He goes where the people are.

I remember a music magazine interview with RATM from the late 90s/early 00s, in which they were basically asked why they agree to corporate media interviews if they’re so anti-capitalist. Morello and de la Rocha’s response was that they would never turn down any platform, unless they were asked to dilute their message. They said they’d learned this from Marx, who wrote about exploiting capitalist infrastructure to spread anti-capitalist thought.

Does this work better than the boycott mentality adopted by other overtly political bands (eg Godspeed You! Black Emperor, another fave of mine, who last week appeared to respond to this latest Spotify controversy by pulling their catalogue from every streaming service)? Honestly, I don’t know. The Morello approach risks tacitly tolerating horrible shit, but the Godspeed approach seems counter-productive – if the job to be done is persuading other people through art, then getting the art in front of people should be the priority, right?