The Politics Behind the Art You Already Know

Hidden in Plain Sight

By Dominick Conidi, Alexandria Shaner , Bill Fletcher Jr 

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

You know this art. But do you remember what it was actually about?

Hidden in Plain Sight uncovers the politics inside the songs, films, books, and images millions of us already know—and asks: What happened to the message?

Art is powerful. It can help us recognize that problems we experience as private are often collective. It can help us imagine alternatives, and see new possibilities for change. That’s also why powerful institutions work to manage culture: by suppressing some ideas, commercializing others, stripping away context, and turning radical critique into something safe.

But meanings can be reclaimed.

Look again. Recover the story. Imagine more. And follow the series as we explore how culture can help us build the power and possibilities for a better world.

Click here to download our 1-page PDF guide!

Transcript:

You know this song.

You’ve heard it at sporting events. Political rallies. Fourth of July celebrations.

But listen to the verses.

A young man is sent to Vietnam. He comes home. He can’t find work. The country that used him for war has little use for him now.

Born in the U.S.A. is a song about war, class, and abandonment. And somehow, it became a “patriotic” anthem, dismissing the original intent of the piece.

How does that happen?

You know this one too. Fun. Catchy. Impossible not to sing along with.

But listen closely.

You put in the hours. Someone else takes the credit. You make the money. Someone else gets rich.

Forty years later, millions of people still know exactly what she’s talking about.

Millions of people know these works. Far fewer remember what they were actually saying. And sometimes, the forgetting does political work.

In this series, we’re going to take some of the songs, movies, books, and images millions of people already know—and look again.

Some of these stories will be familiar. Some may surprise you. And some may make you hear or see something you’ve encountered a hundred times in a different way.

Through the series, we’ll ask what happened to the message—and what it can still tell us about power, liberation, and the world we might build.

The Message Didn’t Disappear. We Stopped Hearing It.

You don’t always have to ban a dangerous idea.

You can take away its context. Leave out the inconvenient parts. Turn the critique into entertainment. Put the rebel on a T-shirt. Sell the anger back to the people who felt it in the first place.

And after a while, the work becomes so familiar that we stop hearing what it’s saying.

Take Pink Floyd’s Money. A song about greed. About a culture that treats wealth as a measure of human worth. Today, it can sit comfortably inside celebrations of wealth and business success.

Or Fortunate Son. A song about class privilege—about the children of the powerful escaping war while working-class people fight it. Now it can play almost anywhere as a burst of generic American rebellion.

The sound remains. The target gets blurry.

That doesn’t mean the art has failed. It means there’s another struggle over the art.

Who gets to tell us what it means?

Sometimes, They Just Leave Out the Verses

Everybody knows This Land Is Your Land. For generations, children have sung it as a simple celebration of America.

But Guthrie wrote verses that many people never learned. Verses about private property. Poverty. People going hungry.

In one, a sign says:

Private Property.

And Guthrie answers:

The other side didn’t say nothing.
This land was made for you and me.

Suddenly, the song is asking something much more difficult:

Who gets to own the land? Who gets excluded? Who gets to make the rules?

The song survived. So did the question.

The part that disappeared was the connection between the two.

The Politics We Learned as Children

Take The Lorax. Most of us met it as children. A funny story. A strange little creature. Bright illustrations.

But look again.

A living forest becomes a business opportunity. The more that’s extracted, the more money is made. The damage piles up. Other people pay the price.

That’s a pretty clear story about power. About who makes decisions. Who profits. And who lives with the consequences.

The book came out more than fifty years ago. The story hasn’t gotten less relevant. We’ve just gotten very good at treating it as a story for children.

Some Ideas Become So Familiar, We Forget They Were Ever Radical

Then there’s Star Trek.

A future where humanity has overcome many of the assumptions that organize life today. People from different worlds working together. Technology directed toward exploration and human development. Less scarcity. Less nationalism. A society that can imagine something beyond endless competition.

Millions of people grew up watching that future. Most weren’t sitting there thinking, I’m watching a radical political vision. They were watching television.

