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The New
Yorker
Contenders:
Post-Punk
by Nick Paumgarten
October 11, 2004
It is customary for politicians to be called rock
stars and for rock stars to be active in politics, but there
haven���t really been any rock stars who are politicians, in the Mr.
Smith sense of the word. ���Sonny Bono doesn���t count,��� Danny
Goldberg, the record executive and liberal activist, said one night
last week. ���He was television, not rock and roll.��� Goldberg was
standing in the garden behind his town house, in the West Village,
in the midst of a party he and his wife, Rosemary Carroll, were
throwing for Krist Novoselic, the former bassist for Nirvana, one of
the bands Goldberg used to manage. Goldberg was making the case that
Novoselic was a serious man, with serious prospects. ���He���ll be
governor of the state of Washington one day,��� Goldberg said.
���He���s our Arnold.���
The occasion for the party, if not for the comparison, was
Novoselic���s new book, ���Of Grunge and Government: Let���s Fix
This Broken Democracy!,��� which Goldberg had published, in
partnership with Akashic Books (its motto is
���Reverse-gentrification of the literary world���). Novoselic was
using a book tour to canvass on behalf of some of his pet electoral
reforms (instant runoff voting, proportional representation), his
promotion of which would be familiar to legislators and
alternative-weekly editors in his home state of Washington. He���s a
local-politics veteran; in 1995, he helped form jampac���the
Joint Artists and Music Promotions Political Action Committee���in
order to help get Seattle teen-agers access to live music. From
there, it was a short leap to ranked ballots.
Novoselic, thirty-nine, is tall and baldish, with a kindly,
half-bewildered expression and posture that call to mind the Andy
Kaufman character Latka. At the party, he was wearing a wide-striped
oxford shirt and new black Carhartt pants, with a big belt buckle.
When it came time for him to speak, the guests���for the most part,
rock-and-roll chroniclers and practitioners in a political mood
(���We were thinking that a good name for a band would be Swing
State���)���gathered at one end of the garden. Novoselic���s opening
remark, ���Hey, thanks for coming,��� prompted laughter, as though
his audience was prepared to receive him as a lampooner of stump
talk. But silence took hold as he embarked on a sincere speech about
hope (���As I travel around the nation meeting people . . .���) and
apathy (���. . . who have lost faith in our democracy���). He
chopped the air with his right hand. His voice had the singsongy
cadence of the Pacific Northwest, which to tristate-area ears
sounded like Eskimo.
On the rocker-activist continuum, Novoselic would be slotted,
ardorwise, somewhere between Don Henley and Dee Snider, but in terms
of technical expertise he���s probably closer to Frank Zappa.
���We���re stuck with this eighteenth-century electoral system,���
Novoselic said, winding up his garden talk. ���We need to update our
operating system. An electoral system is like an operating system on
a computer. We���ve got this hard drive, and we can tap all the
information. We���ve got a real fast processor; it can handle the
participation. But our operating system is like this DOS system from
the eighties. We need an open-source democracy, like a Linux system
or a Macintosh, a 10.35. And, of course, Windows, the new Windows
system, me being from Washington. So, we can do it!���
The state of Washington has not historically been a great
incubator of national political talent. The big exception may be
Henry (Scoop) Jackson, the longtime Democratic senator and
Red-baiter, whose prot��g��s included Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz,
and Elliott Abrams. Novoselic is no Scoop Jackson. Still, he has
given up on the music business and taken up the scutwork of politics
full time. He even considered running for lieutenant governor this
fall. In the end, he said, ���I decided I���d rather do something
than be something.��� Still, in the spirit of the political game, he
won���t rule out future campaigns. ���It just depends on what���s
going on, how the landscape looks,��� he said. ���Right now, I���m
just looking forward to the next legislative session in Olympia.��� |
