For vanity’s sake we should all pretend that celebrities and musicians help swing undecided voters just as we pretend that they’re our moral guidance. It’s a healthy naivetÈ.

I was not surprised to see students posing for pictures with Josh Hartnett on Tuesday morning in front of the campus center. To me it showed a healthy cynicism. Students couldn’t take him serious enough, knowing he starred in one of the most blatantly myopic American films in the last ten years, “Pearl Harbor.”

I vainly think that we’re rational enough not to strictly vote for straight teeth. This campus did in favor of the linseed-polished Gore and the off-again-on-again flaccid and botox-injected, gravity-defying carriage of John Kerry. As did the trashy elite of Hollywood. It’s no new revelation that American political campaigns rival that of the most epic theater. So should we let Bono, Sharon Stone and Spielberg feel they can manipulate the process? Politics and pop culture have appropriated each other’s mutual function to become indistinguishable.

The moments when you see both sides tangibly intermingling, however, is when they disassociate. Springsteen playing at a Kerry rally, and Amy Grant for Bush, is more than just affected or silly but illogical. Only Springsteen feels the urge to show publicly his support as if it mattered more than I did. The problem is more than just preaching to the converted. Springsteen’s music and Kerry’s campaign lose their message when music takes a strict political approach and politics an artful one.

Art, politics and entertainment all have their shared functions but not one can be an exclusive function of the other. Contemporary art, and always, music, is the underlying antithesis of politics. Entertainment, for lack of a better term, is the mixing of the antithesis and the dominant ideal. Whenever a musician picks up an instrument or puts out an album, the specific world view attached is politics in itself, ready to be absorbed into entertainment or pop culture if the conditions are right.

Elvis, The Beatles, Bo Diddley, and The Stooges are just a small sample of artists who have engendered a political antithesis in the face of Cold War anxiety. Nirvana, and Pavement to a fuller extent, embodied a post-Cold War apathy to a gloating capitalism. N.W.A. represents the isolation of an urban, black youth in the midst of being left behind by 1980s politics. You even see it going back to the Great Depression with Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads as one of the first punk recordings. Guthrie’s songs about the plight of migrant Oklahomans manifest the disintegration of the American government of the time. We listened to the same thing as The Sex Pistols foamed at the mouth in 1977 critiquing the crisis of the British youth and social divisions. Capitalism and Marxism wouldn’t do but only apocalyptic anarchy. Guthrie and the Pistols tended to be more overt in their observations while Pavement and The Ramones let it run through personal emotions, or lack thereof.

Politics is a construct, albeit vital, and art is the foible of these constructs. When I went to vote, my impassioned fits towards American politics only found itself buried in art. The thesis and antithesis of any issue I could dream up I found hidden somewhere in a record collection, DVD, or book. I had to let The Clash’s London Calling play through—listening to Joe Strummer’s biting wit and raucous instrumentation, it felt only natural that the world was falling apart yet rebuilding itself simultaneously. The poet Stanley Kunitz said, “I remind myself that to choose to live as a poet in the modern superstate in itself is a political action.” More and more the same rings true of artistic endeavors.

Candidates then often find themselves calling on artists as a reflection of themselves rather than any speech or advertisement to appeal to a certain demographic. However, I feel there’s very little place for art to deign in politics. Musicians wield their instruments as the most artful weapons they have—the music is inherently political with a perpetually permeating world view. In fact, my vote for president isn’t even American or alive, but I wanted to write him in anyway.