I wrote a long piece on a recent online debate over whether art or politics is more important. But then it occurred to me that there’s a simpler answer, because there’s a simpler question: Which is more important when? It’s like asking whether art or carpentry is more important. Art may take on great importance during a long sailing voyage. Painting, music, and dance are all excellent ways to pass the time and elevate the soul during those long days and nights at sea.
But what happens when the boat springs a leak? Without a good carpenter, everyone on the ship will die. And their art, beautiful as it may be, will die with them.
Politics is social carpentry. It holds the ship of human community together. That ship is like any other; if it fails, people will die.
The children of Gaza are still dying. The children of Yemen and Lebanon are dying. Children are dying everywhere, in fact: of war, of poverty, of disease. And with each lost child, a universe of potential art dies with them. Who, what, can even begin to measure that? If you love art, you must do politics.
Here’s the original long commentary.
Two rock stars have been caught up in an argument that’s been heating up social media feeds—mine, anyway—for the last several days. One is former Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters, whose songs—“Comfortably Numb,” “Another Brick in the Wall,” and “Money”—are known to millions. The other is Metallica’s James Hetfield, whose credits include “Enter Sandman.”
The question has been framed as, “Which is more important: art, or politics?” At least, that’s how Matt Taibbi framed it in a recent column. My take? You lose the argument the minute you decide to join in it. And yet, I’m glad it happened.
Before we get to my (humbly offered) conclusions and my final verdict on the subject, it’s rock and roll time.
Star Star
It all began when Hetfield (see my note on names, below) opened a gig in Las Vegas by saying:
“... I just gotta say: Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their bullshit. We are here to forget about all the outside shit. Metallica’s agenda is love, energy, and heavy music, baby!”
Podcaster Katie Halper called Hetfield “a loser and a coward.” She then invited Roger (see my note on names below) onto her program, where he said:
“‘I’m apolitical’ is not an option. Nobody can step away from this. You are being killed. Gaza is just the first bit. They’ll get to you. Don’t you worry. They’ll either enslave you or murder you. Because that’s their ethos. This goes back, you know, 500 years, to the beginning of European white settler colonialism.”
Waters also said:
“Being kind is way more important than all that loud music and bouncing around and whatever. Being kind, having some empathy for your fellow human beings because that if we need that to spread through the across the whole world ...”
That would seem to be the heart of the disagreement. Roger Waters, whose many songs are known to millions, is making the case for empathy while James Hetfield, who wrote “Enter Sandman,” is arguing that art—a term that includes all forms of music—has a right to be apolitical.
Raising a Racket
It would seem to be the heart of the disagreement—but it isn’t, despite what Matt Taibbi says. Matt takes nearly two thousand words to make his case in Racket News (not that I’m one to talk about length) but I would summarize it as follows: The idea that art must serve politics is oppressive in a Stalinist way. By attempting to link art and politics, Waters and his supporters are following in the footsteps (according to Matt) of Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, or of John Lennon when he was writing diss tracks about Paul McCartney.
Chekhov, Auden, Yeats, Pushkin, Wilde, MacLeish, Baudelaire, Blake, Moe Howard, Louis Armstrong, Weird Al, Swift, Molière, Dostoyevsky, even Nikki Sixx: they all get name-checked when Matt steps up to make his case. I’ll say this for my dude: when he’s at bat, he swings for the fence.
What is “politics,” anyway?
First, there’s a semantic problem. Modern Westerners tend to see “politics,” consciously or subconsciously, as a series of scheduled competitions between public personalities representing a center-left or center-right political party, like the Republicans vs. Democrats in the US or the Social Democrats vs. Christian Democrats in Western Europe.
If you’re a follower of right-wing (later, Nazi) philosopher Carl Schmitt, politics is the division of other people into friends and enemies. As Schmitt wrote (and many others still believe), “all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil.”
If that’s what “politics” means to you, it’s easy to imagine that it pales in comparison to art that can elevate and inspire the human spirit.
It’s a different story if you see politics the way Aristotle did, as the elevation of a people through community-building and collective decision-making. “Now it is evident that the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily,” Aristotle wrote. He found a wisdom in the many that was lacking in the few.
Whatever your definition of politics, Matt is way off base when he writes, “No, not everything is political. Aren’t most things better?”
Better? When lives are at stake? If a child was starving to death on your front lawn, would you refuse to feed her because doing so would be “political”? Would it be “better” to crank up the volume on your Metallica track and let her die? Roger was saying that it’s impossible to avoid being political when people are dying and that will never change.
Matt’s Dream
To be fair, Matt’s argument reflects genuine idealism—a surprisingly naïve one, perhaps, but idealism, nonetheless. The idea that “art” exists on a higher and purer plane is a beautiful one, however sentimental. But politics and art are both aspects of the human spirit. To say one is more elevated than the other is like exalting my hand over my foot.
Matt was on much firmer ground when he wrote that “love isn’t apolitical, but a higher form of politics.” That’s exactly what Roger Waters was saying when he called for kindness, empathy, and humanity (although, to be fair, his comments about Hetfield were anything but kind.)
Matt loses the thread again, however, when he adds this comment about love:
“... one of its strengths is that it ‘does not insist on its own way,’ unlike the current crop of Twitter ideologues.”
It doesn’t? The quote from Corinthians is a nice touch, but Matt should know better; after all, he’s covered school board meetings in Loudoun County Virginia. If there’s one thing a school board meeting demonstrates, it’s that love definitely insists on its own way. It should. Even when parents are misguided, their fierce love for their children—and their insistence on protecting them from harm—is a covenant with the future, a binding declaration of loyalty to the promise of tomorrow.
