Is there something intrinsically political about music?
It would be crazy to overlook its use as a form of protest or a way of accompanying political movements. I think it’s also interesting that politicians use it as a branding device, as a way of trying to indicate what sort of party they belong to or what kind of people they are. As a matter of course it is incredibly difficult to come across as a credible music fan if you are a politician. Gordon Brown isn’t an obvious Arctic Monkeys fan. There’s something going on there.
Is music dispensable at a time of huge government cuts?
You’re talking to someone whose university has just closed its music school. We live with these questions. Obviously music is something that people enjoy and it moves them and so forth. But it also teaches life skills: the ability to play with others, to work in a team and to realise that the sum of the whole is greater than its parts.
You have a chapter on music in classical political philosophy. What’s that about?
It is worth reminding politicians and others that historically from Plato to Aristotle onwards to Rousseau and Nietzsche and then Adorno, music has featured quite prominently in the way people have imagined the good society. It’s not something that people just regard as background entertainment. It’s central.
Can politicians really learn from the X Factor?
You get higher levels of participation and more engagement in these things than you often do in elections. But I do find them a kind of frightening version. Were we to translate the same sort of approach to politics it would be more akin to the gladiatorial world where you decide who is going to live and die rather than whether we should have A or B economic policy. The way that the crowd is worked up, the way that the judges play off them and all the sob stories – you do sometimes feel a chill.
People like Nick Robinson have sort of compared the leadership debates to X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent. The audience were not allowed to respond, there was no kind of formally designated range of feedback mechanism, nobody was allowed to really get at each other and there were a very limited range of questions. So they created the potential for an X Factor style political context. But I suspect that all the parties would be incredibly wary about going too much further down that road. Because in the end they might all be the losers.
Music and politics by John Street is out now (Polity, £55.00)
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