Politics & Power Quote by Paul Kantner

Kantner frames “the starship thing” less as a band and more as an instrument panel for a movement. In his mouth, Starship isn’t a sci-fi gimmick or branding exercise; it’s a continuation of a civic argument that had already been staged in sound. By calling it “really political action and reaction,” he’s insisting that the music is downstream from events: protests, crackdowns, hope, burnout, and the churn of late-’60s America as it slid into the harder, more managed reality of the ’70s.

The key phrase is “natural outgrowth.” Kantner is doing two moves at once: defending evolution and rejecting the idea that change equals betrayal. Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers was already a record that flirted with revolution in plain language; Starship, he implies, is what happens when that energy hits the wall of consequences. “Action and reaction” suggests not just activism but backlash, co-optation, surveillance, disillusionment, and the industry’s pressure to package dissent. The “starship” metaphor works because it sells forward motion while quietly acknowledging escape velocity: a desire to leave a compromised ground behind without pretending you can.

There’s also a musician’s realism underneath the idealism. Bands don’t only respond to politics; they respond to audiences, radio, money, and internal fractures. Kantner’s line tries to keep moral continuity intact amid aesthetic shifts, arguing that even the turn toward grander, more conceptual “Starship” imagery remains anchored in the same political weather that made Volunteers feel urgent in the first place.