headcount

Some reading material for your Saturday evening:

• brownsox from Daily Kos interviewed Ashwin Madia, the Democratic House candidate in Minnesota's Third District, this past Wednesday and has video of it. Madia is a 30 year old Iraqi vet and a lawyer -- another young candidate.
• A story in an Appleton, WI newspaper focusing on local youth involvement this election cycle
• The Nation compares both candidates' policies on national service.
• DNC '08: Pundit playtime?
• Young voters energized the Iowa delegation/were energized themselves at the convention this week.
• What are Boomers reading online?
• A profile of Headcount.
• An explanation of both candidates' views with regard to students and college financial aid.
• Finally, a columnist at the Pensacola News Journal observes the Millennials/Gen Xers are ready to "throw the bums out" -- of both parties.

Update: Here is the documentary shown prior to Obama's acceptance speech. Some powerful stuff -- check it out:

First some youthy news:

• Two articles are out today on polling. The Michigan Messenger does a great job analyzing a PEW study on the demographics of cell-only and "cell-mostly" users and how pollsters are dealing with under-represtentation of these demographics in their polling. If that's a little too data-geek for you, Campus Politico has a good "polling 101" story that might be a little more your speed.
• At Tapped, Tim Fernholz questions the effectiveness of a voter registration drive launched this week by the Hip Hop Caucus.
• Matt Zeitlin at PushBack follows up on that post, noting that celebrities are not an effective way to move young voters to the polls.
• Teaming up with SPIN, CMJ, and others, Head Count has launched a 90 day voter registration challenge. They hope to register 100,000 voters by the end of the 90 days. You can watch a video of SPIN at the Warped Tour interviewing an artist about the program here.
• NDN notes Connecticut Democrats are out-registering Republicans among young voters by 4.3 - 1. That registration and turnout advantage might help Democrats defeat Republican Chris Shays in the fall. Shays is the lone Republican congressman in New England.
• South Carolina young Republicans are not feeling the love from John McCain, and Young Republicans nationally are having a tough time drawing young people to the convention.
• Meanwhile, Young Democrats are thriving in delegate-rich Florida.
• Tech President argues that 2008 is a boring year in tech/politics. While 2004 and '06 saw huge paradigm shifts in how we organize, 2008 is all about refining those practices.

Some less-youthy, but very interesting news:

• Democrats are getting ready to spend $20 million to register and GOTV latinos.
• The Nation writes about MoveOn's 10th birthday and how far the organization has come.
• A new study by the RAND Corporation tells us the obvious - to win the war on terror, we need to stop fighting the war on terror.
• Finally, the Washington Post has a front-page story basically calling "liar liar pants on fire" on the McCain campaign for their latest ad attacking Sen. Obama.

So, I'm finally settled back in. Here's the rest of those Quick Hits I didn't get to while at the Austin airport, as well as a few more that have accumulated since.

• The Austin Statesman picked up our little youth caucus, but seemed to miss the point. The caucus was an informal meeting, not a strategy session to construct a master youth plan. And the focus of the discussion - to what extent our youth movement needed to be about GOTV and infrastructure for organizing our peers, or building an ideological consensus - was barely touched on in his piece.
• In this piece by The Washington Post, 29 year old Republican tech strategist David All confirms the complete disconnect between the GOP and Millennials. My favorite line:
  

  David All points to a page on McCain's Web site as more old-fogy branding:

• PEW reports that young voters in this election are at least - if not more - knowledgeable about the candidates' position on Iraq.
• Anderson Cooper's ac360 blog profiles HeadCount and their latest work at the Camp Bisco festival.
• The Virginia Pilot reports that young Viginians (under 25) are registering at twice the rate of their elders. Registration has increased 10% in the last year.
• Rumors abound that Barack Obama is going to show up as a surprise guest at this year's Lollapalooza, which takes place in his hometown of Chicago.
• Young People For just announced the new class of their Front Line Leaders Academy.
• Nine Latino organizations are teaming up to spend $5 million on a nonpartisan voter registration effort targeting 2 million Latinos.
• Finally, Rock the Vote is teaming up with Comcast in its effort to register 2 million new voters this election cycle. I'm not a fan of this partnership. Last year, Comcast was caught blocking internet traffic from peer to peer networks. They are on the wrong side of the Net Neutrality debate.

