The Dominion - music

Propagandhi Scores Against War

Moira Peters — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:33:19 +0000

Torture, Terror, and Don Cherry face the music in the band's sixth release

Propagandhi, Winnipeg’s “progressive thrash” heroes, have just released a new album. Supporting Caste is twelve and a half songs of political passion and metal-tinged post-punk. Singer Chris Hannah discusses the issues inspiring their sixth full-length album.

Erin Empey: Do you think that Propagandhi has evolved since the release of Potemkin City Limits? What’s new with Supporting Caste?

Chris Hannah: I'd like to think so! At the very least, we added The Beave on second guitar to the line-up, so that's new, and in my opinion has added a lot more depth, dimension and atmosphere to our customary sonic pummelings.

Also, Jord has more gray hair on this record. I’m not sure if that comes through on the recording though.

Since you guys decided to fold your record label last year, how has working with Smallman been compared to G7 Welcoming Committee?

Well, considering we're in a time where the racket of selling recordings to people has been essentially eviscerated, it's been pretty good! We've known them for years, they understand where we're coming from and they live within choking distance. These are important factors.

G7 operated using Participatory Economics (parecon), where business decisions were made democratically and profits were shared equally among members. Based on your experience, do you think it could be applied on a larger scale?

After a decade of experience in a parecon-inspired enterprise that was subject to all the human frailties and palace intrigues that every single gathering of more than two people throughout history has always endured, I still can't come up with any good reason why people shouldn't endeavor to embrace parecon's core values of solidarity, equity, diversity and self-management in their workplaces. It makes sense and it is right.

The track “Human(e) Meat” opens with a howling Sandor Katz about to be cannibalized. Who is Katz and why do you want to eat him?

Sandor Katz is someone who talks and writes about food. He has a book called "the Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved" that is actually worth reading until you hit the absurd and utterly embarrassing chapter where he tries to rationalize torturing, maiming, killing and mutilating sentient animals for his personal enjoyment. It is the type of embarrassing new-age hippy nonsense that sets serious debate about food politics and human ethics back a decade every time it rears its hippy head.

We simply used his logic, step by step, and daydreamed me rationalizing torturing, maiming, killing and mutilating him for my personal enjoyment. Which is of course also absurd, which was the point of the illustration.

Apparently he has no sense of humour (or of his own irony for that matter) and is very upset about it. Poor persecuted meat eaters! Will they never be free from the tyrannical oppression of vegetarians?

In “Dear Coaches Corner” you lament Don Cherry using his platform to promote militarism. Do you think that there are ugly politics in hockey culture beyond Don Cherry's routines?

For sure. Cherry is just the emptiest and hence, the loudest barrel. The culture of professional hockey is essentially a propaganda wing of the western elite and their geo-political objectives. Why else would Jim Balsillie, head cocknose of the company that makes the Blackberry, appear on Hockey Night in Canada thanking Canadian troops in Afghanistan for "defending our lifestyle?" Wait, I thought it was about liberating Afghan women? Whoops!

During the pre-release of Supporting Caste, proceeds from downloads went to Partners in Health, Sea Shepherd Society and Peta2. Why are these groups important to you?

Partners in Health provides a preferential option for the poor in health care. At its root, their mission is both medical and moral. It is based on solidarity, rather than charity alone. When their patients are ill and have no access to care, their team of health professionals, scholars, and activists will do whatever it takes to make them well – just as one would do if a member of one's own family were ill. They stand with their patients, some of the poorest and sickest victims of poverty and violence, in their struggle for equity and social justice.

People for the ethical treatment of animals is probably best known as the most frequently criticized and denounced activist organization on the planet. Some of the criticisms are legitimate, like those that lament campaigns that play on and foster or perpetuate sexist stereotypes in the service of drawing attention to the mundane terrors visited upon animals in human societies. Still, Peta2 (the youth wing of its parent organization) is currently the most effective potential gateway drug to an abolitionist animal liberation perspective that is not merely anti-animal exploitation, but anti-capitalist, anti-sexist and connects human affairs with non-human animal affairs.

