Politics and Art

Politics and art are a tricky combination.

When I was in graduate school I was a BIG fan of didactic, political art. And damn the torpedoes. My field was the turn of the 20th century in American literature, an era that had plenty of troubling issues worth an artist's time to think about and make art about. It was also the early 1990s, and although I wasn't out of the closet myself at that point, it was impossible not to notice the real issues going on around me, with HIV and AIDS, with government policy, with the end of the Cold War, and so on.

I was never NOT aware that putting strong political statements about the times you live in into your art can "date" your work as fast as clinging too tightly to an of-the-moment fashion. And the beauty and artistry of the art can suffer, too. It's easier to be strident and call people's attention to things than to delve into them in a way that connects heart AND head. Art's path to truth needn't be linear to be a true path. Didactic art can get too linear.

Still, didactic art that really tries to talk about Big Questions can be damned exciting. So I was often passionate in my defense of novels from my period that were not necessarily "great literature" but were literature AND great because they captured something about their times that "better" works didn't.

But now it comes time to make more art of my own and, not surprisingly, I have to wrestle with questions of whether and how to incorporate my personal convictions into my work, and whether the works in which I'm passionate but more vague are stronger than the ones in which I'm specific, and the specificity sometimes robs the work of the room for interpretation and personal reaction that can be the key to audience's really investing themselves and their own passions.

In theory one can have it all--if not in each work of art, then in the arc of one's whole career--but that merely defers the confrontation or moves it to a different level.

I've had a song kicking around for a couple of years, with the working title of "Good Men." It's a political song. I notice that I'm both attracted to it and have strong needs about it *because* of its political content, and that it scares me in ways that some of my other work doesn't. I think what's scary is the feeling that it would be all too easy to be crappy in this context. And many are the types of crap I could make.

The gist of the song, originally, was that I had gotten a little tired of seeing gay men ranting on internet hookup sites about how there were no "good men" out there. It's not that I don't know my share of bad gay dating stories, either ones that have happened to me or to my friends. But I know plenty of great gay men, so the lament about how there weren't ANY good men ANYWHERE often struck me as an overstatement. Look around. Great gay men are everywhere. Whether each of us is guaranteed one as a life partner, yeah, that's trickier, but it's a different question.

Thing is, the original thrust of the song was kind of snarky. And not in a good way. I'm blessed with a pretty good relationship, and so I don't have to wrestle with whatever feelings of loneliness might be troubling people who say "there are no good men." (Well. Except to the degree that one can feel lonely even in a relationship. But that's Adult Commitment 202 or 303, and the song was about Adult Dating 101, Male Same Sex Version.) It didn't feel particularly productive to write a song about how other people were whiny.

The thing that held my attention was the snippet of chorus I came up with. Which centered on a question: where are the good men we dream of?

At my age, although I came out just after the worst of the original HIV crisis, it's pretty hard not to recall how devastating that time was. I have one lover who is the ONLY person left alive from the friendship circle he came out into. And he's only a year older than I. It's become somewhat rote to talk about how an entire generation of gay and bisexual men was lost. Obviously it wasn't an ENTIRE generation .... I know several people in my own age bracket and older. But it was indeed a HUGE number of people. My ex Woody, who worked in GLBT community centers in the 1990s, can still talk about going to one or two memorial services a week. Often for people he'd known fairly well.

The answer to the question "where are the good men we dream of?" became pretty apparent to me the more I thought about it. "Gone."

As I say, this song has been kicking around for a while. Nearly three years ago, in the summer and fall of 2005, I was briefly in a band project with some friends from work. I know this tune was in the works at that point because I remember playing it for them.

Politics aren't the only tricky thing about art, of course: technique matters, too. My songwriting technique wasn't particularly solid at that point (whatever it may be now, it's definitely a lot better). The song didn't have so much a chord progression as a lead keyboard line that suggested a progression. My MIDI keyboard was the shiny new toy at that point and I was exploring it for all it was worth. And it was a GOOD lead riff (well. Decent, anyway. Very good considering my underlying skill level at the time). Problem was, the chorus and verse sounded a lot alike. And the melody over it was a bit repetitive.

The project fizzled out for a variety of reasons not long after that, and I filed the song away for future reference. Went on to other things, practiced my craft.

Beyond the musical limitations of the song, though, something else was troubling me. I was serious and passionate about the topic of how there was a generation of gay and bi men gone. It was something that we used to talk about the lingering impact of when I did men's health organizing. The lack of role models. The fact that a lot of gay and bi men my age are sort of "pioneering" the process of living into our 40s and 50s because so many men 10 or 20 years older than us never made it this far. How hard that feels.

Meanwhile, out in the rest of the world--which I'm never not noticing, even if I care a great deal about the queer communities--there's a whole 'nother series of crises putting young people in harm's way. Particularly the war in Iraq.

What blocked me about the song three years ago wasn't just the musical stuff I needed to get more experience about. There was a BIG part of me that didn't want to just write another impact-of-AIDS song. Not if it meant rehashing the 1980s and 1990s and ignoring my own time .... when friends are STILL vulnerable to HIV, but when there's a lot else going on too.

Trying to talk about the waste of human life due to indifference and apathy in ALL their forms--indifference to queer men, treating younger men and women as cannon fodder for wars whose justification never looked fully solid even at the outset, and dead wrong now .... well, that really was beyond my abilities.

Three years have gone by and I've taken another poke at it.

I feel quite a bit more confident now. Among other things, I have much better ideas about how to differentiate the verses and choruses. It hasn't taken me much effort to chuck some simple solutions at that part of the problem. ("Simple" now that I know more.)

The first verse of the old song contained some strong images that I've kept intact. And they've provided some jumping-off points for later verses.

I'm still ambivalent about the results. I have this funny feeling that nobody would necessarily perceive the original link to the history of the HIV crisis if I didn't write a long blog post about it. *I* know which lines in the first verse are directly about that.

The rest of the song sort of veers off into my frustration about the Iraq War and the culture of political inaction around it. Which I'm part of myself.

And a big part of me thinks that writing a song about how so many of us have been less active than we ought to have been is just one more failure to do enough.

I mean, I can't tell you how much I do NOT want to be one of those people who writes about saving the whales, or some other form of tilting at windmills, without really DOING something.

I fully believe that making political art IS a form of action. But it's a tricky one. It's VERY easy to get misled that you've accomplished more than you have.

And to make crappy art in the process. Failing at both the art AND the politics.

And yet, the song has a good shape in its current form. I can imagine investing my own emotion in the process of working on it further, of singing it. Sometimes the meaning of these things, and whatever impact they wind up having, comes out in the doing, not in the thinking about doing.

It may take on additional life if I sit and connect with it more deeply. If I open up more fully to the rage behind the frustrations I'm working out in writing it. Or if I put it across in a way that lets other people connect with whatever feelings THEY have about all this.

Or. Not.

Hard to tell, sometimes.