I'll say the same thing I said over in /r/arcadefire
i like artists being political. i do. I even tend to agree (mostly) when most artists speak up as they tend to be at least culturally be progressive.
And i dunno. As artists, i think it's your job to not act as an endorsement of a politician or a political party. You don't have a 9-5 job, you're rich (-ish). You have a flexibility and freedom to speak out against the establishment as a whole that most citizens only really get around close friends or behind anonymous names on the internet.
Acting as a rubber stamp to any part of the establishment (even the lesser evil in tense elections), in a way is a betrayal of your role as an artist.
This is kinda why i backed away from the Daily Show and all those sister shows b/c they just became never ending endorsements of the Democrats. And like artists.. that's just not what the jesters are for.
They're supposed to be outside of it and above it. Not trying to say "both sides" are equally bad or anything of the sort. But that you're role should be more adversarial.
When I see Will.I.Am shilling for Hillary or Obama, I'm just like.. really man? You have a voice the rest of us don't. You can cut to a more universal core of systematic or institutional critique in a way that people will listen, in the way the media never will.
I will extend what I said over there with this:
As a millennial, I'm a pretty big critic of my own generation. In fact, everything I consider myself a part of - i try to be a little extra critical of. I like to point the finger in the mirror, more than outward at other groups. I'm a geek, so i'm critical of geek culture. I like rock culture - so I'm critical of that. I'm a progressive - so i feel more of weight to hold progressive's feet to the flames when they don't live up...or when they get a little full of themselves and ignore nuances of the world where the philosophy doesn't fit. And so on.
I think the one thing we've seen with the rise of poptimism, the erosion of rock culture is that in many ways..the nu-left, (some might even call a portion of them SJWS, if one is seeking a pejorative..but not talking about them entirely either), is that the role of a human being as a consumer as a primary, subconscious identity has really seeped in deeply into American society.
I don't know when it happened really. But Ever since the 60s consumer culture has been chasing counter culture. And sometime around the 90s, the eating of it became complete.
I don't know if it was the acceptance of something like pop punk, totally ignoring punks culture and reducing it down to merely an asthetic.
on the literary side of things, the same was kinda done with cyberpunk. It got reduced down to images of neon lights and smoggy city scapes, and the philosophy got thrown out the door.
Maybe it's when Hot Topic became a thing.
I dunno - but somewhere along the lines, everything just became consumer choice. Everything equal to everything else. Everything reduced down to mere flavors of ice cream.
some musical subcultures used to be truly counter culture. They didn't run around campaigning for people you wondered.. how they slept at night for the things they have done. They stuck to their idealism, the made art that connected to people and spoke out against injustice as it cut across philosophy, political party, etc.
And it seems that spirit is lost not just in music, but in millennials entirely. The concept of counter culture seems cliche, passe, done.
I honestly think most artsy types think they rose above it, but the reality is - they and their fans have been consumed by it and are a part of it to such a degree to separate it from them, would destroy who they are as a person, as a culture.
And it's bizarre to me, that the realities of capitalism - so predicted in texts like Brave New World or Society of the Spectacle, are now core identities to most people claiming to be progressive.
Only someone who couldn't see that in themselves, IMHO, would pose as an artists and endorse or campaign on behalf of a republican or a democrat with the track records those parties and who they're running have.
Only in the land of consumer culture, poptimism, and so forth - would a band so smart and artistic as Animal Collective or Arcade Fire, endorse a Wall Street stooge and a war monger.
Artists should be critics. Not rubber stamps on the political class. And there's just something about this generation that it feels par the course, for the artistic to become part of the same sludge as the daily fighting of MSNBC and Fox News.