Get Up Stand Up
Saturdays, ABC TV at 10pm
REVIEW BY DAVE RILEY
As you grow older you forget. My ears have been listening to music for longer than I know and thousands of melodies have wafted between my two earlobes.
I have been treated to so much music it's a wonder that any four bars can hang around long enough for me to hum, let alone sing (although I apologise for the results) any tune older than breakfast. But that would be the norm as the sheer volume of popular song is almost indistinguishable from the air we breath. Through muzak, a car stereo, or the omnipresent earphones, music can be everywhere. Just listen.
When it comes to musical styles, the world is your noisy oyster. When it comes to politics, it's amazing what you can find.
And Get Up Stand Up does a good job of sifting through the airwaves looking for political causes. From Joe Hill to Rage Against the Machine, the same harmonies that talk about "luv" and fornication now and then remind us about the world we have to live in. Even though this six-part series verges on a listen-down-memory-lane, now and then it manages to establish the rich political context in which such and such a song was born.
Some of the program's talking heads may be those performers you adore, including Pete Seeger, Patti Smith, Tom Paxton, Ed Sanders, Jello Biafra, Mary Travers ... and still there's more. And you get frustrated — because each of so many only gets a sentence-length three-second grab as the editing takes you off to another musical montage. Pete Seeger deserves his own six-part documentary series. Ed Sanders and The Fugs warrant a special. And if only we could get more than eight bars of the one song, Saturday night would be a night best spent at home.
This isn't profound history. It's newsreel stuff. Themes are jumbled up and tangents are pulled in from all over the place, especially when the concurrent German and French political music traditions are crudely grafted on to what is essentially an exploration of English language song writing. But then, one of the most moving performances (a rare one of more than eight bars) in the series has been Marlene Dietrich's version of Where Have All the Flowers Gone in German.
Indications are that the series won't explore "world music" in any depth, although the political impact of reggae is sure to be a major theme — Bob Marley's anthem is, after all, the theme song for the series. The series also fails to distinguish between music with political intent and performances for charity work, so that a performance at a big fund-raising concert (against hunger and such) passes muster as political activism. So We Are the World is given as many credentials as Jimi Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner.
But among all this dross, the genuine article shines through and the work of the most committed artists towers above that of their peers. Some, like Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger, may now want to disown the passionate advocacy of their youth, but the songs live on and each rising of the people throws up its own troubadours. Get Up Stand Up gives us all an opportunity to enjoy the best of them.
From Green Left Weekly, May 11, 2005.
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