I've always liked the very offbeat Sophie B. Hawkins, ever since I saw an extended ad for her first album before a screening of Woody Allen's Shadows and Fog in Chicago at the Water Tower. The crowd guffawed at her once they heard the humorously direct title, but I was hooked and I've bought most of her albums over the years.

Having kept track of the "omnisexual" artist's liberal positions (she's very environmentally conscious, recently criticizing President Obama from the left on his BP spill response), I was shocked when I read she'd agreed to play GOProud's party at CPAC. This just didn't add up.

So I wrote a nice note to her PR to ask what fans are supposed to make of this, and I received this heartfelt note back from her management:

"I manage Sophie and Lisa Lori sent me your email re Sophie and GoProud. She is not supporting their beliefs but trying to build a bridge so we can all talk and be humans over party. They invited her to play for free. She said she would, if they recognized she is an artist and is going as an artist not taking sides, but being open for them to emjoy her music as humans.

 

"This is very risky for Sophie, she knows it, but she is trying to say lets all reach out our hands and try to find understanding.  She is so tired of the hate and I think thought love and music and art could build a bridge.

"I hope you remain a fan.  She is really trying to do something good in the world and I am sure she will address this soon"

I see where she's coming from, or where she thinks she's coming from, but why is it always liberal-minded people who feel they have to build bridges to people who are so contemptuous of their ideals? No conservative artist would play a climate-change awareness party, let alone the equivalent of CPAC. She's saying it's not political, but how can it be construed as anything but when the occasion and the group are highly political?

This is not me saying, "Ew! Don't play for Republicans!" but me asking why, if she feels the need to build a bridge, she would decide to build the bridge to the furthest point away on the other side, to a group whose leader thinks gay activists are literally worse than terrorists, to a group that pays hate-spewing Ann Coulter (while Sophie plays for free)?

If she were playing for a sitting Republican president at the White House, that is an instance in which an artist can play without it being a comment on the politics. (Though I wonder if Ricky Martin regrets his George W. Bush gig.) But to play for GOProud at CPAC? I don't see how it's avoided.

It's nice to know she isn't a GOProuder, but it's still baffling to me.