To claim to be "non-political" is a privilege reserved for the powerful. This is because the political norm, our current existence, is built to be invisible to those with power. Reducing friction, increasing transparency, removing obstacles; these are all things which any successful political system is built to do. The only question is for who it does so. In our case, it is for the ruling class and its allies, for Westerners, for men, for cis-people. For them, it is easy to be "non-political" because, from their perspectives, politics doesn't seem to exist. As long as it does its job well, it disappears.
In response to this refutal of politics as manifested in art, an opposite cliche has emerged: "all art is political". It is easy to agree with this statement and most people in the blog's circles do. But what does the statement actually mean? In what way is all art political? Another easy answer is that art is about expressing yourself. The question of who gets to express themselves and how they do so is, of course, a political question. But this seems insufficient. After all, for art to be political, we expect more from it than mere existence. It might be better to say that all art involves politics, as does the entirety of human existence, but that invites us to ask what makes art truly political instead?
I'd like to propose at least a partial answer to this question by pointing to a certain way in which art can be political - when it involves positing future imaginaries. Future imaginaries are descriptions and depictions of different ways in which our future might be; ideas and proposals for how we might live our lives differently in the days to come. They are inherently political because they propose a different arrangement of our material reality and our relationships with each other and the world around us. Which is as good of a definition of what politics actually is as you're going to get here. This is, naturally, also about the present - the future imaginary "bleeds back" into the present and shines a light on how we live now and how we might do so otherwise.
Therefore, we can say that art which is about how we live now and how we might live differently in the future (whether explicitly, through writing or lyrics, or implicitly, through choices of medium and style) is one very political style of art. More importantly perhaps than the future which such art proposes is the present which it makes visible and resists against. As mentioned above, the "powers that be" would like of the current arrangement of the world to be invisible (more on this here). Think of it this way - a supermarket catalogs the world into discrete and completely artificial categories. If you run down its aisles and scream "none of this makes any sense!" you will be arrested. Don't try this at home please.
Under that definition, Anthropoceno's No Ritmo da Terra is one of the most political works of art I can remember. It uses its art to directly confront the current order of things in multiple ways. First, it challenges the relationship between Western genres and what is sometimes horribly dubbed "world" or "folk" influences. We rail against this on the blog very often, instruments, sounds, or compositions taken from various cultures and "tacked on" to different styles of metal. The core sound remains firmly grounded in Western genres, with the "outside" influences merely gestured at instead of firmly understood and incorporated into the music.
No Ritmo da Terra is the opposite of this. It is a black metal album but one which performs a deep, syncretic fusion of Brazilian musical styles like, afoxé, candomblé music and even capoeira. As a result, it sounds like nothing you've ever heard. It has the harsh, high-pitched vocals of black metal but also sonorous and varied vocals from the African-Indigenous traditions of Brazilian popular music. It has blastbeats and tremolo picks but also electronic drums, glitch, African percussive instruments, berimbau, and the sounds of animals and the jungle. Musically, the adjective we're looking for is "eclectic" but this is something more since it insists on fusing all of the elements into a cohesive core rather than appeal to the aesthetics of wild, improvisational experimentation.
This style is underpinned by both charged lyrics and a well written manifesto. These underpin the objective of the art that has already been conveyed by the music itself: to challenge the existing order of things and imagine a new way to be. Just like the music recalibrates the center and the periphery, breaking down those ideas by reaching out far and wide for ideas and bringing them "back" into a new core, the ideas at hand demand that we recalibrate our relationship with the world around us. The explicit content of the project connects itself to the work of Indigenous, Marxist, and Anarchist thinkers of the last one hundred years, thinkers who would have us conceptualize our relationship with our world as more than just resources to exploit but rather objects and subjects that are worthy of their own volition and agency.
The whole thing comes together into some of the most effective art I can remember and certainly one of the best albums of the year. Because the political message of the work exists both at the unmediated level of the art itself and the more mediated level of the text, it can be experienced in multiple ways. You can easily "just" listen to the album and let it envelop you in its different vision for what black metal (and post-rock) can sound like. If you listen carefully, it will make you question why other albums sound the way they do and only the way they do. But you can also engage with these ideas on a higher/lower level (whichever way you conceptualize the relationship between music and text) and think more consciously about the politics of the project. In an age where "all art is political" has become a throw-away phrase, Anthropoceno shows us one way in which it truly is so, a vehicle through which to not only imagine a different future but to manifest it in the present.