From the political to the personal Pop music in 2004 BY MATT ASHARE

It’s hard not to look at 2004 as an enormous failure. That probably has a lot to do with the fact that as early as March, at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference, I had my hopes raised by a "Rock Against Bush" show that drew a capacity crowd to one of Austin’s better known clubs (Emo’s) and offered everything from stand-up comedy by David Cross to political commentary by MC Jello Biafra (formerly of the Dead Kennedys) to amusing punk salvos by punk vets NOFX. For the next few months, through conversations with Biafra, NOFX frontman Fat Mike, and others who were involved in putting together two Rock Against Bush compilations as well as manning the punkvoter.com organization that was supposed to get thousands of new young voters to go to the polls in November to cast their vote against George W. Bush, I became convinced that for the first time in my life, punk rock was going to make a difference — that the polling booths in swing states would be overrun by the 18-to-25-year-olds whom all the political pundits claimed didn’t matter in a national election because they didn’t vote. Well, they did vote — in larger numbers than ever before. But so did thousands of Christian evangelicals who were scared to death of gay marriage and Kerry’s perceived "liberalism." ("He’s gonna take away our guns"; "He’s gonna make us eat French cheese"; "We’re all doomed to spend eternity burning in a lake of fire if we don’t vote Republican.")

And so, as I watched the election results roll in, I once again realized that when rock and roll changes the world, it’s rarely as simple as mobilizing a bunch of people to vote in one election. Music may have an immediacy that other art forms lack, but it works on our psyches in mysterious ways, to steal a phrase from Bono. And the disappointment of November has given way to a cautious optimism as I’ve come to grips with the thought that all those 18-to-25-year-olds will be back in four years to vote again. And they’ll be four years wiser. Maybe they’ll have even spent those four years creating the kind of grass-roots organizations that the Republicans are so good at. Yeah, I’m probably just getting my hopes up again. But isn’t that what rock and roll is all about: getting your hopes up and then having them dashed, again and again and again?

This was a year in which politics and music mixed in a way that I haven’t seen since I bought Let Them Eat Jellybeans (Alternative Tentacles) during the Reagan presidency and sang along to "Jesus Entering from the Rear." And against my better judgment, it made me care about the world beyond my iPod headphones in a way that I haven’t in some time.

1) Green Day, American Idiot (Reprise)

The title track says it all, in the same guttersnipe growl that made Joe Strummer’s pronouncements seem so urgent. But apart from lobbing bombs at the Bush regime, Billie Joe went out on a musical limb this time and wrote rock operettas like "Jesus of Suburbia," which if nothing else proved that he’d overcome the ADD that’s said to affect so many of his generation. I wasn’t expecting a great album from this little East Bay trio, and maybe that’s what made American Idiot so consuming.

2) U2, How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (Interscope)

It must have been a tough decision for Bono: do we release an album before the election in the hope that it will galvanize anti-Bush voters or do we put our energy into recording an album that will help express the people’s outrage if George W. is re-elected while also working as balm for their tired souls? U2 didn’t really have to worry about the former because John Kerry used "Beautiful Day" at his DNC coronation. Instead, they teamed up with iPod in the commercial coup of the decade, and they gave us an album that’s both inspiring and soothing. We know who Bono would have voted for, so we trust him when he looks around at the world and finds joy underlying the disappointment that runs through How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. U2 put out an album that made it sound as if the good guys were winning.

3) The Pixies reunion

Of course, if you wanted to keep your mind off the election, there was no better distraction than the reunion of the once Boston-based band who catalyzed the last wave of rock-and-roll rebellion by inspiring Kurt Cobain to write "Smells like Teen Spirit." Plus, rock and roll is so full of stories of bands who got screwed out of the big payoff by being ahead of their time that it was magical watching 40,000 or 50,000 cram themselves together to experience the reunion of the mighty Pixies at the Coachella Music Festival in California earlier this year. Maybe we’ll even get a new album out of the band in 2005. Or is that too much to hope for?