Music Was Never Apolitical. We Just Didn’t Always Notice.

There's a sentence that keeps showing up under festival posts and artist statements lately: "Keep politics out of music."

Every time I read it, something feels off. People are allowed to want a good night out. Of course they are. But the sentence assumes music and politics were ever separate in the first place, and they never were. The music I've spent over a decade working in, psytrance included, wouldn't exist without politics.

A few reminders.

Goa was a walkout before it was a genre

The people who drifted down the hippie trail to Anjuna in the late '60s and '70s weren't just looking for beaches. A lot of them were walking away from the Vietnam War, the draft, Cold War Europe and the whole idea of a nine-to-five life. The parties they threw on those beaches, and the music that grew out of them, carried that refusal in their DNA.

Listen to old Goa and psy records and you'll hear Timothy Leary sampled again and again, "turn on, tune in, drop out". Richard Nixon reportedly called Leary the most dangerous man in America. When Leary was jailed, he escaped with the help of a radical underground group. That's the voice our scene chose to put on its records.

And it hasn't stopped. Anyone who has run a party in Goa knows how the 10pm loudspeaker cut-off, the permits, the raids and the "settlements" have shaped where and how we're allowed to gather. Who gets to dance, where, and until when, has always been a political question here.

A law against repetitive beats

In 1994, the UK passed a law giving police the power to shut down outdoor gatherings playing music made of "a succession of repetitive beats". That's the actual wording.

It was written for the free party sound systems that had pulled tens of thousands of people into fields across the country. The scene answered with protest marches, sound systems on the back of trucks. Autechre even released a track built so that no bar repeats, just so DJs could play it legally. A government wrote rave into law. Nobody back then thought it was "just music".

Chicago blew up disco, then built house

In 1979, a radio host in Chicago blew up a crate of disco records at a baseball game, and the crowd stormed the field. It was sold as a joke. But disco belonged to Black, Latino and queer crowds, and many of the records people brought weren't even disco. They were just Black music.

In the same city, Frankie Knuckles was playing at a club called the Warehouse to a crowd that was mostly Black and gay. The sound took its name from that club: house. It was born because people unwelcome almost everywhere else needed one place to be themselves.

The resort nobody would play

In the 1980s, apartheid South Africa built a luxury resort called Sun City and offered huge fees to international stars to break the cultural boycott. Some took the money and were blacklisted for it. In 1985, more than fifty musicians, Miles Davis, Run-DMC and Bob Dylan among them, recorded a track called "Sun City", each promising never to play there. Radio stations wouldn't touch it. Today, nobody remembers it as a career mistake.

So here's how I see it

Look at where this music comes from. Travellers who walked out on a war. Black kids in Chicago and Detroit. Queer crowds with nowhere else to go. Free party kids chased across fields by police. Electronic music was never an escape from politics. It was a reaction to it.

Psytrance especially. Our flyers have talked about freedom, love and tribe for thirty years. Our festivals sell the dream of a different way to live. We put Leary on our records. We can't build a whole culture on that and then go quiet the moment it's asked to mean something.

So when someone says "keep politics out of music", I hear "keep it out now that it makes me uncomfortable". Because nobody says it when an artist posts about a new release, a brand deal or their gym routine. The rule only seems to appear when someone talks about people being killed.

I do understand the fear. Most artists in this scene are freelancers living gig to gig, and speaking up can cost bookings. I've seen it happen. That pressure is real and it deserves some grace. But silence isn't neutral. It never was. It's a choice, the same as speaking is.

Back to the dancefloor

Most nights, people just want to dance, and honestly that's the best thing we do. I'll never argue against it.

But every generation of this music has had a moment where it had to decide what it stood for. The ones we remember, the ones we sample, the ones whose names we print on our tees, are the ones who said something.

Music was never apolitical. We just didn't always notice. These days, it's getting harder to pretend we haven't.