The United States of Lou Reed- David Feith and Bari Weiss
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303471004579165513269039296?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
Sometimes rock ‘n’ roll can accomplish more to promote freedom than translating the Federalist Papers. (Oh Puleez!!!! I appreciate Lou Reed but this is balderdash!!!! rsk)
It is somehow fitting that rock star Lou Reed died Sunday, in this season of American national angst over government shutdowns, mounting debt and declining influence abroad. That’s because the Velvet Underground frontman not only motivated Václav Havel and the Czechoslovak dissidents who challenged their Communist rulers and helped bring down the Soviet Union. He also demonstrated why, for all we hear about Washington’s sclerosis, it is still smart to bet on America in this century as in the last.
Not that Reed himself would have put it this way. Starting in the mid-1960s, his lyrics about urban life, drugs and sexuality made him one of rock’s leading transgressives. Later he lambasted the concept of the American dream (“Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor I’ll piss on ’em/That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says”) and railed against New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the religious right. In recent years, he supported Occupy Wall Street and performed in Israel, even as some of his left-wing contemporaries boycotted the Jewish state.
Former Czech President Vaclav Havel (R) and U.S. singer Lou Reed (L) arrive for a news conference in Prague, January 10, 2005. Reuters
But whatever his personal politics, Reed’s music took on a life of its own behind the Iron Curtain. In the 1970s Czechoslovakia’s anti-Communist movement coalesced around a Velvet Underground-inspired rock group called the Plastic People of the Universe. The Communist government branded the rockers enemies of the state for their long hair, crazy outfits, secret concerts and anti-authority lyrics.
Playwright Václav Havel documented their trial and imprisonment in 1976, then published the “Charter 77” human-rights manifesto and eventually led the Velvet Revolution against Communism in 1989. The name derived partly from Reed’s band, Havel later said. And when the two men met in 1990, Havel told him, “Do you know I am president because of you?”
As far as we know, Lou Reed didn’t get up in the morning thinking about how he could overthrow the Soviet Union. But his story reminds us that rock ‘n’ roll can sometimes inadvertently accomplish more to promote freedom than translating the Federalist Papers. In unfree societies, free expression—whether from Lou Reed or Lady Gaga—is subversive in itself.
Consider apartheid South Africa and the unlikely story of Rodriguez, an early-1970s folk singer in Detroit who achieved no fame in the U.S. but immense popularity among white, anti-apartheid activists thousands of miles away. His blunt lyrics about sex won him young South African listeners, as did his claim that “This system’s gonna fall soon, to an angry young tune/And that’s a concrete cold fact.” The system that fell was South Africa’s, where the government tried to keep Rodriguez’s music off the radio and out of stores, with official censors sometimes scratching his LPs by hand.
The music of Reed and Rodriguez reinforced an appreciation for the critical divide between closed and open societies. Free societies like the United States—where one can write songs such as “The Establishment Blues” or even “F*** tha Police” without fear of hearing a knock on the door in the dead of night—create an endless stream of material that can wield outsize power in rigid, unfree countries.
When the Soviets sent tanks to crush the “Prague Spring” in August 1968, they couldn’t have imagined that the crackdown would spur the formation of an absurdist rock band capable of stoking two decades of popular political protest. But Communist leaders knew that their hold on power was always tenuous. Otherwise they wouldn’t have built a police state to monitor and restrain their people.
So it is today, as regimes try to tamp down the contemporary analogues to the Plastic People of the Universe. In Vladimir Putin‘s Russia, two members of the punk-rock collective Pussy Riot now sit in prison, guilty of “hooliganism.” In Turkmenistan, the popular singer Maksat Kakabaev, known as Maro, served in a penal colony for two years. In Belarus, Europe’s last dictatorship, the rocker Miron was accused of creating political unrest and forced into military service. And in Iran, “Samira,” a female rapper, sings: “Captive and prisoners behind the dark walls/ We know our destiny to freedom.”
In July, Iranian Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari pointed to the Internet, movies and satellite TV as “tools” of the West’s “soft war” against the Islamic Republic. Last month, the Revolutionary Guard took his cue, rounding up hundreds of satellite dishes in the city of Shiraz and crushing them with a tank. On some, the regime had written “satellite dishes are treason.”
No matter how many satellite dishes the ayatollahs confiscate, or how many Internet connections they jam, as Lou Reed put it in a 1987 song, just two years before the Velvet Revolution: “I hear the voices of freedom from the left/ I hear the voices of freedom from the right/I hear the voices of freedom, babe, from all over this world.”
Mr. Feith is a Journal editorial writer based in Hong Kong. Ms. Weiss is the associate editorial features editor at the Journal.
Comments are closed.
