Theories, rants, etc.
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NOT EVERYONE IS COMFORTABLE WITH how music and politics have fed off each other over the decades, as our mailbag will testify most months. Nevertheless a spirit of protest, an imperative to speak up for the oppressed, has been a constant in much of the music we celebrate in MOJO.
This month, for example, we find Lucinda Williams grappling with how “Being positive is always more difficult than just going ‘everything’s shit’, spewing out vitriol. If you’re going to do that, make it count, like Dylan did in Masters Of War.” We listen in on Mavis Staples at 86, continuing the work she began as a key voice in the civil rights movement. There’s an investigation into Devo’s often disorienting assault on consumerism and the mainstream.
And, of course, there’s John and Yoko, superstar emissaries of the counterculture, under surveillance from the FBI. In our cover story this month – and, in fact, on our very special Power To The People CD – we uncover new info about the Ono Lennons’ most radical period. “The audience wanted John Lennon the Beatle,” our cover photographer Bob Gruen remembers, “and instead they got John Lennon the politician.” But how easy, really, was it to separate the two?