JUDGING BY THIS PIECE IN SALON, ’60s revivalism isn’t playing that well among younger audiences:
I’m standing near the back of New York’s Webster Hall, by the radical bookstore’s table, when Morello appears onstage with his acoustic guitar. Most of the dozen young people I’ve met so far have come to hear Morello, so I expect mostly praise from the crowd of sources who surround me. Instead, Mike Levin — a sideburned graduate student at New York University — tells me that he’s not pleased. “I feel alienated by it,” he says. Morello’s speech — including the reference to Iraqis wanting Americans to leave, and a tale of being tear-gassed at the Miami FTAA protests — seemed “kind of preachy,” says Levin, 28. “Kind of clichéd.” His cousin Kate, 22, a politically active intern at the Nation magazine, agrees: “It seemed like he was trying to make the music fit the politics.”
Four of six fans I speak to offer a similar critique — Morello and the other artists seem a retread of ’60s counterculture that’s not quite able to fuse politics and music into a persuasive whole. Some critics simply see holes in the content; Jason Lyons, a tall 24-year-old in baggy jeans, says that he doubts that all Iraqis, or even most, actually want U.S. troops to leave immediately, as Morello claims. Similarly, in Boston, Sheldon found the rhetoric fast and loose. “It wasn’t driven by factual evidence,” she says. “It was driven by their opinion.”
Said Lindsay Sullivan, a fan I met in the Webster Hall stairway: “There’s a great message and I agree with it, but there isn’t anything new.” Her friend Anna Hurley agreed: “There’s not much inspiring going on.”
According to Danny Goldberg, CEO of Artemis Records and the author of “Dispatches From the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit,” stars tend to alienate their fans “if they become preachy, didactic, too predictable.” Despite the artists’ best efforts, this seems to be what happened, at least at times, during Tell Us the Truth.
Read the whole thing (you have to sit through an ad, though).