Keys to a Future Majority - Meeting Music for America

This is the first installment of my thesis. You can find the intro here

“Wu!” Gza boomed from his microphone. “Tang!” the crowd shouted back. “Wu!” Gza yelled again. “Tang!” the crowd responded before Gza said goodnight and left the stage. My friend Chris and I headed towards the exit. We had inched our way toward the back of the club so that we could slip out quickly; hip-hop shows have a tendency to end much later than they should and I had to be at work at 8:30 the next morning. After Jedi Mind Tricks’ opening act Chris had asked me if I wanted to bounce. The concert was still running on time, and I had never seen the GZA live before, so we decided to stay, but we settled on at least making sure that we could exit quickly once the show ended.

Even though we had made it close to the exit we still managed to get stuck in the crowd. “Shit, what is taking so long?” I asked no one in particular.

As I reached the door I could see what was holding us up. A group of about 5 kids were standing on either side of the exit with clipboards registering people to vote and asking them for their e-mail addresses, causing the bottleneck that I now approached. “You registered to vote” a nerdy young woman asked me. I nodded and tried to hurry past. “Want to volunteer to work a show?”

“Do I get into the shows for free?” I responded, the $15 I had just dropped on the show still fresh in my mind.

“Sure do. All you have to do is talk to people about politics before and after the show, register them to vote and sign them up on our e-mail list.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said as I stopped, took the clipboard and jotted down my e-mail, adding to the logjam that had just annoyed the hell out of me.

“Here,” the girl said as I handed back the clipboard and continued towards the exit. “Take this bag.”

As I walked through the cold Brooklyn night I looked closer at the bag and its contents. “Music for America” read the insignia that adorned the otherwise plain white shoulder bag. Inside I found some stickers, a few voter registration cards, and a set of issue cards covering topics from downloading music to the drug war, education funding to media consolidation. “Sounds pretty cool” I thought as I slung the bag back over my shoulder and parted ways with my friend.

I continued making my way through the brisk February night, thinking about the sorry state of politics in our country. The two years since the Supreme Court handed Bush the Presidency were a complete disaster in my eyes. The internet bubble burst, and the budget surpluses of the Federal Government quickly turned to record deficits. Bush successfully pushed his tax cuts for the wealthy through congress. California had been robbed blind by energy companies with ties to the Bush Administration. Huge corporations like Enron, MCI and Tyco were exposed as frauds. I sat on my roof one morning and watched as both of the World Trade Center buildings came crashing to the ground. I then watched in horror as this painful event was used to attack Democrats, pass the Patriot Act, and justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The one-year anniversary of our invasion was less than a month away. President Bush declared victory less than a month after the initial attack, but that country continued to plunge into chaos.
Through all of these events I watched with despair as congressional Democrats allowed themselves to be bullied into submission by the ascendant Right. As the main stream media did everything it could to ignore the Bush Administration’s many deceits, I sat and watched

I had almost lost hope when I happened to tune into Ted Koppel’s Nightline, in late September, 2003. On this night Koppel’s guest was Retired General Anthony Zinni, who had led U.S. Central Command prior to Tommy Franks. As I sat there I heard the General say that the WMD accusations against Saddam were in the same vein as the Gulf of Tonkin affair, the Johnson administration hoax that led to the U.S.’s entry into the Vietnam War. I watched as the General criticized the administration for starting a war because “some policy wonk in Washington D.C. had a brain fart.”

“Holy shit,” I thought to myself. “Maybe the leaders of the government apparatuses will step up and oppose Bush.” For the first time I felt hope that the Bush Administration might be stopped.

The next morning I decided that I too couldn’t sit around while right-wing ideologues screwed up our country. “Fuck it,” I thought to myself. “I’m gonna do something.” I didn’t know what I would do, and I still wasn’t overly optimistic about the chances for dethroning Bush, but I had come to the decision that if Bush was reelected the following year that it wouldn’t be because of a lack of involvement on my part. And so I began to look around for some way to get involved.

However, the night I met Music for America, I wasn’t out looking for a cause to get involved with, despite the fact that I had decided to become active a few months prior.. But the cards that I looked over on my way home from the show intrigued me, so I decided to kept them

For the next few weeks I glanced at the cards a few times, but they never really got my full attention. The issues that were covered on the cards seemed interesting enough for me not to toss them in the garbage right away, and the drug war and downloading cards reassured me that this was not just another cornball Rock the Vote type youth outreach program, with its snazzy graphics, cultural capital, and an almost complete lack of any substance. But, even with the promise of seeing free concerts while registering young people to vote, which sounded fun, I still wasn’t sure that this was the best way for me to have even a small impact upon the upcoming election.

One day, as I was sitting and thinking about how I was going to create the experiment which was to provide the basis for my Masters Thesis, something came over me. It was one of those “Aha!” moments when pins and needles prick at your skin and you feel that you just stumbled onto something big.

I stood. I walked over to my desk. I picked up the cards, one by one, and read through each. I walked to my computer, cards in hand, and began to look around the site. On the forums section of the site I found a topic called “Strategery,” where Music for America (MfA) members were discussing how they could have the greatest effect in the upcoming election. I registered on the site and wrote my thoughts on what we could do. The academic research that I held in my hand lead me to believe that the upcoming election would center around the Vietnam War, and I wanted to prove that it would.. But instead of trying to prove something that I already was fairly certain was going to happen, by doing research that would prove that I was right, I took another path. If the events of our young-adulthood shape our memories and our political views for the rest of our lives, which was what the research I held proved (and which I will detail in the next few sections) then rather than passively sitting by and documenting how generations shape their collective understanding of the world, I was going to stand up and try to help shape that understanding.

These were the first steps on a new path in my life in politics.

But, before I go into the ways that my life changed or what I learned during the Presidential campaign of 2004, I have to backtrack to the research I was pondering on the day that I went onto MFA’s website, and delve a little bit deeper into the thinking that led me to join Music for America.