Music and Politics: the Greatest Combination

By Dino-Ray Ramos, WireTap. Posted June 14, 2006.

Although Music for America has only been around for three years, it has made significant impact on the way young people view and participate in politics. Its fusion of various genres of live music shows with the often lackluster world of politics is undoubtedly a stroke of genius.

Its long roster of partnerships with bands, which includes acts like Green Day, Usher, Blackalicious, Tori Amos, Beastie Boys, just to name of few, may be impressive, but it's the work they do on the sidelines that stands out. With its radars set on the younger demographic of America, it is constantly registering voters, mobilizing young people and encouraging voting stances at various concerts every day of the week, all over the nation. Since its inception, MFA has registered about 35,000 new voters and reached audiences of over 3 million through live music shows.

Molly Neitzel, the executive director of MFA took some time out of her musically infused political schedule to catch up with WireTap Magazine about MFA and some of her personal theories on today's youth and politics.

WireTap: Can you briefly expand on the organization and how you got involved?

Molly Neitzel: MFA started because a group of guys in Brooklyn were friends. They did not like that there was going to be a war and their friend was being sent to Iraq. They were like, 'What can we do?' One of them recently read an article about Howard Dean. They thought he was awesome -- anti-war, running for president and saying all these good things. They liked how real he was. He wasn't a typical politician. They started going to Howard Dean meetups.

They realized that Dean was cool, but the meetups didn't have any young people in New York. They weren't very hip. They knew how to get their own friends involved and that was music. So they started bringing DJs and bands to Dean meetups in New York. That was how the model started. They thought, "Let's bring a little bit of Dean to concerts and a little bit of music to Dean stuff." That's the way they started the organization. They were very Dean-centric in the beginning.

I found them on the Howard Dean blog. I lived in Seattle at the time, and I was really into Dean. I was trying to figure out if I wanted to get involved in the elections. So I started to go to Dean meetups, and I had the same experience. I thought, "There are no young people here, what's up?!" When I found them on the Dean blog, I said, "Hey! I want to be your West Coast chapter!" So I started doing shows in Seattle. That all happened in the spring of 2003. In fall of 2003, we got some funding, and we started hiring in swing states and started partnering with bands to take the organization national. So whenever bands went out on tour, we started sending voter registration material and issue education cards with the bands on tour. They would let our volunteers get into the concert for free and register voters. That's sort of how it started, and it is the current model that MFA uses.

WT: Approximately how many voters has MFA registered since the organization's start?

MN: Since we've started we have registered about 30,000 to 35,000 and we've reached audiences of about over 3 million. Our major metric isn't voter registration, though. MFA's mission is to just engage young people in progressive topics through music communities -- and that can take on a lot of meaning. It can be voter registration or voter mobilization for those who are already registered. It's also making politics more culturally normal -- making politics "cool" and fitting it into our everyday lives. Taking a political stand becomes more normal for our friends and communities -- we're trying to un-nerdify politics.

WT: What works best to politically engage your music fans? What doesn't work?

MN: There's a lot of research done on the millennial generation (generally those born between 1976-2000) and how we react to things. What we found was that mobilizing young people to get involved in politics works best when they are asked by a friend. It's all about the peer-to-peer interaction. It's also about our language and our messaging.

Dino-Ray Ramos is a Bay Area-based writer and a former editorial intern for WireTap.

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