Less than one percent of the planet's living creatures live on land, so you'll have to excuse Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Society for his bluntness when declaring the Sea Shepherds Society's "single-mindedness" for defending the oceans from human encroachment and exploitation. We humans constitute less than 0.1% of life on earth and act like we are entitled to the rest of it. Humans continue to terrorize and destroy the largest-brained sentient mammals in the history of earth and enlist the services of PR firms to cloak the brutality in vestments of scientific research. The Sea Shepherd intends to stop such stupidity.

Do you ever feel awkward about speaking on behalf of groups you are not a part of, such as Aboriginals, refugees or women? With an influential band, is there a danger of overshadowing the voices of those you are trying to help?

Not if you're a good listener. My obligation as I see it is to take the information that marginalized groups have articulated to me about the realities they face in a fucked up system and relay it to my people in a way that has resonance. And what can I say? My people happen to be largely white guys in NHL starter caps. Hey, we need information too, eh!

When are you playing Vancouver?

I refuse to answer such a politically-loaded question!

Erin Empey is a Vancouver based journalist.

propaghandi

Tadamon! Solidarity Night.

Stefan Christoff — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 23:25:59 +0000

tadamonsouthimage.jpg

A cultural benefit event for Tadamon! Montreal...

Friday, September 7th, 8pm
La Sala Rossa
4848 St. Laurent
Montreal.
Entrance: $5-15

Tadamon!

* Montreal Launch of the film ‘Roads Through Palestine’:

Screening / Launch of a film by Brett Story, with a piano score composed by Stefan Christoff. A cinematic journey through the roads of occupation and resistance in the West Bank of Palestine.

Including performances from.

Rheostatics: Last Gig Tomorrow.

dru — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 20:56:46 +0000

The band that "would seem to venerate Rush, Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot in equal measure" takes the stage tonight at the Horseshoe and then at Massey Hall tomorrow to wrap up 17 years of relentlessly quirky, beautiful rock and roll.

The Star has a little retrospective.

He's bang-on, really. I've had some near-religious experiences at Rheostatics live shows, cherish a number of their songs ("Aliens (Christmas 1998)" is a fave) and have always found the lads – Dave Bidini, Martin Tielli, Tim Vesely and Michael Phillip Wojewoda, as well as past drummers Dave Clark and Don Kerr – a tremendous bunch of guys, but I'm by no means an aficionado because, to be honest, sometimes I find their more freewheeling antics quite impenetrable.

Labels to embrace MP3?

dru — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 13:35:02 +0000

According to this interesting analysis by Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired News, major labels may be getting reading to take their drops when it comes to online digital distribution. Buskirk cites a coming massive drop in CD sales and a desire to end Apple's and iTunes' dominance in digital music distribution as the main reasons. The analysis is optimistic to say the least, but it's fun to think that things like better treatment of artists, lower prices (read: prices circa 1970s) and cool new features are just around the cor

Race, Rock and Soul

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 17:50:01 +0000

<em>Jamaica to Toronto</em> raises questions about Canada's pop past

Decades after this photo was taken, the music of Wayne McGhie is finally being recognized. This Magazine

The Canadian media has recently been celebrating the release of the excellent compilation Jamaica to Toronto: Soul, Funk and Reggae 1967-1974:, part of a series of re-issues that are single-handedly prompting the rediscovery of a vital era of Canadian soul music. But they should also provoke Canadians to consider why such albums were forgotten in the first place.

