What should we do in the wake of the election? A polyphony of voices will continue to suggest ways for us to counter the hate-fueled threats to rights, services, and decency that has been exacerbated by Trump’s rise. Indeed we can expect members of the music community to become actively involved. Artists are often asked to come to the front for movements: to be spokespeople, give cash or mobilize status to start non-profits, or play huge benefits to raise money for causes. We all know the Beys, Gagas, Legends, and Bonos of the world. As much as they might inspire us, they also work on a scale that is not accessible to us as everyday people. As part of a community of readers steeped in the history and values of DIY, we might go the other way and decide that the personal and local, the de-commodified, the small actors in non-staged actions are the voices we want to lift up and join together with right now.
But how? There are no easy answers. We should be looking to leadership from the communities most affected by these situations, and act in tandem with their needs. Along the way, there are a few skills every movement person will need. Here are six contemporary musicians who have taken radical political action as everyday people—and how those actions can be examples of what you can do to help.
(That said, if you have the extra cash, set up monthly donations to a beloved grassroots group with fair leadership. But consider this work in addition to that.)
Learn to confront business-as-usual bigotry: Rebel Diaz + Ted Cruz’s campaign stop in the Bronx
Everyone knows the uncomfortable feeling of being at a gathering when the speaker starts saying something false. When the speech contains bigotry and no one says anything to disrupt it, the speaker has successfully spread the idea that this kind of speech, and the thoughts and actions that go with it, are normal and maybe even OK. Don’t let them do it: be the disruptor. As difficult as it can be, if you actually want to help, you should do something in these moments, whether it’s a political event or a co-worker’s casual racism/sexism. An important thing to remember: Approach the situation with good intentions and a humanist perspective, otherwise this tactic can go the way of the Tea Party, when strategic public incivility boiled over into anger and hate.
A great example of how to disrupt a powerful liar comes from the hip-hop brother duo Rebel Diaz, who popped into Ted Cruz’s April 2016 campaign stop in their native neighborhood of the Bronx. The room was packed with 70 of Cruz’s own people and only a dozen unaffiliated people. In other words, it was a media set-up to make Cruz look friendly to the neighborhood’s working class people of color. RodStarz began to speak among them, shouting, “We deal with climate change every single day and he wants to say that it doesn’t exist. We’re one of the poorest congressional districts in the country, and to receive this right wing bigot is an insult to the whole community,” before walking out of the event. With that, he captured and refocused the narrative on Cruz’s media circus.
Protest and put your body on the line for your values: JD Samson + protests for Pussy Riot at the Russian Embassy
One of the most insidious tactics of power is to discredit the idea that their critics have the right to speak. That’s what Trump is doing when he dismisses the tens of thousands who protest against his hatred by calling them “professional protestors,” or by implicitly supporting his more radicalized followers in their violence against them. These tactics try to make protest seem illegitimate or possibly dangerous, and they can move some people to self-censorship. It’s important to resist this feeling, and to learn the difference between comfort and safety; there is no better example to look to than the Civil Rights Movement, when young people put their bodies into the space of conflict to create a moral conundrum for segregationists. Important to this is that entire networks supported each of those who sat, marched, and sang—doing childcare, eldercare, or behind the scenes work for protesters is just as important, and not often as celebrated. Whatever place in direct action you take, the important thing is to do it with regularity, or as punk elder Ian MacKaye once put it, “I’m always looking for the long-distance runners. The people who recognize that protest is a form of exercise and that life is there if you want it. You just have to be open, communicative and interested.”
Madonna, Paul McCartney, and many other mega-huge artists came to support the imprisoned members of Pussy Riot, but before all of that happened there were a bunch of folks organizing on the case within feminist and queer activist spaces globally. Once such place was in front of the Russian Consulate in New York City, where members of the anarchist organizing collective In Our Hearts joined with members of Occupy Wall Street’s Guitarmy and the third-wave feminist group Permanent Wave, co-founded by former Titus Andronicus guitarist and now solo artist Amy Klein. While out on the line protesting, I personally remember turning and seeing JD Samson of Le Tigre and MEN among us. She wasn’t there to give a media statement or to have her photo taken with the protesters—she was just there as another New Yorker protesting. Turns out that like many musicians, she’s shy off stage, and it was the anarchists and young feminist musicians from Permanent Wave who held the spotlight that day. Samson gave a lot of energy to Pussy Riot support at all phases, from collaboration to speaking out to fundraising, but in that moment she was just another person standing among the many outraged by authoritarian policing of feminist political speech and abuse of human rights.
Do the basic footwork for your movement: Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste + Bernie Sanders phone banking
While mainstream media continues to ask “how did this happen?” and offers up thinkpieces about Trump’s white America, those who have been canvassing and phone banking already knew we had an uphill battle and needed to sharpen the left’s message to appeal to disenfranchised working-class voters. Besides getting you out of the bubble, boots-on-the-ground work like canvassing for a candidate or a cause will train you on strategies for productive conversations with those who disagree politically—a skill that’s as important now as it’s ever been (hello, awkward holiday-dinner convos). This work is improvisational, vulnerable, and potentially very productive, but it’s also scary—just like getting on stage, but without the audience to cheer. Seeing as we just had an election, canvassing and phone banking might not be the way to play it in the immediate, but for the midterm elections in two years, Congress races will need your help. Find local reps you believe in and give them your time. (Also, your reps want to hear from you right now: call and tell them how you feel about Trump’s appointments—they are keeping tallies.)
