There's this whole debate these days about Listening to Venezuelan Voices or Listening to Iranian Voices and while on the one hand it's true that the Venezuelan Voices or the Iranian Voices promoted by the mass media tend to be overwhelmingly right-wing and pro-interventionist, the reaction of the left to dismiss the idea of listening to people from these countries also doesn't help, especially when there are positions that don't serve as cheerleaders either for the imperialists or the government - Haymarket's new anthology Venezuela in Crisis, for example, offers a good selection of Venezuelan leftists opposed to both US imperialism and the Venezuelan government, analyzing the issue of the continuities and ruptures between Chávez and Maduro

But beyond that, the reason the whole Listening to X Voices thing is a farce is that it's always Listening to X Voice. Right-wingers find a pro-interventionist voice in a given country and refuse to listen to any others, and anti-imperialists find a pro-government voice in a country and refuse to listen to any others, when the whole point is that you have to imagine that politics somewhere like Venezuela or Iran are as complicated and nuanced as your own country, rather than a one-dimensional caricature of Barbaric Oppression or Heroic Anti-Imperialist Struggle

Too many online music opinions be like:

“Your entire musical taste is suspect unless it includes this American list of American genres of American music.”