Say what you will about Yasiin Bey (and many do), but his 1999 track “Mathematics” was nothing if not prescient. While much of the track was railing against the lasting effects of Bill Clinton’s 1994 Omnibus Crime bill, one line would ring truer and truer in the coming years. After spitting a rapidfire set of statistics about drug sentences, Bey (then going by Mos Def) raps the following lyric:

40% of Americans own a cell phone
So they can hear everything that you say when you ain’t home
I guess Michael Jackson was right: “You Are Not Alone”

While the most verbal criticism of Mos Def is usually what’s described as paranoia, this track was followed not two years later by the PATRIOT Act, the US government’s magnum opus of clever abbreviation and expansion of executive power. Of course since then government surveillance has only expanded in both wiretapping and cyber-surveillance,  and has turned its FISA courts domestic–the F stands for foreign. At first, few critics dared speak out against the erosions of privacy, because that would mean disrespecting their impetus: the attacks on September 11th, 2001.

While I was still young at the time, I remember this was a very tenuous time to be a liberal American. To criticize the government or any thoughts of war were unpatriotic–one of the era’s worst labels. It is important to recall that an attack on our soil was unprecedented throughout the vast majority of Americans’ lifetimes. Not since Pearl Harbor had any foreign aggressor committed an act of war on American land. Fear and Islamophobia spread across the nation and nationalism became the cultural imperative. What started as “Support our Troops” ribbons and a blazing resurgence of presence for the American flag (and the Confederate flag, for that matter) began to look a whole lot like the aestheticization of politics.

Many scholars glom onto the final epilogue to Walter Benjamin’s arguably most famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction because of this phrase. It is indeed one of the key underpinnings of fascism, but the rest of the essay has a great deal of insight into the ways in which fascism collects and attains power from co-opting art’s aesthetics. It focuses mostly on the art object, and in the way before the means of mechanical reproduction (be it photography, film, or a physical forgery) that it had what Benjamin called an “aura.” Benjamin explains that through mechanical reproduction, be it via any of the previously mentioned methods, one removes the aura from an object. This is also stripping it from its cultish fascist attributes. Just like capitalism fetishizes the commodity, art that has an aura of artistic and aesthetic authority. He also argues that an aura can arise from simply maintaining historical relevance for an extended period of time.

“The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (23).

Benjamin argues that the destruction of the aura is integral for art to move from something obsessed with ritual, it can be based on politics. This, he insisted, is the way in which one resists fascism. It’s not merely through politicizing art, but moreso it is the use of technology to destroy the aura of the art-object and decommodify art.

Music has changed a great deal since when Benjamin wrote his essay. At the dawn of the new millennium was the dawn of even greater forms of technology that would allow reproduction to be altered even further from mechanical to digital reproduction. This is most evident with the invention and rise of the .mp3 file. In 1999, the same year as Mos Def dropped Black on Both Sides with it’s stirring single Mathematics and again two years before the Patriot act, Napster was founded. Even though it was a year after the Digital Millennium Copyrights Act, it caught fire, popularizing peer to peer file sharing of music. This mode of digital reproduction of music–digital recording was just picking up in the 90s–was the beginning of the replacement of CDs and was the first death knell of physical copies of music.

One can understand the aura when one picks up a full-size LP and drops the needle. It is one of the reasons there has been such a resurgence of vinyl in recent years: there is heft to it, and warmth. That said, p2p was the most revolutionary thing to happen to music perhaps ever. Although mainstream artists bemoaned lack of sales stolen by piracy, some independent artists revelled in it: it not only provided free publicity, but it was yet another way to stick it to a system that many noted was having increasingly cryptofascist tendencies.

One such band was an English rock group that just so happened to have revolutionized the way music was made in 2000 when they released Kid A. Give it a listen if you haven’t heard it and pretend the last record you heard was Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (one of the best albums released in 1999). You’ll probably try and justify that Kid A isn’t a rock album. It is. It’s just one of the most revolutionary albums in terms of production and genre bending in recent memory. Also, if you want to vomit from pure pretentious prose, read the album’s Pitchfork review. Regardless of their previous sonic revolutionary activity, the band is also notable in having one of the first and one of the loudest critiques of the criptofascism that was the Bush administration’s first term.

