Pete Seeger was a good man. There aren’t many musicians you can say that about without seeming simplistic. Music is often progressed by flawed, volatile, glamorous egotists, and thank God for them. But Seeger carved out his place in history with a quieter, rarer set of qualities: nobility, generosity, humility and, when things got rough, breathtaking courage. Perhaps uniquely, he became one of the most important singers in America without ever being a star, because he believed in the song rather than the singer…
Pete Seeger 1919-2014
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I’ve written a few things recently about the power of a video to convey additional information that would clutter up a lyric and the new John Grant video is an extraordinary example. To my ears, perhaps because I know a lot about Grant’s upbringing in a homophobic religious household, Glacier felt far more personal than political but this video recontextualises it as a hymn to the perseverance of the gay rights movement. It’s easy to do a machine-gun-paced montage badly — Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror is just a barrage of Heavy Stuff That Happened — but the speed of change here, both visual and historical, is emotionally overwhelming. Every time I see it, I’m left stunned.
DORIAN LYNSKEY is the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, published by Faber and Faber (March 2011) and Ecco (April 2011). He writes for the Guardian, The Word, Q, Spin and Empire.
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