At their worst, school boards and other local democracies are a demonstration of human instincts run wild. At their best, however, they reflect the higher collective wisdom of a unified community. That’s what Aristotle meant when he wrote, “The many are more incorruptible than the few; they are like the greater quantity of water which is less easily corrupted than a little.”
Anyone who has participated in a successful democratic action knows the feeling of excitement and engagement that comes with being part of something greater than yourself.
Hetfield’s Hat Trick
James Hetfield pulled off a simple hat trick. He convinced a lot of people he was above politics while being explicitly political himself. He knew about the recent controversies around free speech and Gaza: Macklemore being fired from Ed Sheeran’s tour, for example, or the censure and potential prosecution of Bob Vylan and Kneecap in the United Kingdom.
He could’ve kept silent about them, but he didn’t. He brought them up. Then he said that what those artists were doing was “bullshit.” Here’s a simple rule of thumb: if you say “politics is bullshit,” that’s a political statement. Here’s another: If you don’t want to be political, don’t bring up politics.
It would have been fine for Hetfield to say something like, “We know things are heavy out there right now. Let’s just have fun, love each other, and get into the music.” But no. He had to say the other artists were talking “bullshit.”
This is a common fakeout in certain quarters. Take Apalachee Don, the country/rock singer and rapper whose song “Everybody’s Fightin’” also calls on us to rise above politics. The chorus says, “The elephant’s mad at the jackass/Liberty’s headed for war/The left wing’s kickin’ at the right wing/And the bird ain’t flying no more.”
I like Apalachee Don, and I was with him on the whole unity thing. And then he says: “They’re takin’ prayer from our schools/Man and that ain’t cool/They said it’s alright being a lady if being a man won’t do.”
You can express your opinion, or you can call for unity. But if you try to do both at once, you’re really calling for everyone to unify around your opinion. That’s not being apolitical. It’s a political sucker punch.
Were Roger and Katie Wrong to Respond?
So did Roger Waters lose the argument by engaging in it, as I hinted at before? It’s true that he responded to Hetfield’s comments by saying you can’t be apolitical in times like these. In one sense you could say that he—and Katie, it would appear, was taking Hetfield’s deceptive comment at face value.
To be fair, however, Roger seemed anxious to take the discussion beyond Hetfield’s limited worldview. (His exact words on the podcast were, “Can we stop talking about this prick?”) And as I was writing this piece, Katie tweeted the following:
“You know what an apolitical person would do? STFU about the artists who DO talk about politics at their shows. You don’t have to wade into this.”
Exactly! That’s my point!
So the conclusion, it seems to me, is as follows: Art or politics? That’s the wrong question. They’re both expressions of the human soul. This conflict between two music stars—the one who wrote such classics as “Brain Damage,” “Wish You Were Here,” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” and the “Enter Sandman” guy—turned into a debate that was, paradoxically, both misguided and worthwhile. Art is politics, and politics is art.
And all of it is human.
Additional Thoughts
Can I still love Metallica? Sure you can! (Good news, Ben Burgis!) The world has always been full of great artists with terrible politics. I loved Merle Haggard when I was a teenaged country singer, for example, even when he wrapped himself in a right-wing mantle with songs like “Okie From Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side of Me.” (“They love our milk and honey but they preach about some other way of living”; Ouch! That blow landed.) I still love Merle.
Sometimes that juxtaposition of great art and bad politics can be challenging. In my college days, for example, there was a lot of debate about the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Céline’s use of language was astonishing, even breathtaking; so was his antisemitism and his enthusiasm for Nazi Germany.
I’m not much of a metalhead (I rely on my friend Al and my son-in-law for recommendations there), but I admire the virtuosity and understand the attraction. So go ahead and listen to your Metallica. But be forewarned: some of their songs are, dare I say it? Political. “One” is an antiwar song that seems to be loosely based on Dalton Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun. Others, like “... And Justice for All,” “Blackened,” and “Disposable Heroes,” are equally polemical.
Maybe Metallica’s old records should come with a “bullshit alert.”
A note on names: A keen reader might observe some seeming inconsistencies in my use of names. I use the last name for “Hetfield” and the first name for “Roger” and “Matt.”
Here’s why: I don’t know James Hetfield, I don’t know anybody who does, and I’ve never seen Metallica live. I’ve been in shared spaces with Roger Waters and we know many people in common, so it’s more comfortable to refer to him as “Roger.” (I also saw Pink Floyd perform the entirety of “Atom Heart Mother” at the Roundhouse in London in 1971, which is a bonding experience of its own.) I know Katie, too.
As for Matt Taibbi, I’ve considered him a friend for a long time. He can say things that piss me off or infuriate me—he seems to do it more with every passing day—but that’s not a disqualifier from friendship in my book. I do have disqualifiers. They include racism, sexism, other forms of hate and bigotry, and advocating genocide. I haven’t seen any of those things from him, so “Matt” he remains.
Pink Floyd vs. Metallica: Which band is better? “À chacun son goût,” as the French say; to each his own. I’m much more familiar with Pink Floyd, but the running gag in this piece—listing Floyd’s many famous songs while only referencing one of Metallica’s—is just my way of jacking up James Hetfield for being a jerk. Of course “Enter Sandman” isn’t Metallica’s only famous song! There’s also “Master of Puppets.”
A final note: Free Palestine. Everything else is commentary.