The band released Hail to the Thief in 2003. Intending to release the record June 9th, it was instead leaked on March 30th, just 10 days after the invasion of Iraq by Coalition forces. The leak was combatted by Radiohead’s record label EMI and initially bemoaned by band members themselves, but when they saw the amount of free publicity they received and became frustrated by EMI’s cease and desist letters against radio stations playing the band’s singles, they became disillusioned by the business side of music. The botched release of Hail to the Thief inspired them to self-release their next studio album In Rainbows in 2007 for free on their website in a zipped folder of .mp3s.

Another band fed up with avaricious labels stifling creativity was Wilco, often seen as the American Radiohead. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot he band’s most critically lauded album wasn’t catching on with the labels. It was too complicated and the label panned it as unmarketable. Problem was, they’d already booked a tour that was to begin in April 2001 and needed their material out there to sell it. They decided to stream their music directly from their website. Digitally manipulating around record labels is still in style to this day: Frank Ocean used a similar maneuver this year to get out of his contract with Universal and self-release his new album Blonde.

This new trend of independent release without a physical copy would have warmed the cockles of Walter Benjamin’s heart, especially with politically charged albums like Hail to the Thief. Not only was the move by these artists to self release without selling commercial copies (or selling fewer of them than the fashion, artists still need to live) and in a form that is digitally reproducible, Benjamin would argue, was the greatest form of resistance to an emerging crypto fascist force over the nation.

If you don’t believe the force was there at all, take the case of former Texas superstars the Dixie Chicks. On March 10th, 10 days before the invasion of Iraq and 20 before Hail to the Thief leaked, the Dixie Chicks stood onstage at the Shepherd’s Bush Theater in London at the onset of their World Tour. As they were about to begin their song Travelin’ Soldier, Natalie Maines introduced the tune, saying

“Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”

Word spread globally at 160 kb/s and soon the Dixie Chicks were getting banned from local radio stations, in a beef with Toby Keith and were panned with the McCarthian title of Un-American in the country music community. The United States were at a point where one could not question leadership without being branded.

The only way out was a politicization of aesthetics in music. More and more artists released work critical of the multiple wars as details came out that they were founded on misinformation and falsehoods. Mos Def’s second record was one such album. It was called The New Danger, and it focused on war, inequality, the appropriation of rock and roll from black Americans and many other social themes. Finally, the follow-up to his brilliant debut was here in 2004. Unfortunately, it was awful. It’s gaudy and indulgently sludgy use of guitars and rock elements detracted from any lyricism that could be scrounged from the tracks. As Jamin Warren noted in it’s review for Pitchfork Magazine, the song “‘War’ regurgitates a similar tune, adding a fairly benign critique of its titular subject, depressingly offering the impression that Mos believes a loud message makes an acceptable substitute for a thoughtful one.”

Instead of a blatant political statement about the war, hip hop went in a different direction, turning even more conscious of social issues of race and poverty. In 2005 Common, also known as Common Sense, released Be, one of the most iconic “Conscious” hip hop albums of the new millennium. It addressed the microcosm of Chicago instead of the macrocosm of the United States. In The Food Common addresses drug issues on the city’s south side not as a black-on-black problem as was often portrayed in the media, but as the result of social iniquities. Drugs were dealt to buy children food.

By 2008 the Bush era was at its close, but war raged on in numerous countries in the middle east, and intervention was decentralized through the use of drones and airstrikes. Direct intervention and troops on the ground were replaced by proxy wars in Yemen and Libya. The NSA was still surveilling US citizens and Guantanamo remained open. Music now is needed as much as it was in the mid 2000’s to be politicize aesthetics and keep conversation about political and social iniquities in this country flowing. Most notably taking up the mantle of people like Mos Def (his 3rd album in 2009 was actually great and heavily critiqued wars in the middle east) is none other than superstar Kendrick Lamar. Controversially hailed as hip hop’s preservationist messiah, in 2015 Kendrick released his best piece of work to date, To Pimp a Butterfly. The album followed in Black on Both Sides‘ direct footsteps in its critiques of the prison industrial complex, systemic oppression of black Americans, gun violence and police brutality. Benjamin would see a spark in these artists with whom he conflates historians, as he notes in his 6th thesis: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” This marks the politicization of aesthetics and it is our way forward.