Hey folks. I'm sure those of you who visit the site regularly notice that there are a few different things around here lately (and for those of you in RSS-land, come see what I'm talking about). I'll have more on what's new around here tomorrow after I complete a few finishing touches tonight. In the meantime, here's some good stuff that didn't get blogged today:

• Larry Lessig's anti-corruption group Change Congress is looking for some tech-savvy kids to help run the operation. Job description is here. This should be right up the alley of FM readers.
• I've been talking for months about how John McCain plays the mainstream cultural media. Well Rock the Vote actually has some stats on it, along with a big BS detector on McCain's attempts to reach youth:
  

  Indeed, John McCain has made more guest appearances on the Daily Show—12 in total—than any other guest of the show ever. According to IMDB, McCain has also made 10 appearances on the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” and 8 appearances on the “Late Show with David Letterman.” By comparison, he has appeared on the famed Sunday political talk show “Meet the Press” only 6 times.

  Too bad Obama is massacring McCain on the web. It is just not the 20th Century anymore . . . . Definitely worth a read.

• HeadCount is getting some big media play for their work at Bonnaroo this past weekend. Not in the article is the fact that HeadCount registered 1,100 new voters at the festival and received 2,000 more vote pledges. Great work y'all.
• Music for Democracy, a PAC looking to get the music scene into partisan politics, launched their website this week.
• It's been a big week for culture and politics. The Progressive Book Club also launched their website today.
• The Concord Monitor notes that over two dozen candidates under 35 are on the ballot this year. Looks like the Granite State might get a big youth-infusion in its state house.
• Finally, Marc Ambinder has the goods as to what the 3,600 Obama Fellows are doing with their time.

One of the organizations I'm involved with this year is Head Count - a nonpartisan nonprofit that registers young voters at live music events. They're basically the only group left from 2004 that deploys such a strategy. It's a shame because I think the strategy is useful in reaching people you otherwise wouldn't with traditional tactics. On the other hand, HeadCount is highly efficient and expects to register 100,000 young voters at 1,000 live music events.

They just signed on a number of new artists (not a few of which were once in the MFA sphere):

A diverse array of artists ranging from Jack Johnson and John Mayer to Foo Fighters and Megadeth have joined forces with the nonpartisan voter registration group HeadCount (www.HeadCount.org) to sign up new voters at their concerts this year. My Morning Jacket, Santana, Wilco, Ani DiFranco and The Decemberists have also become aligned with the organization, joining longtime supporters such as Dave Matthews Band, The Allman Brothers Band and members of The Grateful Dead and Phish. HeadCount's army of volunteers will stage voter registration drives at over 1,000 concerts this year, with a goal or registering at least 100,000 voters.

As part of my work with them, I've agreed to blog on their website a few times a month about HeadCount and where it fits in the larger youth movement. Here's my first blog post:

HeadCount operates by partnering with artists to help engage their fanbase and the live music scene. It's a good strategy. Studies show that peer to peer organizing is the most effective way to engage people in the political process, and who are more our peers than those who listen to the same music and live in the same culture as ourselves?

So what does that look like? Here at Head Count, looking from the top down, it means partnering with artists. It means finding a band with a commitment to our democracy and to making the world a better place, and help them and their fans fulfill that commitment at the ballot box. It's an organizing model based around an artist's geographically dispersed fanbase, united by their love of the music and desire to see change.

