Music and the arts feed our souls, but a decent wage puts food on the table. Musicians, fans of music, and grassroots political organizations are a potent force to fight for social justice.
Interpretation
Art nourishes our spirit, but financial security is essential for survival.
Tom Morello emphasizes the dual importance of music and the arts, which enhance our emotional and spiritual well-being, while also highlighting the necessity of a living wage to meet basic needs. He advocates for musicians and their communities as powerful allies in the pursuit of social justice, underscoring the intersection of art and activism in addressing societal issues.
In practice
In a speech advocating for musicians' rights, this quote illustrates the balance between artistic passion and the necessity of fair pay.
Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.
The way corporate media likes to portray America is as a homogenous whole that high-five's each other at the Super Bowl. But what we have is a grotesque disparity between the rich and poor that is only getting wider.
Of course, music is an art form, and it's not all that competitive. But we don't ever intend to be the second-best band on a stage at any show.
Paul Ryan's love for Rage Against The Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades
Music, I think, is best when it honestly explores personal demons, and it stirs around in the silt of the psyche to find out what's really there.
Paul Ryan's love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades.
I can't think of anything worse, really, than to try to live up to someone else's expectations of what you should be. You don't make art by consensus.
I wanted to be Stan Laurel, then I wanted to be Fred Astaire and then Captain Kangaroo. I actually started out as a radio announcer when I was 17 and never left the business so that's literally 70 years.
Capitalism and power politics have made our generation creatively sluggish, and our vital art is mired in a broad bourgeois philistinism.
When a person listens to a good song, and they can look out at the world and their lives and see the dark and the light, the negative and the positive, all the different elements, all come together in one holistic poem, that is a very healing and very reductive thing, and that's what my music is about.
I hate the idea of theatre just being an evening pastime. It should be emotionally and intellectually demanding. I love football. The level of analysis that you listen to on the terraces is astonishing. If people did that in the theatre... but they don't. They expect to sit back and not participate.
Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.
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