The following article is from the March issue for Townhall Magazine. To subscribe to twelve issues of Townhall Magazine and receive a free copy of Andrew McCarthy’s Willful Blindness: A Memoir of a Jihad, click here.
Rock stars are the ultimate individualists, right? Independent spirits with tortured souls and torn jeans, they buck the system, defy the norm, and bear up against the “The Man.” They’re so very anti-establishment.
Except when they’re not. These days, the chances of finding artists who don’t conform to the knee-jerk, hackneyed leftism of a politically predictable entertainment culture seem about as good as seeing a sold-out MC Hammer comeback tour.
Artists are all anti-war unless, of course, you’re looking for class warfare. They re-hash the protest slogans of the ‘60s as readily as they sample the pop hits of the ‘80s. In the search for artists for whom individualism means more than a really ironic thrift-store tee, I found a couple of chart-toppers with minds of their own.
Dolores O’Riordan: Best known as lead singer of “The Cranberries,” the Irish-Catholic crooner and mother of three, whose most famous political statement was the 1994 protest song “Zombie” about IRA bombings in her native country, has also been known as an overtly pro-life artist. Her first solo album was released in 2007, entitled Are You Listening? Maybe you should be.
Quotable: “It’s not good for women to go through the procedure [abortion] and have something living sucked out of their bodies. It belittles women. Even though some women say, ‘Oh, I don’t mind to have one,’ every time a woman has an abortion, it just crushes her self esteem smaller and smaller and smaller.”
Singable: “How could you hurt a child? / Now does this make you satisfied? / I don’t know what’s / Happening to people today / When a child, he was taken away.” (“The Icicle Melts,” 1994)