What happened to the protest song?
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'
Not my words, fairly obviously, but those of folk troubadour, as he was then, Bob Dylan back in 1964.
The number of protest songs in contemporary music is often perceived as lower compared to past eras, particularly the 1960s and 1970s and to have dwindled in its power and influence. But is that true?
It’s time for a medium-sized dive.
A Medium Sized Dive:
Let’s start with the USA. It has been argued that the 60s and 70s were a time of greater political upheaval leading to more protest songs. Well, certainly there were wars in Korea and Vietnam and those did involve the conscription of civilians. Then the Civil Rights Movement was a lightning rod for protest. In the UK the 70s and 80s saw plenty of social upheaval such as the troubles in Northern Ireland, anti-royalist sentiment during the punk era, mass unemployment and strikes in the early 80s, the violent struggles of the miners and the Poll Tax riots.
There was no shortage of protest songs in the US and UK from the 60s through the 80s. A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, Eve of Destruction, Revolution, Ohio, The Revolution will not be Televised, What’s Goin’ On, Anarchy in the UK, Shoplifting, Ether, Glad To Be Gay, Alternative Ulster, Biko, Ghost Town, Shipbuilding, The Message, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Two Tribes, Meat Is Murder, Born in the USA, Free Nelson Mandela, Fuck The Police, Fight The Power. In Jamaica Bob Marley and many other reggae musicians had songs such as Get Up Stand Up, while in Australia, Beds Are Burning was about Aboriginal land rights.
But this century has hardly been bereft of subjects to protest about. The Gulf War, inaction on Climate Change, the Trump presidency, Black Lives Matter, the MeToo movement, the fight for same-sex marriage, the reversal of Roe vs Wade, turmoil in Gaza – the list is virtually endless. In the UK there’s been long, long years of austerity, what feels like an assault on the National Health Service, Partygate and a Prime Minster who crashed the economy in a month.
I often hear people say there are fewer protest songs now. But here’s a somewhat random bunch of ten from a long, long list from the last few years.
Ghosts of Grenfell about the Grenfell Tower Fire; Jerusalem advocating peace on the Middle East; I Can’t Breathe about police brutality; the LGBT anthem Born This Way; Thoughts and Prayers on gun control; Liveable Shit about living in poverty; Elections on Kremlin corruption; In The River on water contamination; Who’s got a padlock and chain on fossil fuels; Fit for work on welfare cuts; Never buy the Sun on the Hillsborough disaster.
You might say they’re probably niche songs sung to a handful pf students above a pub somewhere. Not so: here’s some artists who’ve produced protest songs over the last few years and I’d be surprised if you haven’t heard of most of them.
Steve Earle, Lady Gaga, Billy Bragg, Sleaford Mods, Childish Gambino, Sea Power, Beyonce, Pink, Run The Jewels, Pussy Riot, Melissa Etheridge, Fiona Apple, the Chicks (formerly Dixie Chicks), Gossip, Radiohead and Drive-By Truckers.
So, it seems reasonably clear that protest songs are still a thing. The interesting question is – what tricks us into thinking they’re not?
It’s time for an entirely reasonable discussion.
The Shock of the New
You can’t have a party on a Saturday night if you’ve had one on Friday night, I remember a dad of my 16 year-old friend said to her when she was applying to go out two nights in a row. Similarly, you couldn’t pull off the shock tactic of the ‘60s protest song indefinitely. It lost its shiny allure.
When Bob Dylan sang that the times they are a-changin’ in 1964, he was telling the truth. Beatlemania had just swept the USA and suddenly everyone had to take young people seriously for the first time. The modern idea of a teenager was born and adults were on notice. Please get out of the new way if you can’t lend a hand.
And in addition, it was only a decade or so previously that television sets had become commonplace in people’s homes. It provided the galvanising influence to unite and accelerate popular sentiment.
Protest songs were also taken seriously for perhaps the first time. Hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today was chanted on every university campus. The students sometimes took over the lecture halls and common rooms and had to be arrested by police. This was a form of reaction that did have the shock of the new as the youth demographic channelled their new weapon of pop music.
Now, Billie Holiday had sung Strange Fruit back in the 1940s, while Pete Seegers, Woody Guthrie and other protest singers had been loud and active all through the ‘50s. But the mid-60s saw the protest song truly penetrate the mainstream and like the invention of the alphabet, those leaps of imagination can only happen once.
The sixties protest song had been largely disseminated via the television set which held sway as the mainstream form of communication for the rest of the century. But nothing stays stable forever. At the turn of this century things changed.