And that may be part of the point.

Art can put an idea in front of us before we have the language to argue about it. It can make another world feel familiar. It can make the supposedly impossible feel ordinary.

That’s no small thing.

People are constantly being told what is realistic. What is human nature. What will never change.

Art can interrupt that. It can say: Look again.

Why the Struggle Over Culture Matters

We’re living through a struggle over how people understand the world.

Corporations spend billions telling us what happiness looks like. What success looks like. Who we should envy. What we should buy.

Powerful institutions tell us which problems are urgent and which are supposedly just the way things are.

Authoritarian movements turn fear and grievance into stories about who belongs and who doesn’t—and who should be blamed for problems created much higher up.

None of this happens by magic. There are institutions behind it. Money behind it. Media behind it. Algorithms behind it. People and organizations working to protect systems that concentrate wealth and power at the top.

And those systems depend, in part, on how we see ourselves. As consumers. As isolated individuals. As competitors. As people whose problems are private.

That’s one reason culture matters.

Art can cut through that isolation. It can help someone recognize: Wait. This isn’t just happening to me. This has a history. There are reasons for it. Other people are living through it too.

And maybe we don’t have to accept it.

That is where private experience can become public understanding. And public understanding can become the beginning of collective action.

Popular Doesn’t Mean Powerless

And popularity doesn’t erase politics. Sometimes popularity is exactly how liberatory ideas travel.

9 to 5 became a massive hit because working people recognized something in it. Respect became more than a great song because people carried it into struggles over dignity, gender, race, and power.

A song can move millions and still carry a sharp political charge. That’s the point.

The question is what happens as it moves.

Does the message stay connected to the lives and struggles that gave it meaning? Does it get flattened into a slogan? Does the rebellion become a brand? Do powerful institutions celebrate the art while ignoring the people and movements whose struggles made it necessary?

Those are different things. And they matter.

We don’t want liberatory art to remain obscure. We want its ideas to travel. We want more people to encounter them.

The struggle is over whether those ideas keep their force—or get turned into something safe.

When History Gets Sanitized

Look at Guernica. One of the most recognizable anti-war images in the world.

But recognize the painting and explain the history behind it? That’s a different thing.

The bombing of civilians. The Spanish Civil War. The rise of fascism. The people whose lives were shattered.

When that history fades, the painting can become a general symbol of suffering. Beautiful. Powerful. And safer.

The same thing happens to people.

We celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. while editing out his attacks on war, racism, and economic inequality. We praise Rosa Parks while turning a lifetime of organizing into one exhausted woman refusing to give up her seat.

We love the symbol. The politics become inconvenient.

That’s how collective memory gets managed.

But it can also be reclaimed. A new generation can go back and ask: What were people fighting for? What did they win? What did they lose? What did those in power want us to forget? And what is still unfinished?

Then the artwork—or the historical figure—stops being a relic. It becomes part of the present again.

Liberation Has Always Created Its Own Culture

The people who changed history understood this.

Workers built songs and newspapers. The Black freedom struggle produced music, poetry, literature, visual art, fashion, and new ways of seeing Black life and Black power. Women took experiences that had been dismissed as private and revealed their social and political roots. Colonized people recovered histories that empire had tried to erase. Queer communities created languages, images, and spaces where people could find one another—and become more visible to themselves.

This wasn’t decoration around the struggle. Culture helped make the struggle imaginable.

It helped people recognize that what felt personal was often shared.

And once you understand that, something can shift. Your problem may no longer look like your failure. It may start to look like a condition. A pattern. A structure. Something people can change together.

Recognition Has to Become Power

Of course, understanding the problem doesn’t solve it.

A great song doesn’t build a union by itself. A brilliant film doesn’t redistribute wealth. A viral video doesn’t create democratic institutions. People at the top don’t surrender power because we’ve finally seen through them.

Power has to be built from below.

But art can be part of that process. It can give a feeling a name. It can make people curious. It can start conversations. It can help strangers recognize a shared reality.

Then comes the harder work. Building relationships. Building organizations. Learning strategy. Creating institutions capable of challenging the ones that dominate our lives.

