B.I.A.

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Floyd Westerman, "B.I.A. (alternate version) (download until 2/28/09), from "Custer Died for Your Sins/The Land Is Your Mother."

Great political music has to be completely authentic, whatever that means, or else it loses its effect and in fact becomes counter-productive. You can tell in a song if the writer said to herself or himself, "gee, I want to make a statement about this issue." When political music reflects the real course of a musician's life, it takes on a completely different power, because it is itself the issue.

I wouldn't want to suggest that it's not possible for a writer to do real justice to a subject that she or he hasn't exactly lived, because one's mental existence, one's ability to step, so to speak, in another's shoes, is as real in its way as the physicality of going to the supermarket or to work. At the same time, anyone who is serious about political music, who, while perfectly happy to make a lot of money, wants to take a musical gift and try to help people with it, treads very cautiously when writing outside of one's direct or, possibly semi-tangential experience. One needn't have lived a precise experience, the stuff of which constitutes the political song, but it helps to have lived next door to it or at least in the same neighborhood.

So having finished the preface, we can look at Floyd Westerman, whom I only came across in the last year--last six or seven months actually, not to my credit--and who made some of the best political music of the 20th century. The politics of his music are on the surface pretty easy to explain. He was involved in AIM--American Indian Movement--and made songs as part of that movement. He didn't release a ton of music, and got into acting which is, it's pretty clear to me, where he actually made most of his money. His first record took its title from Vine Deloria's "Custer Died for Your Sins," often referred to as the AIM manifesto, not without reason.

So all of this, for anyone who's not Indian, or in AIM, could very easily be misunderstood or misused. I don't purport to be an expert on AIM, and I don't want to do the hip white guy "I'm not an insider but I'm aware that I'm not an insider so I can judge other white people as if I were an insider" thing, but what got me to buy Westerman's music was a number of things I read and a couple podcasts I heard in which people in the movement responded to his death. Really, the affection with which people wrote or spoke about him and the sense people communicated that "he was really ours" gave the impression that this was a musician to check out. Indeed he was.

However, what is--this is more from a socio-political angle than a musical one--so fantastic about Floyd Westerman is that he was/is a Johnny Cash fanatic, and has a brilliant bass voice to boot. He doesn't make "Indian sounding" music in any way that one would expect from the stereotypes one gets out of Hollywood or run-of-the-mill U.S. history books, though he did record more traditional music as well. Rather, he played music like he liked, and it's worth noting that Vine Deloria, too, was a country music buff.

People are, each in their own way, completely authentic. Making music as you hear it is really the way to go, especially if you want to be political. Country music, in its appeal to the bulk of its audience, has--this is more of an industry issue than about any individual musicians--taken some pretty foul political stands in the past, and makes an appeal to whiteness that has been and continues to be totally retrograde. It doesn't fit the white hipster liberal assumption to have the great Native political musician be not only a country music buff but a veritable country music master, with his own very real voice. But this just shows that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your philosophy, or politics as the case may be.