Media Fragmentation
If I were an econometrician I would be very interested in the graph which showed the decline in the universally familiar protest song and the fragmentation of the media landscape. There is a very tight fit between the two.
When I was growing up, we listened to Radio 1 in our house. I doubt there’s a hit of any significance I wouldn’t be able to identify almost instantly from the 1970s. The Radio 1 DJs were treated literally like royalty – with terrible consequences, in some cases, incidentally, as some of them abused that power. When the Radio 1 Roadshow came to your town in the summer, it was a massive event. The only way most of us listened to music was on Radio 1.
On TV the only exposure most people had to music performances was on Top of the Pops. And most people had one television set. So the whole family watched on a Thursday night. That said, this was the BBC. When the Sex Pistols released God Save The Queen, it did indeed get to Number One, but was kept off the top of the official chart and never was seen by your granny.
Today, the media landscape is highly fragmented with many platforms and niche audiences, which makes protest songs far less visible in the mainstream. This Is America by Childish Gambino was a huge hit worldwide and singlehandedly gives the lie to the idea that protest songs have disappeared altogether. The question remains though whether your granny has heard it, still less can hum it, or indeed how many people over the age of 45 would even be aware it existed.
Commercialization of Music
The music industry today is far more highly commercialised than it was fifty years ago. Major record labels of course prioritize commercially viable content over politically charged messages. Now that’s not a problem for small bands who don’t care about signing for major labels. But, in the end, most do. Crucially it depends what you protest about. Body positivity is one thing. Foreign wars is quite another.
The case study for what happens when you make a political statement about a war abroad where soldiers are serving is The Dixie Chicks. At a concert in London lead singer Natalie Maines commented “Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”
The Chicks’ single Landslide fell from number 10 to 43 and left the chart a week later. They were blacklisted by many country radio stations, the Colorado radio station KKCS suspended two DJs for playing their music and WTDR in Alabama dropped them after more than 250 listeners called on a single day to criticize Maines's comments. By contrast, the stations continued to play the music of convicted wife-beater Tracy Lawrence.
In an Atlanta poll, 76 percent of listeners responded they would return their Dixie Chicks CDs if they could. Protesters in Louisiana used a tractor to destroy Dixie Chicks CDs. WDAF placed trashcans outside its office for listeners to dispose of their CDs, and displayed hundreds of emails from listeners supporting the boycott. Lipton cancelled its promotional contract with the band.
These days young artists are more commercially savvy than their predecessors. Lipton might want to sponsor their tour, after all. They think twice if they want a long-term mainstream career. They’ve grown up with “how to optimise Spotify” videos only a keyboard stroke away. They know what it takes to succeed and many, though by no means all, types of protest songs ain’t the pathway. It’s been noticeable that Taylor Swift has always been extremely reticent to tell her audience how to vote.
Diverse Media and Diverse Messages
Think of the protest song and that old image of Bob Dylan strumming away on a guitar with a mouth organ in grainy black and white footage may still come to mind. But, time moves on.
Of course there’s format - music is pretty obviously just one medium for protest now, alongside social media campaigns, viral videos, Youtube, Instagram and, in particular, Tiktok.
But let’s talk about the fundamentals. What in fact is the definition of a protest song? Most people would include war, climate change and female rights, for example. But Rilo Kiley has a great song about bipolar disorder called A Better Son/Daughter. Is that a protest song? But how would you define protest? Is “No such thing as waste”by Formidable Vegetable a protest song? Was “Remember you’re a Womble” by anti-litter crusaders The Wombles a protest song?
And what about the growing industry in “Freedom” and “Libertarian” protest songs? They’re definitely on the rise and they’re not all by obscure right-wing nutters either.
Talking of which, one really interesting/worrying development, depending on your point of view, is the co-opting of left-wing protest songs under the right-wing umbrella. Most famously, Born In The USA, an anti-Vietnam anthem, is used to open Trump rallies. The Trump campaign also uses Killing In The Name by the socialists Rage Against The Machine and Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World.
Twisted Sister always intended We’re Not Going To Take It to speak to the world’s disenfranchised. They absolutely did not imagine it would be turned into an anti-lockdown anthem. On their anti-lockdown track, Stand and Deliver – not a cover of the Adam and the Ants song - musical icons Eric Clapton and Van Morrison use the language of liberation to deliver their message.
I’d just like to finish with another verse from the song we started with by Bob Dylan:
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'
So be careful with those words, Mr and Ms Protest Singer. It really doesn’t take much to see how that verse from Blowin In The Wind could have been played to incite the storming of the Capitol on January 6th.