The story of Jamaica to Toronto begins in 1962, when Canada changed its immigration laws in an effort to eliminate racial discrimination, an act that led to an influx of newcomers from around the world. Many of them settled in Toronto, including several talented musicians from Jamaica. One such artist was the young guitarist Wayne McGhie, who recorded an album with his band The Sounds of Joy in 1969. By 1970 there were approximately 45,000 people of West Indian origin living in Canada and a unique music scene was buzzing in Toronto, carrying influences of soul, rocksteady, funk, rock and reggae. Unfortunately, despite their talent and previous musical success in Jamaica, many musicians found it difficult to make headway in the North American recording industry, realizing that reformed immigration laws did not necessarily mean discrimination had lessened in other areas of Canadian society.

As Guy Dixon discovered while conducting interviews with these musicians for a recent article in the Globe and Mail, the musicians affected were still understandably sensitive decades later when remembering the discrimination they faced in Canada in the 1960s. Bob Williams, the singer for the group Bob and Wisdom, recalled: "We were making very good money in Jamaica. We were actually the highest-paid band in Jamaica, back in Montego Bay with Billy Vernon and Celestials. So when we came here, to be actually called a minority, it was very tough." As an example, when Bob and Wisdom recorded an excellent cover of Mac Davis' "I Believe in Music" (re-released on Jamaica to Toronto), Williams recalled that, "We actually took it to CHUM [then the dominant top 40 station in Toronto] and the guy told me that he wouldn't play it. I said 'Why?' And he said it was the best version he had ever heard, but he wouldn't play it because we were black. Straight up. So we kind of got despondent about it. And we just continued to do live shows and stuff, you know? We didn't bother with recordings because there was no outlet for it. So it's ironic that after about 30 years, it has made a resurgence."

Apart from the obvious strength of the music itself, the resurgence is mainly due to the efforts of Matt Sullivan, the co-founder of a small Seattle record label called Light in the Attic, and Kevin Howe, a music researcher and DJ based in Vancouver. For years, an album by Wayne McGhie and his band The Sounds of Joy had been sought after both by record collectors due to its rarity (most copies were lost in a warehouse in 1970), and by hip-hop producers due to its excellent breakbeats by drummer Everton Paul. After much investigation and hard work, Sullivan and Howe located McGhie and re-issued Wayne McGhie and the Sounds of Joy in 2004. Its success led to the expansion of the project to include more albums and songs by immigrant Jamaican musicians in Toronto.

It is wonderful to see the media attention devoted to these fine re-issues, celebrating the discovery of Canada's multicultural pop-music past. One would hope it would also prompt Canadian media to consider why such music needs rediscovering. Unfortunately, the same media that currently celebrates the Jamaica to Toronto re-issues simultaneously turns a blind eye to Canadian pop music of non-white origins in its representations of our music history.

As recently as January 2006, CBC-TV broadcasted a special entitled Shakin' All Over. It was billed as a "joyful look at Canadian music from the 60s" and was based on Nicholas Jennings's book Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of the Canadian Sound. The documentary purported to showcase not only the usual suspects in the Canadian pop pantheon—Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, the Guess Who, the Band and Gordon Lightfoot—but also many lesser-known musicians who didn't necessarily have any chart hits, but who were nonetheless important in shaping Canadian popular music history. Unfortunately, the only pop musicians of colour represented in the documentary were those we already knew: the Cree folk singer Buffy Sainte Marie and "super-freak" Rick James (James himself appeared to be included only as a novelty rather than an artist, due to his brief stint playing in the same band as Neil Young). The CBC documentary should have included any of the dozen Toronto bands that make up the Jamaica to Toronto re-issue series, especially considering the re-issue project started two years before Shakin' All Over came out, and that the documentary was touted as a programme that would uncover and pay homage to forgotten bands.

The forgotten soul, funk and reggae scenes of Toronto matter—or they ought to, anyway—precisely because they create a better, more accurate, not to mention more ethical, revision of Canada's music history, so that we might ultimately better understand how Canadian culture was constructed in the past, injustices and all.

Matt Brennan reviews Jamaica to Toronto, raising questions about Canada's pop past.