That's the view from the top down. It's a good model. It's what makes Head Count successful and has registered tens of thousands of voters. But it's not the only model for organizing around live music, and from the bottom up, the live music scene is anything but geographically diverse or based around individual artists. It lives in tight clusters centered around cities and more specifically the music venues within those cities. For me, it used to be the Wetlands Preserve in NYC - a great venue where, before it closed in 2001, the jamband and hip hop scenes mixed with environmental activism. These are the homes of live music for many. They can also be local centers for change.

This is the other model of music activism - using venues as the local focal point for social change - and there are a number of projects across the country doing just that.

Recently, WireTap magazine sat down with some of those groups as the final installment of a nine-part series on cultural activism. Here's a few of those organizations and what they have to say about a compelling question: Why Build A Movement Among Youth-Driven Cultural Spaces?

Shannon Stewart - The Vera Project - Seattle, Washington

I echoed a lot of what had been said, and added something of a social urban planning perspective, "I think about space -- like physical space -- and its role in cultural change and social change. For The Vera Project, I feel like the space was what was holding the possibility for there to be social change within that cultural community."

And of course, it's how you hold and shape the space that matters. In Seattle, aside from producing music, spaces like Vera also tackled mass voter mobilization efforts that changed the course of elections, community responses to sexual assault, strong alliance-building for youth rights and liberation, anti-war protests and anti-globalization organizing. Connecting young people through art -- and in a space that was set up unconventionally -- created a platform for people of different identities and communities to come together and tackle hard issues, alongside of nurturing new sounds, artists and aesthetics.

Lori Roddy: Neutral Zone - Los Angeles

Lori explained how she is trying to understand culture's function in her work, "I think [culture] is sort of a consciousness of the way that people think, the way they understand the place that they live in and the way that they interact with one another. It's the way they express their interaction or the way they sing, the way they write, or the way they perform. It's a way of internalizing and understanding the way things are. And to change that internal hegemonic perception of [culture] is a big piece, I think. Social change then to me is identifying more of the actual policies, practices, and laws. ... With that definition, the Neutral Zone is really functioning more on the cultural change [side]. It's raising the consciousness of young people, [affirming] that they are competent, capable individuals, that they should have ownership. They don't have to wait to be adults."

Gavin Leonard: Elementz - Cincinnati

Gavin went next. "So the crux of it is ... does the organization see itself as doing cultural or social change work? ... Probably, actually, neither. ... Our mission is to inspire and engage. You can't make cultural change unless you have a culture and are connected with people or, like I say to people all the time, that Elementz is this youth center that has street credibility and then pretty much all I do all day is figure out how to define street credibility." Gavin explained that street credibility is what helps an organization like Elementz get connected with young people, helps young people get connected to one another to create their own culture, and also connects them to the power to make change.

Kevin Erickson: Department of Safety - Washington State

Kevin Erickson from the Department of Safety in Anacortes, Washington, added, "Well, the Department of Safety in its founding was sort of operating on a lot of different levels. They wrote manifestos and deployed all this Marxist rhetoric, meanwhile maintaining a radical humility about their actual expectations about what they would be able to accomplish. Now, I think that we're permanently radical by virtue of existing where we exist and by doing the kind of work that we're doing in the place that we're doing it. I think it's indicative of the current state of cultural politics in America today [that] we have left rural areas out and the red states have been defined as cultural wastelands. [So] by putting together [an argument] that, 'No, actually the town you are in is valuable. You and your friends are capable of doing really good things,' it tends to break down that binary between social and cultural by really shortcutting the fundamental dynamic at work."

There is a lot more on the way that culture can bring about change, and the role that a physical space/community out of which to organize plays in that change. Go read the whole piece.

Apropos of my piece about Neil Young, I thought I should announce that I've accepted a volunteer position on the advisory board of HeadCount.

