At the 2003 Grammy awards, Chris Martin was strangely silent on the prospect of war in Iraq. Three days before, Coldplay’s lead singer had received a Brit Award for best British group and announced: ”We’re all going to die when George Bush has his way.” Yet when the American Recording Academy declared A Rush of Blood to the Head the year’s best alternative album, Martin did not mention Iraq. Critics were quick to note that Coldplay are on the cusp of major United States success, and that any anti-war sentiment might damage their career. But the reasons were more prosaic.CBS had warned all prospective winners that if they attempted to mention the war, they would be taken off air, an act of censorship Coldplay’s drummer Will Champion later described as ”absolutely disgusting — foul and totally fascist”. The only artist to circumvent the ban was Sheryl Crow, who appeared on stage with ”No war” emblazoned on her guitar strap. The ceremony’s host, Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit, remarked: ”I think we’re all in agreeance that we want this war to be over as quickly as possible.”Even without CBS’s ban, it seems unlikely that many Grammy winners would have used the ceremony to speak out against war. In Britain, stars such as Massive Attack’s 3D, Damon Albarn and Ms Dynamite have been at the forefront of the anti-war campaign and Travis’s Fran Healy, Garbage, Faithless, Paul Weller and others performed at One Big No, a protest gig organised by Emily Eavis, daughter of Glastonbury festival founder Michael Eavis. In the US, however, the story is entirely different.The Beastie Boys have rush-released a download of In a World Gone Mad — a song the band’s Adam Horovitz describes as ”a statement against an unjustified war” — but most other well-known artists have declined to comment on the Iraq crisis. At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Cleveland, it was left to Neil Young, a 57-year-old stalwart of hippy protests against Nixon and Vietnam, to make a stand.”We’re having fun tonight, but we’re gonna start killing people next week,” he said. ”I feel like I’m in a great, gas-guzzling SUV, driven by someone who’s drunk as fuck.” The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde has remarked that she hopes the US loses the war in Iraq. A great quote, but its impact is blunted, because that’s exactly what people expect from Hynde, an old hand at anti-fur protests. ”The younger artists are twenty-something kids,” says New York Times rock critic Jon Pareles. ”They haven’t lived through Vietnam, they haven’t lived through a war that saps the national spirit. People were pretty contented in the 1990s, they didn’t feel they had much to protest about.” Some current artists have registered their protests quietly, which seems to be missing the point. Rappers Missy Elliott and Jay-Z are among those who signed an Internet petition demanding more time for the weapons inspectors. As Pareles points out, a big-selling artist signing an Internet petition is unlikely to have the same impact as when they write a protest song: ”Musicians have the gift of melody. They can insinuate something into the culture. Hip-hop, in particular, is like a daily newspaper. It’s surprising that nobody has slipped a verse about the war into a mainstream song.”The obvious answer is that they’re afraid of alienating their mainstream audience. Artists like Young are so well-established that virtually nothing they say or do can affect their standing. If Young’s career survived his mid-1980s flirtations with Reaganism and Aids-related homophobia (”You see a faggot behind the fuckin’ cash register, you don’t want him to handle your potatoes,” he told a startled British journalist in 1985), it’s likely to survive his anti-war statements.For an artist in the more fickle world of pop, however, espousing unpopular views can mean commercial disaster. George Michael’s US career was on the wane before he released his Bush- and Blair-baiting single Shoot the Dog, but the opprobrium it stirred up in the US press hardly helped.Meanwhile, it was reported that Ms Dynamite’s label had told her to tone down her anti-war rhetoric, fearing it had impacted on British sales of her lauded debut album, A Little Deeper. The album has just been released to good reviews in the US: it will be intriguing to see if she takes her campaign to the US. Others suggest that if a major artist did record a protest song, no US radio station would play it. US radio has largely been consolidated into two national networks, Clear Channel and Infinity. Both are notoriously conservative. Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, however, dismisses this argument: ”I don’t believe that there’s any media that’s controlling hip-hop. You throw a rap record out the window, no Bush, nobody, can stop it if it’s a hit.” Pareles agrees: ”If an anti-war record were produced by [hit producers] the Neptunes, it would be on the air.” And he thinks there are deeper cultural reasons behind the silence: ”A lot of popular music these days is about machismo: I’m tougher, I’m badder. An anti-war message is not exactly a macho message. It’s hard to fit peace into your posturing. Saul Williams, the hip-hop poet, has compared gangster rap, with its fights over turf and manhood, to what Bush is doing: trying to prove to his dad that he’s tough enough. Maybe we can’t expect this from a gangster rapper.”Nevertheless, Pareles thinks the situation may change if the US invades. ”At the moment, there’s an element of ‘War, what war?’ It’s really hard to write a war song about a build-up. ‘Inspections will work — war doesn’t’ — that’s just not a catchy chorus.” Pareles is certain that ”a war, as opposed to the prospect of a war” would generate anti-war music. Until that happens, however, the biggest stars are liable to grab the most media attention. — Â