Please Remember Music

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:46:20 +0000

Song plays a central role at the School of the Americas Protest

Music has been a key part of the protest's success. photo credit: Carole Ferrari

Please remember that music is a universal language and it comes from the heart, mind and soul to the world. --Llajtasuyo

"Pas, salaam, shalom…"

With thousands of people milling up and down barricaded and police-patrolled Fort Benning Road, a voice sings out the lyrics of the peace song. This voice causes a reaction on the surface of your skin. It has a primordial quality. The song is big and beautiful and travels down Fort Benning Road reaching those that have just arrived in Columbus, Georgia. Pat Humphries continues to sing and is joined by Sandy O, and then the crowd joins in. Pat and Sandy are Emma's Revolution and they sing a song for peace at the School of the Americas Protest.

The arrival of protestors at the gates of Fort Benning is part of a much bigger week-long teach in and non-violent event coordinated by the School of the Americas Watch. 2005 marked the 15th anniversary of the School of the Americas Protest, held annually at the gates of Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, where the School of the Americas (SOA), or the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security and Cooperation (WHINSEC) - as it was renamed in 2001 - resides. The purpose of the Protest is simple: to shut down the School, under whatever name it adopts.

The SOA/WHINSEC's mandate is to train soldiers from the Americas. Graduates have been linked to some of the worst atrocities and most repressive regimes across Latin America, including the assassination of Archbishop Romero of El Salvador, the massacre of the community of El Mozote, also in El Salvador, as well as Chile's General Augusto Pinochet's inner circle. Pinochet's sword is encased in glass and is displayed in a hallway of the SOA/WHINSEC. But it is not only Latin America's history that has been affected by the SOA/WHINSEC. A massacre of eight people in February of 2005, including three young children, in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, in Urabá, Colombia was linked to the Colombian military's 17th Brigade, which is led by an SOA graduate. It was for reasons like these that 20,000 people from across the Americas came to Georgia for the SOA Protest. The annual call to shutdown the infamous School is relevant, strong, and popular. It is also musical.

Folk singer Pete Seeger has called the SOA Watch movement the "singin'est movement since the Civil Rights movement." Music is omnipresent at the SOA protest. It is structurally imbedded in everything that goes on over the weekend. There are singers and musicians that inflect and punctuate the message of the speakers throughout the day. There are concerts, puppetry with music, and a solemn procession with a mournful melody. Protesters come to Fort Benning with their instruments, and they play everywhere.

"Music is cathartic," says Indigo Girl Emily Saliers, who played at the protest. "Sometimes it's just fun, sometimes you need your spirits lifted or you need to kick up your heels. It actually plays a lot of roles. Music takes us out of our pain, or brings us closer to our pain, reminds us of it, makes us live through it."

Harnessing music's ability to affect us emotionally and move us through emotional levels is why many believe this movement has lasted for 15 years and has been so successful, "Not all movements understand the importance of music the way the SOA Watch does," notes Sandy O, who has played at demonstrations across North America. "SOA Watch uses liturgical sounds for the funeral procession for the folks that have been murdered by students of the school. But it also uses upbeat music and sing along music and dance music and puppetry to keep peoples' energy up." She adds, "This is a very heavy subject and a very intense time in the world, and music and the arts and puppetry and dance and poetry are the kinds of things that keep your spirits up while your mind is saying this is pissing me off and I want to do something about it. The arts get the rest of your body involved so you can do something about it."

Pinochet's sword is displayed in the hallway of the SOA. photo credit: Carole Ferrari

Keeping people positive in the face of torture and atrocity and formidable opposition to change has also been crucial to the success of the Protest. Medea Benjamin, founder of GlobalExchange and CodePink, was a speaker at the protest and is a long time supporter of the SOAWatch movement. Medea believes in humour, positive energy and emotional engagement to bring about positive change in the world. "I believe that we should make the movement fun. I don't want to go to something where you're just brought down and feel like, oh no, isn't it awful and you don't have any inspiration to keep doing it." Medea believes that a movement based on guilt will not last long. "If [the protest] is based on feeling communal bonds with people who think like you and who really believe that life is the most sacred of all concerns and they are able to show that concern in a way that's fun and loving and spirited, I think that's great, and that's important to me."

