Can Politics Be Separated From Culture?

Sitting in my room, I doomscroll on social media, watching politicians giving great, large, and long speeches. I wonder, how do these speeches connect to the young voter? How do these words about foreign policy far into the unknown apply to me? I stop doomscrolling and open my Spotify playlist, when I wonder again is all music political?

Music is an incredibly useful tool for politicians to utilize when discussing localized politics. Creating art, and by extension music, is inherently a political act. Even the modern corporations that run music today recognize this, with Universal Production Music marking the 1950s as the growth of music’s large usage in politics became mainstream with the popularity of radio, television, and record sales. This gave music a newfound platform to incite rebellion and self expression that was not possible in other highly regulated and censored media such as network TV or heavily edited newspapers.

This was especially true for minorities who used the explosion of music to generate their first forays into Westernized politics. Martiniello and Lafleur explain in their 2008 study that music has taken the form of today’s core cultural practices, moving past individualized uses in political campaigns and having the political being ingrained into merely listening to music alone.

In philosophy, this idea of the social role of music goes back all the way back to Socrates’ ideas of virtue and ethics, creating the foundations of education and reassurance by introducing stable common emotions. These elements of music that are inherently political have since been defined in sociological theorizations as lyrics, rhythm, and sound.

The significance of lyrics seems the most obvious for cultural analysis, as the words in songwriting can advocate for a variety of social and political issues such as some recent songs being clearly anti-war. This can even be seen in language choices of songs, in which artists in linguistically divided or hegemonic countries often use foreign languages to protest their governments.

In this vein of loosely connected artists and their sonic messaging, organizations such as Rock The Vote change the definition of how unified political music can take place. In response to the elitist commodification of music through corporatization, commercialization, and censorship, Rock the Vote targets particularly youth voters by representing their political wants and desires through music to make them more active in localized politics. They’ve written numerous annual reports echoing exactly what Martiniello and Lafleur have found, and implemented it in a stronger organization.

Thus, can politics be separated from culture? The culture says no.