Music Activism Quotes

I collaborated with so many people from Chicago - so many Black people, young Black women organizations like BYP100 and Assata's Daughters. Just being out there, I saw what a community mobilizing can accomplish in terms of freedom and how music and my words in my music can play a significant part in that.

Music must awaken people to do their duty as citizens and act.

Rock-and-roll was an example of change in the body of the culture. I think it's really what helped bring the anti-war movement to its peak and moved people into the streets to seize the day - the movement was the embodiment of what was happening in the music. This is what taught me that it was possible to bring art and activism together. Without that piece, that energetic embodiment piece, the rest is just intellectual construct.

There was a band in Australia named Midnight Oil, and they were a very, very political, and they literally hit you over the head with a hammer. U2 sometimes can hit you over the head with a rubber hammer.

I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It's time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It's time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.

I looked at Willie Nelson and Farm Aid as a role model; they do it every year, and it draws people together, and drawing people together where they realize they're not alone, to me, is strategic in healing.

My sense of politics and justice was deeply shaped in adolescence by my involvement with the underground punk - rock scene, and though lots of social and political issues had come forth in my comics, it wasn't until my late 20s that I felt properly equipped to address certain issues of race, power, and violence in my work.

In our country there's never been a successful progressive struggle that did not have a soundtrack, whether it was the civil rights movement, workers' rights movement, women's rights movement. There's got to be songs at the barricades, and those are the kinds of songs that I try to write.

It's an interesting line that I walk. The AIDS crisis has done a lot for my songs and made them proliferate, and my songs have contributed a lot to that cause as well.

Rock Against Drugs, what a name. Somebody was high when they came up with that title. It's like Christians Against Christ. Rock created drugs.

I just look at music as a retreat from organizing. It's like a tug-of-war with me. Music can be effective, but it's not any good if there isn't a grass-roots movement going on to support it.

When I was 20, political music was the uncoolest thing on earth. But when Bush got elected, that was the first time I started actually reading the news.

It's not like we were setting out to make a political statement - we're just a band with opinions.

Remember the Bob Dylan rule: it's not just a record, it's a movement.

I never believed that U2 wanted to save the whales. I don't believe that The Beastie Boys are ready to lay it down for Tibet.

Hip-hop has always been speaking about the way your brain is manipulated by stress and struggle because hip-hop is borne from struggle.

Song, songs kept them going and going; They didn't realize the millions of seeds they were sowing. They were singing in marches, even singing in jail. Songs gave them the courage to believe they would not fail.

I think my biggest musical hero growing up was probably Ian MacKaye. He set a great example for all of us local musicians. Still, to this day, I see him as the best example of a right-on musician.

There were a lot of anti-apartheid rallies and marches and concerts that we would go to as a family. And music was a big part of that. It was never just the politics.

Such times of crisis have inevitably brought 'music of conscience' to the fore and I expect we will be hearing more and more of it in the immediate future. When people feel empowered to come together and raise their voices, also will mean raising their voices in song as well.

I think for writers who write that kind of stuff, they want to make changes. Look at Kris Kristofferson and Dylan. I mean, whole generations come along liking that stuff and that's great.

It's nice to be recognized for what you do, but that doesn't satisfy what I wanted out of this music, which is for people to hear it and get involved in movements and campaigns.

I am the ambassador to the world. I use music to talk to the world - to try to unite masses. To try to spark conversations. To try and evoke legislation to change that'll really be for the people. That's behind-the-scenes kind of thing for me. And that's what the music is for me.

If rock criticism is to be a political calling, which has always been my angle, that's obviously not because it's a fountainhead of protest songs.

Minor Threat was an important band, believe me that it was important it in my life, but it belongs to an era that no longer exists. I'm not nostalgic. I think music today is much more important, because something can be done about it.