Music has come to play a central role at the Protest because the SOA Watch movement is inspired by and deeply connected to Latin America where music is also central. Colleen Kattau, a long time musician for the SOA Watch, sings many Latin American songs. For Colleen, Latin America is a source of inspiration for change for a better world, and for the music involved in bringing about that change. "For Latin Americans the music was so much a part of the revolution; the artists were so much a part of the revolution." She explains. At the protest Colleen sang a song by Victor Harra. "He was killed because he was too dangerous because of his 'armed guitar', that's what they called it, the 'gitarra armada.' Music and revolution are really inextricable."

In light of this influence the Protest's main focus is a solemn procession conducted in the Latin American tradition. Throughout the procession the names of the victims are sung out in the Catholic tradition of the litany of the saints, and for each name sung everyone together calls out "presente." "It's part of the Latin American tradition that when people have died they may be gone in body but that their spirits are still here," explains Chris Inserra, music coordinator for SOA Watch, who has been singing out the names of the murdered and disappeared during the solemn procession for the past six years. " We need to call forth their spirits to remind us, not only who they were, but why they are no longer with us, to give name to the horror and the torture that caused their death. Singing out their names calls them forward."

During the procession protesters hold crosses marked with the names of those who have been murdered or disappeared at the hands of SOA/WHINSEC graduates. They slowly make their way towards the gates of Fort Benning. The gates are barricaded with lines of fences that are erected for the protest and the protesters place their crosses on the fence. It is a powerful moment and it is usually during this time that those who choose to commit to non-violent acts of civil disobedience do so by crossing over or crawling under the fence and onto the base. For this they are arrested and fined $5,000 and face six months in a federal prison.

Because the penalties for crossing the fence are so harsh few people are able to commit to this action. "But crossing the line is not the only way [to have an impact]," points out Sandy O. "There's a bill in congress that has more bi-partisan sponsors than it's ever had and that's why Pam Bowman [SOA Watch legal coordinator] can say we have confidence that we're going to win that vote in the spring. So the sheer number of people that are here who are going to take the message back home and call their senators and representatives and get the School shut down, [that] has a lot of impact."

"It's difficult in this political situation when it's been so partisan and there are conservative factions that seem to have taken over America," admits Emily Saliers. "But then you come here and there are 20,000 people and you realize that – I mean, this is my America. And you've heard witnesses, people who have been tortured in Latin America who brought generals to justice. So victories are being won. I believe in social activism, I believe that it makes change. It's not like music is solely saving the world, it's just something that adds to the spirit of good change."

Thousands sing for revolution at the School of The Americas Protest in Fort Benning, Georgia. Carole Ferrari joins the chorus.

New Brain Machine Improves Musical Creativity

Fri, 12 Sep 2003 14:09:36 +0000

Image: Ftrain.com

Yes, you read the headline correctly, and no, I can't believe it either, but apparently scientists have invented a brain machine that dramatically enhances musical performance, thus paving the way for a new race of highly skilled super-musicians. According to the BBC, "the system - called neurofeedback - trains musicians to clear their minds and produce more creative brain waves. Research, to be published in the journal Neuroreport, indicates the technique helps musicians to improve by an average of 17% - the equivalent of one grade or class of honours. Some improved by as much as 50%."

The brain machine was tested on 97 students at the Royal College of Music in London, UK, and the percentage scores refer to examinations conducted by professional adjudicators. Anyone who has ever taken piano lessons as a child and gone through the trials of Royal Conservatory exams will understand that a 17% grade boost represents an incredible increase in musical proficiency (enough to send even the crankiest of teachers into fits of joy). But the student wouldn't be able to take the credit - thank the brain machine instead.

