"throwing a popsicle into a volcano"

I wanted to add one thought related to my weekend at Austin City Limits Music Fest– one highlight was seeing the Flaming Lips, one of my all-time favorite bands. Wayne Coyne (lead singer) prefaced one song (don’t remember which one; doesn’t matter) by saying that a lot of people have interpreted it to be a protest song about the Iraq war and the general current state of the world. He said, in actuality, that he’d never thought of his songs that way, because he’d always thought of a song as something so happy and fun and celebratory– how could a song, with all those qualities, even begin to address (let alone protest) something as horrible as war? He said that this would be like throwing a popsicle into a volcano; what good would it do? Would it ever affect any change?

This perspective really struck me, as someone who thinks a lot specifically about the potential power of art (in all its forms) to alter peoples’ consciousness in relation to the events and ideology of the moment and how they are portrayed in mass media and understood in popular consciousness. There are so many artists, many of whom are musicians, who use their practice for this very purpose. So to hear this was pretty astonishing, and it made me wonder how many artists feel this way. Do we constantly take artists’ work out of context and make it about something outside of its intent? Probably, but I think that’s actually a great thing. Freedom of expression goes hand-in-hand with freedom of thought, and the meaning that audiences brings to all kinds of art keeps it alive long after it’s created. Something to think about….