Political and Social Activism
In 1992, the Washington state legislature attempted to pass a bill called the Erotic Music Law. The law would allow courts to declare certain albums "erotic" by their content, and would make it illegal to sell those albums to those under the age of 18. A lobbying group called the Washington Music Industry Coalition formed as a response to the bill. Novoselic and Nirvana actively campaigned against the bill and performed a benefit concert for the lobbying group in September 1992.
In 1995, the Erotic Music Law was reintroduced to the Washington State Legislature as the Matters Harmful to Minors bill. Noting that the music industry had serious clout in Seattle given the success of the scene, Novoselic proposed creating a political action committee, which was named JAMPAC (Joint Artists and Musicians Political Action Committee). Over the next several years, JAMPAC fought a number of different issues, including the Teen Dance Ordinance, a 1985 law that severely limited the ability of minors to attend shows. With JAMPAC, Novoselic began to turn his focus more and more towards politics.
Novoselic remains active in politics as an elected State Committeeman, making appearances to advocate electoral reform (especially instant-runoff voting and proportional representation) and running the website. He considered a 2004 run for Lieutenant Governor of Washington (as a Democrat, challenging an incumbent of the same party), but ultimately decided against it. He also joined the board of FairVote, then the Center for Voting and Democracy), and was appointed chair in January 2008.
Novoselic's first book, Of Grunge and Government: Let's Fix This Broken Democracy, was published in October 2004. It covers Novoselic's musical past, including Nirvana's rise to a world wide phenomenon of the early 1990s. It also covers his interest in politics, his support of electoral reform, and his belief in the need to return to grassroots movements and clean up politics overall.
He supported Democratic Senator Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential election, though it was erroneously reported in some media outlets, that he had endorsed libertarian Republican Congressman Ron Paul.
He withdrew from the campaign for county clerk of Wahkiakum County. He was running under the "Grange Party". He is a member of The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry. However, the Grange is not actually a political party. He was running in order to protest Washington State's system, in which a candidate can claim any party as their own (real or fictional) without consent or support from the party.
Novoselic continues to support political reform, even looking at social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, as major factors in shaping the political future.
Read more about this topic: Krist Novoselic
Famous quotes containing the words political and/or social:
“To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to deny the rights of property is like cutting off the hands. To refuse political equality is like robbing the ostracized of all self-respect, of credit in the market place, of recompense in the world of work, of a voice in choosing those who make and administer the law, a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)