The question isn’t whether culture or organizing changes the world. Movements have always needed both.

Culture can help open the door. Organization helps people walk through it together.

So What Happened to the Message?

That’s the question behind this series.

Not simply: What did the artist mean?

And not: Surprise. This famous artwork was secretly political.

We’re interested in what happened next.

What happened when the art entered the world? Who embraced it? Who profited from it? Who left parts out? Who tried to make it harmless? Who kept its meaning alive? Did the work change what people believed was possible? Did it help a movement grow? Did the culture absorb it while rejecting the politics behind it? Or did those politics survive long enough for a new generation to hear them again?

That’s where things get interesting.

Because culture isn’t a museum. Meanings move. They get contested. They get lost. And sometimes they come back.

The Future Has to Become Imaginable

Let’s take this one step further.

If art can help people recognize the world they live in, it can also help them imagine the world they want.

A world where the economy serves people and the planet. Where housing is a right. Where work doesn’t mean spending most of your life enriching someone else. Where care matters. Where democracy reaches the places where power is actually exercised. Where ordinary people have a real say over the decisions shaping their lives. Where the future isn’t decided by billionaires, corporations, or distant institutions acting above our heads.

Those ideas won’t become real because someone writes a beautiful song about them. But they are easier to build when people can imagine them. When they can discuss them. When they can experiment with them. When they can organize around them. When they can experience, in small and larger ways, what collective power feels like.

That’s part of the strategic task ahead.

Not simply convincing people that the present is terrible. Most people already know that.

The deeper challenge is helping people see that the present is not inevitable.

So—you know this artwork. But do you remember what it was actually about?

Maybe you do. Maybe you remember something different from the person standing next to you. That’s part of the story too.

Art doesn’t arrive in a vacuum. It enters a world shaped by power, memory, struggle, and everything we’re taught to see—and everything we’re taught to ignore.

So we’re going to look again. At the songs. The movies. The books. The paintings. The images and stories that millions of people already know.

We’ll recover some history. Follow the politics. And ask: What happened to the message?

Because some messages are suppressed. Some are commercialized. Some are stripped of context. Some are absorbed. Some help change the world. And some remain unfinished. Waiting for another generation to pick them up.

Art can help us recognize the conditions we already live under. It can show us that problems we experience as private are often collective. And it can help us imagine alternatives.

The people and institutions with the most to lose from that have always understood the power of culture. Movements for liberation understand it too.

The future won’t arrive because we found the right song. But every movement that has changed the world has had to learn how to tell a different story about what is possible.

This is one place to start… And we’re going to keep looking.

At the songs. The movies. The books. The images. Asking what happened to the message—and what happens when we rediscover it.

Look again. Recover the story. Imagine more.

Follow Hidden in Plain Sight at ZNetwork.org.

Dominick Conidi is a recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an editor of ZNetwork.org. He previously organized with the Sunrise Movement and is a current member of North Jersey DSA.

Alexandria Shaner, Originally from the US, Alexandria has lived most of her life in the Caribbean, as well as in Egypt and Central America. A sailor, writer, organizer, and street medic, she has been involved in community organizing, media, and education for over 20 years. Alexandria is currently an editor of ZNetwork.org, a writer for Extinction Rebellion, and is active with the Democratic Socialists of America and Food Not Bombs. Her work has appeared on ZNet, Common Dreams, Foreign Policy in Focus, CounterPunch, LA Progressive, Waging Nonviolence, Antiwar.com, The African, The Socialist Project, mέtaCPC, DiEM25, PeaceNews, Green Left, Popular Resistance, Resilience.org, Grassroots Economic Organizing, Shareable, Dissident Voice, Truthdig, Democratic Underground, and various other outlets.

Bill Fletcher Jr (born 1954) has been an activist since his teen years. Upon graduating from college he went to work as a welder in a shipyard, thereby entering the labor movement. Over the years he has been active in workplace and community struggles as well as electoral campaigns. He has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941”; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of “Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice“; and the author of “‘They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions.” Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web.