Where have all the protest songs gone?
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/article/828049--where-have-all-the-protest-songs-gone
The rise-up anthems are out there, minstrels say, but you have to
know where to listen
Jun 25 2010
By Greg Quill
Sometime in the late 1960s, Pete Seeger in his prime with just a
banjo and a 12-string guitar stepped up to a single microphone on
the concert stage of the Sydney Town Hall in Australia, and started singing.
One after another, the simple yet profoundly affecting songs that
moved a generation a couple of generations, actually poured forth
like some kind of healing sacrament.
"Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" "Turn, Turn, Turn." "We Shall Not
Be Moved." "Amazing Grace." "We Shall Overcome." "Little Boxes."
"Guantanamera." "If I Had a Hammer." "Joe Hill." "Waist Deep In The
Big Muddy." "Bring 'Em Home." "Irene Goodnight." The hymns filled the
3,000-seat auditorium.
Audience voices raised in unison, in harmony, in joyful dissonance,
accompanied every one, with Seeger's energetic encouragement. This
was the soundtrack of an era, accompanied with his musical
contemporaries Joan Baez, Bob Dylan.
Two hours later, the exhausted but jubilant folk singer made his
final exit, waving his instruments above his head. The crowd
dispersed into the warm night, still roaring out the songs we were
convinced could and would make the world a better place. Maybe they
did. For a while.
The protests accompanying this weekend's G20 summit in Toronto might
be remembered for their noise and fury, but probably not for songs.
Protest songs at least the kind that galvanized thousands at a time
during the labour struggles of the 1920s and '30s, anti-nuclear and
civil rights marches in the 1950s, the anti-Vietnam war rallies in
the 1960s and the economic upheavals in Britain during the Thatcher
years seem to have disappeared from the landscape.
At least they have from the commercial airwaves. But their spirit
drives much of the best contemporary music, Bruce Cockburn says.
"They haven't disappeared, we just have to hunt them down," argues
Cockburn, who has never wavered in a 40-year career from an almost
obsessive devotion to taking on war-mongers, empire builders and
environment polluters with narrative-based songs of often brutal outspokenness.
Protest songs are alive and well, he says. They are just hiding in
plain sight. "We just don't hear them. We don't hear anything
worthwhile these days unless we go looking for it."
The erosion in the Internet age of conventional mass media may have
given everyone and everything a chance to shine, adds Cockburn. "But
there are so many kinds of exposure, so many formats, and so many
different ways to find an audience, so many places you have to look."
He isn't keen on reviving protest songs as a niche genre.
"The words 'protest songs' give me the willies," Cockburn says. "They
conjure up the worst music of the 1960s – songs like 'Eve of
Destruction,' which I hated when I first heard it. It's pretentious
posturing, manufactured nonsense, bad songwriting and just plain
ignorant, compared to Dylan's work in the same period. 'A Hard Rain'
and 'Masters of War' are beautifully constructed and artfully
created. They hit the right emotional buttons and they nail their targets.
"To have value, a song has to impact its topic. It can't be
propaganda or exploitative pop music."
Cockburn singles out American songwriter and activist Ani DiFranco
for special praise.
"She's a beautiful singer, a great guitarist and a brilliant
lyricist. She doesn't close her eyes to what's going on around her,
and she's not afraid to speak up. And I don't discount punk and
reggae as breeding grounds for some of the best politically intense
songs ever recorded from the Clash and Bob Marley right up to the present.
"Some people say songs and politics don't mix. I don't agree. It's an
artist's job to talk about his or her life, unless you live in a
place where your neck is on the line. War and politics are part of
life. Nothing is taboo."
Even so, the absence in the public arena of songs of conscience may
well be an effect of the wired age, along with so many previously
cherished forms of social interaction, suggests guitarist Brian
Gladstone, the proudly unreconstructed hippie founder and artistic
director of Toronto's annual Winterfolk Festival and its non-profit
offshoot, the Association of Artists for a Better World. The
association encourages, compiles and distributes collections of
contemporary protest songs to radio stations and activist
organizations around the world.
"People concerned about the issues that have always troubled us are
more likely to turn to Facebook to find a like-minded community than
to sing songs in the streets, the way we did in the 1960s," he says.
"There are plenty of protest songs out there, but they just aren't
part of the cultural mainstream any more. Radio doesn't play them,
and people don't seem to do things together, as a community. We're
all connected individually to some kind of device, working alone,
amusing ourselves alone, enlightening ourselves alone."
