Brixton Buzz)
Rock Against Racism – how an artistic movement took on the National Front
The life and death of Victor Jara
Nelson Mandela and the Most Potent Protest Song Ever Recorded (Anglophenia)

MUSIC
“Flags” by Slovo
“Freedom for Palestine” by OneWorld
“Nelson Mandela” by The Special A.K.A.
“Love Is the Message” by MFSB
“Zombie” by Fela Kuti
“I Shot the Sheriff” by Bob Marley and the Wailers
“Anthem” by Leonard Cohen

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon
Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks
Executive Producer: Joe Crawford

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