How do Godspeed You! Black Emperor create political music without lyrics?
Music has always served as a vehicle for people to speak out about their political beliefs. It can be used as an anthem to speak out against injustice, vent frustrations, or pledge allegiance to a cause, and countless notable artists throughout history have tackled political themes within their music, such as Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen.
However, their focal point is always the lyrical content, which begs the question of how one of the most political bands of the last 25 years has released one of their most poignant statements to date without saying a single word.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, a Canadian instrumental post-rock group that has consistently used its platform as an artist to raise awareness of issues on a global and local scale, has a particular focus on anti-capitalism, prison reform, and the denunciation of war. Their latest album, “No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead”, explicitly refers to the harrowing statistic of Palestinian casualties since the Israeli invasion of Gaza and boldly makes the decision to shy away from having a conventional album title so as to not distract from the atrocities that continue to take place in the region.
Yet despite having such a pointed statement to make in the album title, the band – as they have done throughout their career – continue to forgo the use of lyrics in their song, save for the occasional use of spoken word recordings. How is it then that they convey their message beyond album and song titles and create an atmosphere within their songs that invokes political sentiments?
The music the group creates in their new effort is more emotive than most other artists are capable of generating, and in their compositions’ lengthy runtimes, they can often channel feelings of grief and despair as well as hope and celebration. For example, on the track ‘Broken Spires at Dead Kapital’, the listener is subjected to a funereal dirge that one could interpret as an audio illustration of the sheer horror on the ground in Gaza, but this is contrasted by the sounds of optimism that the devastation will one day be a thing of the past on ‘Grey Rubble – Green Shoots’ as it reaches the climax in the centre, only to be served a blow with the mournful outro that highlights the harsh reality of the conflict.
There are plenty of stories told through just music on their records, and their latest album is one of the most pertinent examples of this as it works its way through a current crisis. The sole song that features any words is ‘Raindrops Cast In Lead’, which features a spoken word segment in Spanish that reflects on the loss of innocent lives.
Another example of how this is done on other releases of theirs is on their debut album F # A # ∞, where the opening track ‘The Dead Flag Blues’ begins with a recorded monologue depicting apocalyptic scenes over a pulsating drone, introducing the listener to the record’s themes of societal collapse. On Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! opener ‘Mladic’ we are introduced by a short sample of a police radio conversation that is seemingly prepared to open fire on an individual before the song devolves into another droning epic that borrows from Eastern European musical scales and gets increasingly more intense throughout, again seemingly transporting the listener to a world of brutality without really doing much to explicitly say as much.
Whether the listener does more of the hard work to view Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s songs as political by inferring sentiments through song titles is up for debate (‘The Dead Flag Blues’ could refer to the collapse of a nation, while ‘Mladic’ could be a reference to Serbian general Ratko Mladic who was charged with war crimes relating to the Srebrenica Massacre), but there is certainly a charge to their music that few other bands active today or during their time have managed to recreate.