Many, many folks in the independent music community do this kind of work, but one that comes to mind is Ed Droste, who also campaigned for Sanders on college campuses and whose band Grizzly Bear played a Bernie Sanders rally in New York. That visible advocating aside, Droste straight-up phone banked for Sanders (and canvassed for Obama before that).
Advocate for the teaching of accurate U.S. history: Downtown Boys’ Joey DeFrancesco + the Slater Mill Museum
One of the most often blamed indices for why voters went for Trump was that they were “uneducated,” which is not an entirely accurate description of the situation. The problem is, people have been educated, but in a system that has been deeply manipulated by conservative Christian, racist, nationalist, and pro-capitalist forces. It comes from all sides, from forcing educational textbooks to valorize perpetrators of slavery and indigenous genocide, to the creation of laws against the teaching of ethnic studies and other forms of accurate history. If we are to shape a future that combats these forces, then we must take seriously the ways in which public school resources represent our history. One easy way to do so it to look at the Zinn Education Project and the materials created for teachers seeking to counter some of the current required texts within K-12 education. They have good recommendations not just for how to spread these materials, but how to advocate for accurate history in public schools.
The members of Downtown Boys are all doing great on-the-ground activism, and indeed the legend of the band’s formation comes from guitarist and vocalist Joey DeFrancesco meeting vocalist Victoria Ruiz while they worked at an exploitative workplace that DeFrancesco quit in a rather spectacular fashion (you should definitely watch the video below). DeFrancesco now does educational work at Slater Mill, an 18th-century cotton mill in Rhode Island—a place that school children and community members routinely pass but of which they may not know the real history. There is a way that this museum could sugarcoat the horrors of child labor and repression of labor organizing, but DeFrancesco is one of the people who keeps the museum honest in its representation of the mill as a foundational key to the exploitation of labor and the growth of industrial capitalism in America. He curated “The Mother of All Strikes,” an exhibit on the first organized labor strike in the U.S., which was led by women working at the mill.
Know yourself, intersectionality, and move forward from there: Princess Nokia + the creation of safe spaces
Part of knowing accurate history is locating your own place in it. There are many vectors to one’s own privilege or disadvantage in the world, from race to able-bodiedness to geographic location. Learn the history of how these systems came into place, dwell with what that means as an individual and in relation to others, and proceed in political endeavors by working with your unearned privilege in mind. (For example, this essay on white fragility could be useful to consider.) That said, never assume someone else’s privilege or disadvantage just by looking at them — you never know where someone’s from or how they got there, or how hard or easy it was for them to show up. When in doubt, listen; what’s best is to help create a space, so alienating someone with assumptions about their background is the opposite of what you’re trying to do here.
One of the mantras of riot grrrl was “girls to the front,” but one of the biggest critiques of this punk community was its failure to recognize its white and cis privilege within its larger political space. Afro-Latina rapper Princess Nokia is of the next generation of DIY musicians who have done the work of understandingintersectionality for herself and within black and brown feminist and queer consciousness. At her shows, she blends the desire for women to come to the front with a greater understanding both of what “women” can mean, and that black and brown folks of all gender expressions need to feel safe and welcome in a space. She asks her audiences to make and hold these spaces not just for the music community, but to model the better world we should live in.
Organize what you know and connect it to the bigger picture: Label owner Sean Gray + the Is This Venue Accessible project
It’s hard to figure out how one person can plug into the massive, interlocking set of problems for disadvantaged peoples that will be exacerbated by Trump’s presidency, but a good mantra is to start where you’re at. Perhaps this could best be practiced with a parody from a wise elder: Stand in the place where you live/work—think about the (problems for yourself or others in) the place where you live/work, wonder why you haven’t before. (But you know, don’t just do that—talk to others, organize, take action, and join others doing so to build coalition.) It’s the place you know best, and therefore the place from which you are most capable of speaking with accuracy about the needs that must be addressed.
A great example of this is folks from the music community who organize to demand venues become accessible to those with disabilities. (To that end, maybe “Stand” is an ableist metaphor, could R.E.M. have used something less so?) Fan Death Records and Accidental Guest Recordings head Sean Gray is one such figure, a music fan with a disability who has been going to shows for nearly two decades. He put together the website Is This Venue Accessible in order to collect information on venue accessibility, and one simple action you can take is to submit information about all the venues you go to him, and educate yourself enough to talk to venue owners about making this information clear on their own sites, as well as taking steps to make their venues more accessible. The knowledge gained from this points to how you might become an advocate for accessibility and non-discrimination against those with disabilities from your local scene all the way to D.C.
This is a major issue especially in the DIY/indie community, as we often throw shows in non-traditional spaces that may not have to be built to codes that would support those with disabilities. What seems like freedom from legal constraints for some means exclusion for many others, and this is not what we purport to want for a community founded on those marginalized from mainstream gender, sexuality, and taste cultures.