Out of all the new non profits that formed in 2004 to activate live music scenes, HeadCount, which began in the jam-band scene, is the only one left standing. Just a few months ago, MFA was defunded and merged their membership with the League of Young Voters. In early 2007, Punk Voter mothballed into a news organization. Fat Mike is limiting his involvement in politics this year, and Scott Goodstein who ran the day to day operation now runs Barack Obama's text messaging program.

So HeadCount, which in 2004 was the most underfunded of the three, is now the only game in town. This year, they're expanding their work outside the jam-band scene, hiring their first full-time staffers, courting donors, and scaling the entire operation upwards.

It makes me glad to see that live music outreach is going to continue in 2008.

HeadCount has set a goal of registering at least 100,000 voters at 1,000 live music events in 2008. That's a far cry from the 2,400 shows MFA attended in 2004, but HeadCount is a far more efficient organization than MFA ever was. In 2004 and 2006 combined, HeadCount registered a total of 57,000 new voters on a budget of $120,000 - or $2.11/registration. That's at the low-end of the scale in terms of cost/registration, which usually averages around $8/registration.

How they did it was through a mix of artist involvement and a strict organizational culture that stressed accountability and hard work above anything else. About a year ago I interviewed Andy Bernstein, the co-chair of Headcount about this, and the resulting blog post elaborates on how HeadCount acheived such efficiencies while creating a deep bond with their target community. There's also a great discussion from some of the old MFA crew in the comments about what did/did not work at MFA, and I advise you to check it out.

About a week and a half ago I attended the screening of a new documentary about the organization - you can get a sneak peak at it, along with a taste for what live-music organizing is all about, here:

I'll be posting a lot more about HeadCount as they ramp up their 2008 activities.

This is a little rough still, but I need to head out for most of the day and wanted to get something posted. I think I'm getting my point across well enough, though it could be more eloquent and a little more developed. Consider it food for thought.

Neil Young . . . I love the man's music, and have much respect what he did back in the day, but he does not at all understand the current state of politics or culture. And that blindness has twice in the past 2 years caused him to grossly misrepresent the current state of youth activism and the roll that music in particular can play in driving change in our contemporary political environment. It's a shame.

Earlier this week, at the Berlin Film Festival, Neil Young was quoted as saying:

"I know that the time when music could change the world is past. I really doubt that a single song can make a difference. It is a reality," Young told reporters.

"I don't think the tour had any impact on voters."

The tour to which he was referring was his 2006 anti-Bush tour. A documentary of the tour debuted at the Film Festival this week.

As I said, this is the second such comment from Young in the last 2 years. The first came in 2006 when he said:

I was waiting for someone to come along, some young singer eighteen-to-twenty-two years old, to write these songs and stand up… I waited a long time. Then I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the '60s generation."

There was a strong response from the Music/activist community in response to this first statement. Singer-songwriter Stephan Smith published a letter in the San Francisco Chronicle outlining the ways in which the corporate media severely limits the reach and career prospects of activist musicians. He followed that up with an excellent article in WireTap describing the work of organizations like Punk Voter and Music for America in organizing the live music community in 2004 and 2006.

Mark Ristaino of Music for America also posted his own response that hits a few important nails on the head:

Though "Living with War" may have been a potent protest album, the truth is that Neil's most recent release comes way too late, and the reasoning behind it is way off the mark. It’s time for older progressives everywhere to wake up and realize the truth. The Youth Movement is here. We’ve been here. And we don’t listen to our parents' protest music.

Many people like to wax poetic about the cultural movement that surrounded the music of the 60s, but the truth is that today’s young musicians are speaking out just as loudly and powerfully as the musicians of 30 years ago, despite attempts by big media to silence their voices. Musicians today understand that it takes more than singing a song to create real change. "Let's impeach the President" is a catchy chorus, but it's no stained blue dress, if you get my drift.

What Neil Young missed two years ago, and what he's missing still today, is that the media landscape and the culture itself have both radically changed since Crosby Stills Nash and Young first voiced their protest through music.