Gladstone started the association 10 years ago the effort has since
been replicated in half a dozen North American cities because "not
enough young songwriters were using their voices for the common good.
"We've issued eight or nine compilations since we began, and the
response has been intense and gratifying."
Neil Young came to the same conclusion after the release of his 2006
album, Living with War, a toxic indictment of George W. Bush's
foreign policy, when he complained publicly about the lack of
contemporary songwriters willing to step up to the protest plate. At
64 then, he felt forced to do their work for them.
He was subsequently inundated with recorded proof to the contrary and
now runs a page on his web site, Living with War Today, that has
links to some 3,280 songs and 630 videos answering his original challenge.
It has been said that Bruce Springsteen's 2007 album Magic, with its
hallucinatory vision of an America gone mad with war lust,
consumerism and revenge, was the New Jersey rocker's response to
Young's challenge.
Three years earlier, American punk rocker's Green Day's American
Idiot album, now also a hit Broadway musical, was praised by many for
its brave, satirical take on modern America and its powerful
endorsement of love and humanist ethics.
Long before that, roots rocker Steve Earle forsook his chance at
country music's brass ring by writing songs that skewered America's
version of history, many of its icons and values.
"It's not that the issues needing attention are more numerous or
complex than they were a couple of generations ago," says Canadian
folk music veteran Ken Whiteley. He cut his teeth on the anti-war and
union songs of Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and on the plaintive blues
of American field workers and gospel singers.
"You can look at 150 different issues and reduce them to just two
things: greed and the abuse of power."
Protest songs still have meaning and cachet, Whiteley adds. Many
contemporary songwriters among his favourites are Welsh
composer/activist Martyn Joseph, Kingston's Sarah Harmer and
Vancouver-based James Keelaghan have the ability to create
provocative social commentary from simple narratives "and solid,
memorable melodies, the key to the survival of any great song."
The worst protest songs are "simplistic reductions" of complex
ideas," Whiteley believes.
"The best are personalized stories in which you can see the larger
picture unfold. Or sometimes they can be nothing more than a simple,
resonant phrase. My friend Pat Humphries (an Ohio social activist,
singer and songwriter) composed a classic rally song from three words
and an elegant little tune – 'Peace, Salaam, Shalom'."
Some rap music contains elements of social consciousness, he points
out, part of a continuum of commentary and protest that goes back to
the earliest blues forms, "but there's a disconnect between rap and
what went on before.
"If you're my age, you can probably trace a line between (1950s folk
group) the Freedom Singers, (American gospel group) Sweet Honey in
the Rock, (American R&B/gospel band) the Blind Boys of Alabama and
(Canadian rapper) K'Naan. But I don't think the young people who are
rallying around his song 'Waving Flag' are conscious of these connections."
Toronto songwriter Jon Brooks, a winner in this year's New Folk
competition at the prestigious Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, has
earned a devoted following among his peers for soulful, topical
narrative songs that invoke powerful feelings about the horrors of
war, human greed and the absence of the guiding principles what we
called, in another age, peace, love and understanding.
"The closest thing I heard to protest songs in my adolescence were
Roger Waters and Pink Floyd," says Brooks, who gave up his budding
musical career in the 1990s after visiting Bosnia, Poland, Ukraine and Russia.
"I saw real politics in action after the wall came down and I felt
ashamed to be seeking people's attention behind a microphone in the
middle of all that suffering. So I quit for eight years."
In those days, folk and protest music of the 1960s "seemed laughable,
a cliché, something in the back of the record store to be avoided,"
Brooks says. "After I came back from Europe, I was convinced songs
would work no better now to benefit humanity than they did back then.
"Now I've come full circle. In complicated, distracted times, I've
learned that timely songs performed in the right manner, accompanied
by humour and common language, can really get inside people."
Brooks has studied the work of his predecessors Bob Dylan, Phil
Ochs, and Canada's Buffy Sainte-Marie, whose bitter indictment of the
patriot warrior, "Universal Soldier," is a standout feature of his
performances and found many of them wanting.
"I think Ochs represented the best and the worst of that era, and
Dylan was just too young to have a fully formed world view, but they
were capable of writing powerful social and political commentary," he
says, citing Dylan's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" and "A
Hard Rain" and Ochs' "Days of Decision" as favourites.
"The purpose of songwriting, for me, anyway, is to unite people
through stories, through empathy. Direct, shouted protest has never
worked for me as well as indirect story telling."