Most musicians feel that their best performances are the ones where the music just pours out naturally, and such moments of effortless vitality are usually rooted in a clear state of mind. Teachers will try to describe this state of awareness to students, but it's very difficult to put such a thing into words. As it turns out, its not so difficult to put it on a video screen.

The brain activity of a healthy human being can be understood as a collection of brain waves which scientists have learned to identify and isolate. With no musical instruments in sight, the technique consists of attaching sensors to your scalp so the machine can identify three main patterns - dubbed the alpha, beta, and theta waves - and display your own brain waves on a video screen in front of you. From there, as if playing a video game controlled by her mind, a musician can learn to concentrate and hone in on certain brain waves while the machine happily chimes a bell as she successfully learns to isolate one from the other. By teaching patients to increase their theta wave activity, scientists at Imperial College London and Charing Cross Hospital have effectively used the machine to help patients with epilepsy, alcoholism, attention deficit and post-traumatic stress disorders. The new development is that scientists have discovered that increased theta wave activity also enhances performance skills including musical understanding, imagination, and communication with the audience.

And so it is that machines have become far more effective than traditional human teachers in helping us to clear our minds and enhance our creative side. If such technology manages to spread beyond the limits of the experiment and grow in availability it will surely provoke no end of debate between the technophiles and luddites of the arts community. Since it so dramatically boosts performance skills, should musicians who use the machine be banned from competition with those who never had a chance to get hooked up? And from a philosophical standpoint, will this discovery come to be seen as the moment when all of our creative impulses were reduced to waves on a screen, shattering the mystery of the muse and sucking the wonder out of grace and inspiration?

I hope not. I can envision professional musicians who might chastise students for using such a machine, but what I cannot see is a good reason for their scorn. In its time, the invention of the metronome was no doubt met with similar resistance based on similar, unfounded reasons. The machine is not a performance-enhancing drug; it is a teaching tool. Its availability is prohibitive, of course, but so are the costs of tuition and of owning a professional musical instrument. Nor does the machine eliminate the need for practice; instead, if the technology becomes more widely available, it will simply raise expected performance standards for the next generation of musicians.

The philosophical implications may be another source for apprehension, but those who dismiss the discovery are probably the same people who want to cling to the notion of creative talent as being reserved for a chosen few, something you have to be anointed with at birth. But such views are as ignorant as they are selfish - musical talent is something that can be developed, and in a few cases, revealed dramatically by a special teacher. Perhaps this technology will be able to open up creative potential in those who were discouraged from pursuing music but have always secretly wished to be able to strum a chord. Which has to be a good thing.

Matt Brennan is studying media and culture at Stirling University.

-by Matt Brennan -

Review: Manitoba's Up in Flames

Fri, 11 Jul 2003 06:19:57 +0000

Manitoba Up in Flames Leaf Records Spring 2003 www.manitoba.fm

Dan Snaith is a stinking thief, of that I'm sure. His 'Manitoba' alias might throw a few off his track, since he actually hails from Ontario, though I'm sure none of his cronies in London, UK, will ever notice. He lives there nowadays, and claims to be working on a PhD in pure mathematics. But don't let that fool you.

Just like teenagers dumb enough to videotape themselves committing acts of vandalism, Manitoba recorded an album to document his misdemeanours. Listening to it, I was sure that he had broken into my old primary school and positively raided the music room. Egg shakers, a glockenspiel, finger cymbals, and a pile of recorders that were once used to play 'Hot Cross Buns' -- you'll find them all on Up in Flames.

Does this man have no shame? At one point, it sounds like he followed unsuspecting children and recorded them giggling. Not to mention the countless copyright laws he's broken by poaching everything from drum breakbeats to saxophone solos, strings and toy music boxes. Sure, he may have programmed some original rhythmic spurts and sputters and sung a few silly choruses overtop the rest of his microsampled mayhem, but does that mean we should all turn a blind eye?