As Mark and Stephan Smith both pointed out, the media (radio, record companies, music television, etc) all actively discourage political viewpoints in music - particularly topical ones. As I've outlined in my article, Who Will Rock the vote in 2008?, back in 2003, when Music for America was just getting started, musicians wanted nothing to do with politics. They watched the Dixie Chicks get tarred and feathered and wanted no part in speaking out. They saw their own tarnished record of civic participation and recoiled from any chance at being labelled "hypocrite."

But somewhere along the way that changed, and in 2004 hundreds of artists - not just P. Diddy and Russel Simmons - took part in a civic and cultural movement to initiate change. They did this not through protest, as Neil Young would have it, but by encouraging participation in the political system. By registering young concert goers and activating their live music scenes at over 3,500 shows in 2004 alone.

But somehow, Neil Young missed that. I guess he didn't go to any of those shows. I guess that sort of engagement wasn't happening at his shows.

There's a reason for that, and it's simple but fundamental. Neil Young came of age, protested, and got famous in a broadcast media era, and that's how he thinks. Imagine one song ringing through the culture, igniting change where ever its melody could be heard. It's a nice image. And maybe Lennon or Buffalo Springfield, or some of those other folks from back in the Vietnam era did achieve such change through the power of a single song that reverberated through a unified, common youth culture.

It seems like a simplistic understanding to me. After all, 1968 wasn't just about protests. The kids that went "Clean for Gene" McCarthy actually organized and registered their peers and went to the polls. Ditto for McGovern's kids in the 1972 primary. Even back in "the 60s" changed happened both within and outside of the system.

Regardless, even granting Young that much, we're in a different cultural space now. Youth culture is not nearly as monolithic now as it was then. There are dozens of niches, and no one cultural artifact - a song, a movie, an internet video clip - will reach all those people. This is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. The end of the broadcast era means the death of the activism models of the past, but it's given rise to new ones as well. Young people are not just consumers of culture and news anymore, they are also producers, putting out their own music and art online, engaging in politics through social networking and the blogosphere - a whole new culture of (peer) production has emerged that is infinitely more rich and diverse than the broadcast culture that preceded it.

We need to find ways to get all of those cultures activated as Music for America and Punk Voter did in 2004, and as HeadCount does today. We need to find ways to make sure that these niche scenes produce dozens of songs calling for change, and that they register their fans to vote. We need to break out of the old mentality that thinks raising your voice in protest is enough. It's not enough, and it's not effective. If you want change, you have to work for it. You have to organize inside and outside of the system. Anything less is doomed to failure.

Along the way, music and culture continue to have a vital role to play. One song may not be able to change the world anymore, but hundreds and thousands of songs by as many artists, supported by fans that are smart and organized can. Neil Young should stop singing laments for activism of the past, and channel his anger and frustrations into aiding these new artists and activism models that are in part following in his footsteps.

My piece on WireTap about music activism in 2008 is finally up.

Couple interesting, but small items in the news this morning.

Grammercy Communications, an Albany-based PR firm, is offering $1000 in prizes for anyone who can produce a youth-targeted, potentially viral GOTV video:

A $500 first place prize will be accompanied by up to five $100 prizes for honorable mentions. The video should be under 30 seconds in length, be non-partisan and not mention any specific candidate or interest group, and have a generally positive tone. Creativity and humor that appeals to young people is encouraged. Questions about detailed submission guidelines should be directed via e-mail to GOTV@GramercyCommunications.com. The deadline for submissions is Friday, October 27, 2006.

HeadCount, the all-volunteer, artist run GOTV organization for the jamband community announced that it had met it's goal of registering 5000 new voters for the midterms. The group accomplished this with no paid staff on a budget of $25,000, provided mostly by Dave Matthews Band and Relix Magazine.

UPDATE: Also check out this MyDD diary by Ben Waxman of For Our Future about the lack of media training programs for young progressives.