Five years ago, a trio of friends rented out a one-room office in downtown Decatur, Ga., with the admittedly naive goal of starting a national music magazine that would ignore both indie snobbery and pop-culture sycophantism, instead focusing on music that we loved. It was an incredibly selfish endeavor: “Let’s make the music magazine we would most want to read.” No market research or targeted demographics. We filled issue #1 with all our personal favorites—Wilco, Victoria Williams, Tom Waits, Vigilantes of Love, Speech, Sam Phillips and Brian Wilson. To keep ourselves entertained, we included film, books and travel. Because we were covering a lot of independent artists that not many people had heard, we decided to include a CD sampler with music from the pages of the magazine. And we struggled to find a tagline that would communicate the ethos we were trying to create, finally settling on “Signs of Life in Music, film & Culture.”
So, a half-decade in, we thought we’d celebrate our anniversary by toasting the truest Signs of Life in the music community—those who’ve used their platform as public figures to draw attention to a variety of important social causes.
Throughout its history, rock ’n’ roll has been derided as morally bankrupt, blamed for everything from the proliferation of drugs to the Columbine shootings. When it comes to social justice, though, rock has often led the way—it was on the vanguard of the peace and civil-rights movements, it raised money and awareness for the famine in Ethiopia, it helped American family farmers, and, to this day, its practitioners often look after one another when tragedy strikes the music community.
In this issue, we’ve selected dozens of the artists we’re excited about—from the obvious (Bono and his decades of advocacy for Africa) to the obscure (Ryan Costello of The OaKs, who, after 9/11, sold everything he owned and flew to Kabul to see what he could do to help ease the suffering of the Afghan people); both international (Peter Gabriel’s human-rights group, Witness) and domestic (The Edge helping musicians in New Orleans replace instruments lost to Katrina flood waters).
Through the years, several issues have brought the heavyweights of pop music together to generate mass attention, beginning with George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh and continuing through 2005’s Live 8 concerts to pressure the G8 countries to forgive Third World debt. This month, Al Gore and Kevin Wall have gathered Bon Jovi, Kanye West, Dave Matthews, Sheryl Crow, John Mayer and scores of others on all seven continents to raise awareness about global warming.
To be sure, celebrity activism is not without its downsides. Pop-culture personalities feed cycles of causes du jour which can drain support away from other, less sexy but worthy causes. In the wake of the 2004 tsunami, the overwhelming generosity funneled through the Red Cross was offset by financial shortfalls among many other charities. And support for popular causes can be weak and short-term since the fuel is often stardom rather than knowledge of the issues and a passion for addressing them. Certainly, not all artists are well-versed on their causes. Even those who are tend to over-simplify the issues; it’s the nature of their platforms. (As T Bone Burnett wrote about preachers and politicians, “When you’re talking to that many people at one time, you’re bound to be lying to someone at some time.”) Occasionally, poor oversight of fund-raising efforts leads to significant waste, making headlines and fueling skepticism, as in the case of the recent Red campaign (Ad Age reported that, after Gap, Apple and Motorola spent an estimated $100 million on marketing, the campaign had only generated $18 million for charity). And then there’s always the risk of the pontificating overpowering the art.
Nonetheless, artists can be a significant force for good. The art itself can inspire, enlighten, motivate and otherwise bring life to the mundane—not by pedantic proselytizing but through skillful wordsmithing and innovative, passionate musicianship, examining the deeper issues of human existence and helping us relate to characters we’d never given much thought.