His political resume includes a decades-long affiliation with the ACLU, co-directing and co-producing credits on the 1980 rock documentary “No Nukes” and, most famously, a leading role in opposing Tipper Gore’s highly publicized mid-1980s campaign to get rock music to clean up its act. Goldberg’s first book, “Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit,” (out next month from Miramax Books; 256 pages; $23.95) is a tough-love critique of what he sees as an “increasingly elitist and snobbish” left wing that’s losing ground with its natural constituencies. The book’s subtitle is borrowed from “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the seminal hit of another former client, Nirvana. While Kurt Cobain was referring to the deodorant brand, Goldberg, 52, uses the phrase to symbolize the youthful energy he sees as lacking on the left. Beneath a fair amount of name-dropping is an insightful, blunt analysis that Democratic strategists gearing up for 2004 would do well to consider. Goldberg sat down for a chat at his Artemis office in New York City.
NEWSWEEK: As a record-label head, you’re more keyed in to the tastes of young people than the average fiftysomething. Part of what motivated you to write this book is your frustration with the left’s unwillingness to use popular culture to engage young people. Why is it important for the left to focus on the young?
Danny Goldberg: There’s never been progressive political change without a strong component of youth involved. There’s an energy and idealism that you only have when you’re young. Young people as a subgroup are inherently a Democratic strength, the way union members, women, Latinos, and blacks are. In 1992 Bill Clinton beat George Bush by 12 points among 18- to 24-year-olds; in 1996 he beat Bob Dole by 19 points among 18- to 24-year-olds; and in 2000 Al Gore did no better than tie George W. Bush among the same group. It went from a 19-point margin to zero. If Gore had kept the same margin as Clinton, he would have had an additional 2 million votes, which would have pushed him over in many states. Political analysts say young people don’t vote, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy to come up with messages less appealing to young people because you’re assuming in advance that they’re not involved. The result is to move politics to the right because young people in general are more optimistic, more open to new ideas, and therefore more progressive.
What issues could galvanize the young today?
The environment, the drug war, educational opportunities, job opportunities, civil liberties–these would be more important to young people than, say, the inordinate amount of talk we had [in 2000] about social security. Social security is a very important issue morally and politically, but more so to someone my age than to someone in his or her 20s. Also, a moral center is really important to young people, who want some idealism in their politics. Conservatives have ideals–I don’t agree with them, but I think it’s clear what they are. The left, on the other hand, tends to have an issue-by-issue approach, which is often poll-driven and fragmented.
What can Democrats do to inject more moral substance into their politics?
Well, take the tax bill. The Republicans believe that tax cuts are inherently virtuous because they give money back to the people. The Democrats keep saying that most of the cuts will benefit the richest 1 percent. The problem is that many young people think they’re going to be in the richest 1 percent. Democrats could argue, “Hey, this is immoral. Part of being a society is that there’s shared responsibility. We take care of each other.” But there’s such a fear of speaking in moral terms on the left. People care about their self-interest, but they don’t only care about their self-interest.
You write that some of your friends in politics think your concern with the packaging and marketing of political ideas is trivial.
Yes, but it’s not only the content but the style of how ideas are communicated. At the White House Correspondents dinner last year, Bush greeted Ozzy Osbourne, and you just know that Democrats would have been scared to be in a photo with Ozzy because they’re so paranoid about looking culturally liberal. But the truth is that while political liberalism isn’t always popular, cultural liberalism is extremely popular.
It’s not hard to imagine conservatives jumping all over a Democratic president for appearing with Ozzy Osbourne.
There were people who jumped all over Clinton when he went on MTV [during the 1992 campaign] and answered the woman who asked whether he wore boxers or briefs, but to me those people were morons and shouldn’t be listened to. What’s wrong with showing young people that you’ve got a sense of humor and that you care about their cultural environment? When people speak a common language like Clinton did in 1992 and Jesse Ventura did in 1998, youth turnout goes way up. When people speak in policy language that only resonates on PBS or NPR, then a lot of younger people can’t comprehend what the distinctions are between the messages and therefore tune them out.
I was teaching college freshmen in Minneapolis when Ventura ran, and my students loved him. It was great that he got so many young people involved, but he was so goofy. Paul Wellstone, on the other hand, also had a lot of young supporters, who he won not through antics but by connecting to their idealism.
I certainly liked Wellstone’s politics a lot better than Ventura’s. But the fact that Ventura was able to galvanize turnout of young people is important; he showed that if you speak their language, you can get their attention. And language is ideologically neutral: you can speak it coming from the right, the center, or the left. I don’t think George W. Bush is a man of the people; he’s a third-generation politician who’s been surrounded by wealth and political power his whole life. But he had the discipline to learn the cultural language of America, and he came across more empathetic to youth just by seeming like a regular guy, as opposed to Al Gore, who came across like a high school teacher who’s going to be wagging his finger at you. The larger problem on the left is a culture of snobbery from people whose goals are not on behalf of elites but whose style is elitist and therefore unsuccessful.