Yup. Up In Flames is one of the most eccentric, creative and playful sample-based albums I've heard, and frankly, I can't wait to hear what he'll steal next.

Matt Brennan is finishing a master's degree on music and the media at Stirling University, UK.

Sounds Prohibited

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 10:00:58 +0000

Censorship rockin' in the free world

For the first time in nearly three years, aging hip-hoppers the Beastie Boys recorded and released a new song. Called "In a World Gone Mad", the song was inspired by the overt militarism of U. S. President George W. Bush. But Mike D of the Beastie Boys also cited another motivation for the recording: the reports of artists being discouraged from mentioning the Iraq conflict during this year's Grammy Awards. In the months of March and April, it seemed that everywhere you turned there was a pop artist or activist complaining that dissenting voices were getting crushed by the powers above. Surely, you'd think, all the belly-aching was exaggerated -- but then again, you'd also think that if the Beastie Boys released much-anticipated new material, you might have had a chance of hearing it on the radio. Fat chance, apparently. The age-old debate on censorship in the so-called free world has returned to the headlines.

Artists ranging from Chumbawumba to Yo La Tengo released protest songs during the war, but according to The New York Times these tunes were "virtually absent from commercial radio stations, where most programmers wouldn't dream of dividing or alienating their listenership." And yet somehow corporate censorship didn't stop redneck-cum-country-megastar Toby Keith, who scored a huge #1 in America with "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue", featuring the stunning lyrics "This big dog will fight / When you rattle his cage / And you'll be sorry that you messed with The U. S. of A. / 'Cause we'll put a boot in your ass / It's the American way."

The recent wave of music censorship in the West has led some journalists to discover that the corporations who control the entertainment industry have long been close buddies with the world's most powerful political leaders. The top management at Clear Channel, which owns over 1200 radio stations in the U. S., has well-established personal and financial ties to the Bush administration. A recent Village Voice article summarized how Clear Channel's vice chair, Tom Hicks, made George W. Bush a multimillionaire by buying the Texas Rangers from him, and chaired a state university board that steered most of its endowment to firms with Bush and GOP ties. Caught with their paws in each other's pockets. Is it at all shocking to hear, then, that Clear Channel stations sponsored pro-war rallies across America? (This included one in Louisiana where they rented a tractor to crush Dixie Chicks CDs and merchandise, on account of singer Natalie Maines having mentioned at a London concert that the band was "ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas".)

Meanwhile, President Bush has called rapper Eminem "the most dangerous threat to American children since polio". You can see how some musicians might be getting nervous about being listed in the music industry's axis of evil.

Here in Canada, there haven't been widely-publicized cases of music suppression, but that hardly means we're immune from the change in the censorship landscape that's occurred since the war on terror began. Martin Cloonan, chairperson of the censorship watch group Freemuse, says that the new climate in the west is not so much one of outright censorship as it is one of consensual control, where the listening public has voluntarily accepted the corporate mechanisms that restrict the free flow of musical ideas.

We're getting used to the idea that certain pop songs are inappropriate or -- a broadcasting public-relations favourite -- "insensitive" to such fragile times. You'll rarely hear of stations using ugly words like "banning"; instead, Clear Channel, BBC Radio 1, and MTV Europe have all recently circulated memos with "suggested guidelines" for playlists. Apparently, these broadcasters believe that listeners are incapable of handling subversive music, but are ready to swallow euphemisms.

So what exactly should we be watching out for in the future of this debate? Censorship under another name, perhaps. Goodbye to "censorship", then, and hello to policing pop.

Matt Brennan is finishing a master's degree on music and the media at Stirling University, U. K.

In the months of March and April, it seemed that everywhere you turned there was a pop artist or activist complaining that dissenting voices were getting crushed by the powers above. Surely, you'd think, all the belly-aching was exaggerated -- but then again, you'd also think that if the Beastie Boys released much-anticipated new material, you might have had a chance of hearing it on the radio. - by Matt Brennan -