Now, that would put a smile on Pete Seeger's face.
--
Ten great protest songs
• "Universal Soldier," Buffy Sainte Marie: For its bravery in
laying the blame for the pain of war at the feet of those who make
themselves available as weapons and cannon fodder.
• "Fortunate Son," Creedence Clearwater Revival: For smacking
privileged Americans in the face for avoiding the draft and forcing
those less fortunate to be conscripted during the Vietnam war.
• "Blowin' In The Wind," Bob Dylan: The mother of 1960s peace anthems.
• "Shipbuilding," Elvis Costello: For drawing a line between the
economic benefits of war and the end result.
• "Beds Are Burning," Midnight Oil: For pricking the conscience of
imperialist interlopers, not just in Australia, over their abuse of
the rights of indigenous people.
• "Brothers In Arms," Dire Straits: For illuminating the folly of
the Faulklands war and inflated patriotic urges.
• "Clampdown," The Clash: For its empathetic portrayal of the poor
as a criminal class on Thatcher's watch.
• "If A Tree Falls," Bruce Cockburn: For its powerful indictment of
the logging industry's stripping of virgin rainforests.
• "Lives In The Balance," Jackson Browne: An acidic account of
American meddling in the politics of Central America.
• "If I Had A Hammer," Pete Seeger: For its inclusive, joyful humanity.
-------
Sounds Like a Revolution:
Music to protest by
A documentary captures arguments from the left of punk rock and hip hop
Liam Lacey
Jun. 25, 2010
Sounds Like a Revolution
Directed by Summer Love and Jane Michener
Written by Margaret Susan Martin
With Michael Franti, Fat Mike, Paris and Justin Sane
Classification: 14A
These days when we hear stories about a new American revolutionary
fervour, it's usually thundering from the political right, from the
Tea Party Movement and conservative broadcasters. In the last decade,
though, the political left has had its own resurgence in a spectrum
of anti-war, anti-corporate and environmental political activity.
That makes Sounds like A Revolution a timely look at the current
state of protest music, which has flowered since the American
invasion of Iraq in 2003. Directed by Toronto's Summer Love and Jane
Michener (and narrated by Toronto singer Jackie Richardson), the film
is a television-style music documentary which focuses on four
American performers: Michael Franti of Spearhead, rapper Paris, Fat
Mike of the San Francisco punk band NOFX and Justin Sane of
Pittsburgh's Anti-Flag. Additional commentary is provided by David
Crosby, Wayne Kramer of the MC5, Tom Morello of Rage Against the
Machine, along with York University music professor Rob Bowman and
radio host Alan Cross (CFNY's The Ongoing History of New Music) who
provide some useful historical context. Along with a lot of feel-good
expressions of political solidarity, the most interesting point here
is that, although political musicians popped up in every genre from
country to rap during George W. Bush's second term in office, they
have little opportunity to reach the mass audience of say, Justin
Bieber or Katy Perry. Ideologically conservative American radio
(especially the Clear Channel chain) and major record distributors
such as Wal-Mart suppress product they consider too politically disturbing.
At the same time, indie musicians are finding a new solidarity with
their fan base through social networking sites and finding better
ways to distribute low-cost music.
Otherwise, Sounds like a Revolution sounds like something we've heard
before.. The musicians are generally articulate and altruistic but
have a tendency to treat the obvious as profound ("The corporate
consciousness is about money," declares David Crosby).The most
thoughtful is Michael Franti, whose annual Power to the Peaceful
festival in San Francisco draws 50,000 people. His song Bomb the
World has a well-phrased message: "We can bomb the world to pieces
but we can't bomb it into peace." The rapper Paris takes
anti-government paranoia to an extreme, with his conviction that the
U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks.
Some songs amount to little more than sing-along invective: Hey,
Wal-Mart (Blow Me), 500 Ways to Kill a CEO, or the George W. Bush ode
Idiot, Son of an Asshole (which barely meets Alexander Pope's
standard for true wit as "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed").
What's not explored here is the intriguing area where capitalism and
oppositional culture feed off each other. Several celebrated rock
artists – M.I.A., U2 and Bruce Springsteen, to name a few – write a
kind of protest music, created and sold through corporate channels.
As director Michael Moore has said, in reference to the corporate
financing of his anti-establishment documentaries: "Capitalists will
sell you the rope to hang themselves with if you can make a buck off it."
.
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