Much of Dispatches describes your position, as a civil liberties activist in the music industry, at the forefront of a lot of the battles pitting politicians against pop culture. Why do movies, TV, videogames, and music continue to be such appealing targets for politicians?
Well, it’s a quick headline. Other than money, the mother’s milk of politics is media, and there’s no question that you can get media if you have an association with pop culture, whether it’s the president throwing out the first ball in a baseball game, a movie star visiting the White House, or a senator attacking a rapper. It’s rational for conservatives to attack pop culture because they have a constituency that for religious or cultural reasons is offended by the four-letter words and so on. It might cost them a few libertarians, but the good outweighs the bad. What’s irrational is Democrats doing it, because their constituency mostly likes pop culture. They might win some tiny group of swing voters, but they’re attacking a huge chunk of their following and not gaining very much.
Tipper Gore looms large in the book. The upshot of her Parents Music Resource Center’s campaign was that the record industry agreed to place parental advisory labels on certain albums, at the industry’s discretion. Nearly two decades later, how would you assess the impact of the warning labels?
I have complicated feelings about Tipper Gore because on a personal level I grew to like her enormously. She was extremely gracious to people she disagreed with in a way that Joe Lieberman, William Bennett, and her husband, frankly, are not. But there was no legacy at all in the music culture, which progressed exactly as it would have with or without the labels. When she came into the public eye in the mid-1980s, rap was just starting to become a mass-appeal genre. Since then it’s become a dominant genre, and there’s never been a music that had more violent or explicitly sexual themes in it. Its popularity was completely unaffected by anything that she or her cohort did.
It’s interesting that her husband picked Lieberman as a running mate in 2000, since Lieberman himself has been a vocal critic of Hollywood and the music industry.
Lieberman is a more extreme, humorless version of Tipper Gore, and he’s obsessed with beating up on pop culture. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton’s popularity went up, and yet these experts in Washington were convinced that there was a Clinton backlash and that the key to a Democratic candidacy was to show how conventionally moral their ticket was. Al Gore believed that Lieberman was going to cleanse him of Clinton’s sexual behavior, and he completely turned his back on a huge percentage of his base. He never related to the Nader voters, never related to young people, and with a great economy and peace in the world, managed to lose an election.
You discuss the cultural fallout from the 1999 Columbine shootings: people seized on rock lyrics and there seemed to be as much media analysis of the gunmen’s musical tastes than of, say, gun control.
I wasn’t surprised that the National Rifle Association would try to change the subject to culture; that’s their job. But I was surprised that Clinton and so many Democrats would be intimidated by that sort of propaganda. It took Michael Moore, who’s outside the system, to make what will end up being the most remembered statement about Columbine, and clearly it resonated with people: “Bowling for Columbine” is the most successful documentary in history. I don’t pretend to think that dealing with the gun issue is easy, but it’s intellectually dishonest to say that the kind of music people listen to is a predictor of violent behavior. You had the city of Denver canceling a Marilyn Manson concert and still hosting an NRA convention the same month. The right spoke on behalf of gun ownership, and the right was satisfied with their leaders. And on the left, people were saying, “Our guys are invisible.”
Given how celebrity-obsessed our culture is, I like when celebrities express political views–it shows they can be more than just commodities. You point out that showbiz activists have long been ridiculed. What do you see as their value?
Most people in the arts are progressive, so in certain times, like during the Iraq war, artists can get ideas out into the public that otherwise wouldn’t get out. During the war, people like Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn were willing to say things that the Democratic leadership wouldn’t. Half of this country was wondering where their spokespeople were because Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt supported the war. They have the right to their opinions, but it created a tremendous vacuum in the conversation in the country. Unlike politicians, artists don’t have to be all things to all people; they can have a distinctive point of view. In terms of the left/right division in this country, they are an asset of the left most of the time, and the left fails to embrace them enough.
Your company, Artemis Records, released Cornel West’s hip-hop-influenced album, which got him into hot water with Harvard, where he was teaching. By and large, the right has been better than the left at developing public intellectuals who communicate their ideas to a mass audience. On the left, a lot of the thinkers go into academe and end up doing more specialized theorizing. Is it important for the left to create the infrastructure to develop more public intellectuals like West?
I wish there was, say, a left-wing Heritage Foundation. The left’s not going to have as much money as the right, though, because the right does the bidding of the wealthiest people. But there is a lot of new energy on the left. For those of us who were against the war, the fact that [antiwar activist website] MoveOn.org gathered 2 million e-mail names is an incredible development. What the left has is the power of their ideas and the fact that they speak to the needs of the majority of people. But now they have to speak in the language of the majority of people.
