(Photo: Kevin, Mike Fadem (drums) & Mike Strandberg (guitar) of the Goddamn Band)
Singer & songwriter Kevin Devine is known for his political lyrics and passion for social issues. Here he explores the line between songwriter and activist and gives his experience of the Occupy movement.

From our little corner of the playground, I’ve always felt mildly uncomfortable with the amount of attention paid to my ten or twelve expressly “political” songs.

It’s not because I don’t stand by their content (I do); I just have a hard time framing “cataloguing one person’s filtration of existence and its chaos and its systems and its power relationships” as anything approaching activism. I cringe a bit when someone else tries to frame it that way for me, because I’ve been around what I consider to be real and engaged activism, and I think it looks different than songwriting.

I’ve never seen myself as especially topical in the way a Pete Seeger or Phil Ochs was. I feel more like I write and I sing about my experience. Sometimes, that means writing inwardly, abstractions about a thought process, a person, a memory, a feeling, a moment; other times, it means being more specific, flipping the lens, observing, reacting. Sometimes, what you see provokes your conscience, and you respond accordingly.

I guess I just feel like that’s a prerogative and not a requirement.

I write about life: Love, faith, sex, drugs, family, people, feelings, dreams, fictions, memories, and, sometimes, “politics.”

For me, it’s all part of the same larger thematic picture; it doesn’t feel like a writing exercise or even a choice to talk about war or income inequality or global warming or the failures of crony capitalism or our broken two-party corporatocracy or whatever. It’s just what comes out sometimes, and when it does, through me, for whatever reason, I don’t think it makes for especially clear-cut protest music so much as a knotted attempt to sort some shit out in public.

The thing is, sometimes when you do that, people connect to it, and you get asked to play protests. In the last few months I’ve performed at two Occupy functions, one in Boston and one in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. I’ve done dozens of issue-oriented shows over the years, and have otherwise lent myself to fund/awareness raisers across a pretty broad range of causes when it felt appropriate and morally correct, so that exchange (and this internal wrestling match) isn’t new.

Something about Occupy itself does feel new to me, though. I feel invested, curious, emotionally connected to its progress. I feel like it is and could be a really big deal, something a lot of us have waited for and worked towards, the beginning of a more realistic conversation about our broken society and what steps need to and can be taken towards a new, more egalitarian paradigm.

I watched closely with my band as we toured the country through September and October, getting reports from friends “on the ground” and trying to parse bullshit from reality in the media. When I’ve gotten to see it up close, in Dewey Square and Zuccotti Park, in Sydney and in Brooklyn, I’ve been moved by its humanity and its energy. I deeply sympathize with its frustrations, and agree with many of its core assessments about where we’re at and why we’re there.

I think it’s imperfect, but I think it’s a movement that can absorb and learn from salient criticism.

I do think it’s misguided when people say it “lacks focus,” as I’d say the camps and marches and non-violent demonstrations ARE in fact the message, way more than some rhetorical set of streamlined talking points could ever be.  When people across generation/race/gender/orientation/education-level are disenfranchised to the extent that they are willing or, in some cases, forced by circumstance to leave their homes and physically collect themselves TO LIVE in public spaces to express how dissatisfied they are with their situation and, by extension, their CHOICES, well, I’d argue that’s a pretty potent and focused statement. Given the fact that since Occupy’s inception “income inequality” has become a hot potato catchphrase for both Democrats and Republicans leading into 2012, I think at least a few highly paid campaign strategists would agree.

I was there proudly, to take part, to offer what I could. I saw myself there as a citizen and student first and a musician second. I don’t mistake myself for the core Occupiers who risked immensely to provide a spark and speak difficult, uncomfortable, principled truths to power. I’m not the homeless people in the parks reconnecting with their intrinsic human value by providing tutorials to less experienced “residents” about braving inclement weather conditions. I’m not the veterans offering earned perspective on the folly of imperial ambition and the gaping holes in this system’s safety net, even for its foot soldiers and gate guards.

I’m not them, but I’ve been there with them, and it’s inspiring.

And maybe that’s it: for me, the uncomfortable feeling is the self-perception gap between the two, between the songwriter as tourist and the Occupier as idyllic activist embodiment. When I’m there, I want to bring everyone who has ever praised me for my “braveness” or dismissed me as an asshole for singing songs about “politics” there with me: “See? This is what the work actually looks like. I write pop songs. Calm down.”

I know intellectually both have value, and luckily, real recognizes real. The issues at root, in the world as in the music, are ultimately a lot more gut level and broadly human than they are topical or “political.”

Fairness, equity, empathy. Golden Rule stuff. 

I’m grateful something like Occupy can remind us of that. 

The songs are lovely, but the true movement happens elsewhere.  We’re part of it, and not the other way around.