FROM the rise of Gregorian chants to the pointless death of Amy Winehouse, music has been as much about prevalent cultures as it is inevitably about the politics of the day.

The state of a people can perhaps be best gleaned at any given time by the tunes they hum or shun. Bob Dylan and the Beatles galvanised support for their politics through music as they left a trail of popular angst. Bob Marley didn’t leave anything to doubt as he described the “buffalo soldier — stolen from Africa, brought to America.”

Begum Akhtar in her transition from a courtesan who regaled rival Indian princelings with thumris and kajris into a popular gramophone singer said it all in Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar. Her music in the much-acclaimed movie helped Ray capture the waning feudal patronage of her art. The film was about politics though, but it was also about the collapse of a pillar of an ageing economic system.

While music reflects its own political ambience it also occasionally threatens it. Mughal emperor Aurangzeb indulged the clerical stranglehold over his rule by distancing himself from the evolved music his forebears had nurtured with tender care. Similarly, Afghanistan’s Taliban warriors may have no idea of the magic of the fellow Pakhtun vocalist Mohammed Sarhang’s pervasive legacy. History will inevitably show them the door as it did Aurangzeb.

In 1931, Berlin, American singer Sally Bowles performed at the Kit Kat Klub amid a rising tide of right-wing politics in Europe, more decidedly so in Germany. The character created by Christopher Isherwood in his novel Goodbye to Berlin was relived in Cabaret, a cult movie in which Liza Minnelli played Sally. It was based on Isherwood’s personal observations of a culture of music, glitz and brazen grit that mocked Nazi rule for as long as it could survive Hitler’s onslaught.

The Nazis promoted ‘Germanic’ culture and music, which returned people to the imagined ‘folk culture’ of their remote ancestors. Alongside, it inserted political propaganda into its cleverly packaged radio broadcasts. The German people’s tastes in music became much more secret and many of them used their new radios to listen to jazz so hated by Hitler for its Negro and Jewish roots.

In fact, the Second World War was the first major global conflict to take place in the age of electronically mass distributed music. By 1940, almost all north-eastern urban households in the US had radio. As the major powers entered the war millions of their citizens had home radio devices that did not exist in the First World War.

Music sometimes bridged emotions between rival camps. Lili Marlene became a transnational song during the war.

Soldiers stationed around the Mediterranean, including both German Afrika Korps and British Eighth Army troops, regularly tuned in to hear it. Erwin Rommel, commander of the Afrika Korps, admired the song and asked Radio Belgrade to incorporate it into their broadcasts, which they did.

Last week. I waded my way into a famous New York jazz bar and discovered a quaintly resilient spirit thriving in it as usually happens with this genre of music. It all seemed to defy the gathering political storm in America, one that has cloned a giant tsunami. The jam-packed hall at the Blue Notes bar (with branches in Italy and Japan — two other troubled economies!) gyrated to Jane Monheit’s luscious voice with Mark O’Connor’s virtuoso performance on the violin.

Monheit’s jazz vocalism is enriched by her romantic interpretations of exceptional songs that have made her a favourite in both the jazz and cabaret worlds.

Jazz did help ease the searing pain of the erstwhile black slaves but it also peeled the scabs for Rick in Casablanca in 1942, that iconic saga of a classic wartime romance. A song Rick had banished from his life echoed through the Blue Notes bar last week to an entirely opposite effect.

‘You must remember this A kiss is still a kiss A sigh is just a sigh The fundamental things apply As time goes by….’

The words may not seem to fetch any obvious connection between a heartrending moment in the midst of the Second World War and America’s current plight with its rollercoaster bourses giving millions sleepless nights. And yet as Jane Monheit began the song to wild applause she had touched a chord, one which will define America’s resilience through this crisis too. Of that I’m certain.

Begum Akhtar mirrored the end of a long and weakened feudal era. In a similar vein, Monheit and her countless fellow American musicians could be describing a tangled capitalist crisis that may yet reinvent itself into a rejuvenated era of more equitable and therefore durable economics.

As I sat in the blue dimly lit room with American revellers my mind strayed to Frank Sinatra’s much celebrated exhortations on how to conquer a very similar crisis.

‘For what is a man? What has he got?

If not himself — Then he has naught.

To say the things he truly feels And not the words of one who kneels.

The record shows I took the blows And did it my way.’

Music, of course, is not about winning or losing or transforming societies. If anything it accompanies us through our many social moods as precisely that — as an accompaniment.

In this respect, it is not difficult to see a glimpse of the social mayhem dogging Britain of late in the music of Amy Winehouse. Try to look at the televised looters and the lumpen mobs that went out of control on the streets of London and Manchester recently.

A sociology of alienation, of broken families and the slide into political cynicism would be extremely useful to discern the mind of the mobs. And yet, if you were to listen to a few of the lyrics by Amy Winehouse or scan available literature on her brief life, you would perhaps find a kernel of political explanation for many of the tragedies dogging Britain in recent days.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com