When I say "rock," I want everyone to hear an inclusive word that implies everything that came after "hillbilly" and "race" musics came together in the early 1950s and, propelled by a new teen market, brought the voices of America's underclasses to the forefront of popular culture. I want to use the word "rock" to mean most country, punk and rap. Rock music is not one style of music, but it is something qualitatively different than the popular musics that came before it. I'm willing to bet it is distinguished for most rock fans in all of the following ways:

At least once in your life, if only for 3 minutes--whether it was listening to Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues," Jimi Hendrix's "If 6 Was 9," the Sex Pistol's "Anarchy in the UK," Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation," Bobby Brown's "My Prerogative," or U2's "One"-rock music changed the way you saw yourself, making you feel stronger.

Records like Sly and the Family Stone's "Everyday People," Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On," Edwin Starr's "War," the Clash's "The Call Up," Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" and Prince's "Money Don't Matter 2 Night" challenged you to speak your mind about the injustice that surrounds you.

Moving beyond complaint, rock songs like "Follow That Dream," "People Get Ready," "I'll Take You There," "Paradise City" or "We're All in the Same Gang" have insisted there is a way out of your troubles. And (despite rock's fierce celebration of individuality) rhythm section and lead, band and audience, the music and its history all tackle the most personal problems with the power of community.

For all of these reasons, rock pushed me to be personally and politically revolutionary. Unfortunately, the meanings of those words are distorted in our society-personal and political suggesting opposites that are disconnected, revolutionary implying blind rebelliousness. Grab the nearest dictionary though, and you'll find that the most fundamental definition of politics is people working together to gain a place of control. By that definition, the simplest dance song is immensely political.

Flip the same dictionary to the word revolutionary, and you'll find the hallmarks of rock music since its birth-"sudden, complete or marked change"; "outside of established procedure or principles"; and "radically new and innovative." Rock can fit these descriptions in dramatic ways and in very subtle ways, and it can fit these descriptions in musical ways or in lyrical ways. But I think rock's revolutionary nature is in its attitude and philosophy, a radical understanding of individuality and community that immediately makes me at home with the most passionate rock and rap musicians and fans, no matter what their tastes.

One thing I love about Craig Werner's new book A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America (Plume 19.95) is the way it traces the character of rock music back to its origins in slavery and economic oppression. Werner writes about three "impulses" (a term borrowed from Ralph Ellison) that distinguish rock from other forms of music and all of which trace back to the West African peoples we brutalized with the slave trade.

One is the blues impulse, the cry straight out of the field holler that forces us to accept reality and strengthens us to face another grim day of struggle. Another is the jazz impulse that also sounded itself in the cottonfields as slaves and sharecroppers defined their individual voices by embracing experimentation. Finally, the gospel impulse is that vision that keeps the worker going past exhaustion, the faith that salvation lies up ahead, that struggle can be overcome through community. All three impulses are potentially revolutionary-strengthening the oppressed, challenging the way people think and insisting that the war can be won.

Too few rock fans know the rich social history behind their music, and a fundamentally important quality of Werner's book is that he vividly draws the connection between the character of this music and its political role in society. The book reads like a novel when he is tracing the roots of rock and showing how rock evolved along with the political awakening of the '60s. He reaches back to World War II and tells the story of how Woody Guthrie used music to integrate a segregated ship in the Atlantic. In 1948, black deejays led a winning challenge to the white radio industry by playing "race" formats in the South that would transform a generation of white listeners. In 1955, a Mahalia Jackson record Werner describes as "rocking as hard as the Stones," gave inspiration to the tired, ultimately victorious feet of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In 1963, the SNCC Freedom Singers used song to keep dangerous police forces at bay. Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" would be chosen as the anthem of 1967's Detroit riots.

Werner also emphasizes the inclusiveness of the music by showing the dialogue across social divisions that makes up the secret history of rock. Bob Dylan would redefine rock music after his exposure to the Civil Rights Movement. Sam Cooke studied the Stones and read everything he could get his hands on to achieve his dream of taking "real gospel" to the mainstream. The Stones and the Animals started out imitating black singers but found new voices for the blues with personalized songs like "Satisfaction" and "We Gotta Get Out of this Place." Throughout the 60s, Detroit and Memphis listened to each other, spoke to each other and pushed an increasingly funky edge onto the radio that brought with it some of the boldest political statements of the rock era. The 1969 Stonewall uprising against police harassment took place at a club where an integrated, largely gay crowd included veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, the antiwar movement and the Students for a Democratic Society.

But the book is written for the millennium. It shows how popular musics confronted and overcame despair in the 1970s, and how the excesses of 1980s were countered by a popular music concerned with economic disparity and unresolved racial issues. In the 1990s, the most aggressive protest music ever written is coming from all directions. Our own Iris DeMent's "Wasteland of the Free" is held up as the unflinching state of the union that it is, and it is allied with the explicitly revolutionary dialogue carried on by the late Tupac Shakur, Kirk Franklin and the Family, Ani DiFranco, Rage Against the Machine and the Wu Tang Clan.

Of course, there's a reason for this increasing outspokenness. After two decades of an ever-widening gap between rich and poor in America, we have dismantled the welfare system, leaving a bare minimum of 40 million people living below the poverty line with no safety net. Jobs pay less than subsistence, poor people are criminalized for being poor, and three times as many people are in prison today as at the start of the Reagan era. Corporate greed is destroying the environment at an unprecedented rate, and the world's richest leaders drop bombs on the poor in other countries to solve our political problems.

For all its flaws, rock music aggressively takes the moral high ground next to the inhumanity of globalized capital. In fact, sometimes it seems like the only honest moral crusade to counter the immorality of a dog-eat-dog world. While a growing fascist ideology says that a government of the people has no responsibility to meet the peoples' economic and social needs, rock says over and over, "I'll be there for you," "power to the people" and "we can work it out."

Today's greatest musicians have their eyes wide open, and they can see what time it is in America. They show an understanding that they are in the same sinking boat as their audience. One of Dylan's greatest lines comes straight from the Old Testament": "He not busy bein' born is busy dyin'." Musicians can only grow, as they always have, by studying the world around them and listening to their audiences. All they should really be afraid of is not learning what they need to know.

All of our music is revolutionary, and, if we could see that, we would be that much more powerful and effective at whatever we set out to do. My desire to talk about revolution and music has nothing to do with telling you how to do your job as a musician. It has everything to do with trying to help one another get where we need to go. I know there's a world in which you and I and virtually all that we love survives and flourishes, but it isn't going to exist unless we talk to each other about how to make it happen. We have to build a plan together, and it has to be as radical and inclusive as rock itself. Let's talk.

--Danny Alexander
danny@thezone.org

Music and Revolution Weekend, June 26-27th