Against protest songs – Washington Examiner

The last few months have fueled political fears at home and abroad. But one worrying political development has received too little attention: Are we facing a revival of protest songs?

In May, for example, rapper Macklemore released “Hind’s Hall,” a song about the pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, to surprising acclaim. Before that, Macklemore was best known for two things: accepting a Grammy with a particularly obsequious speech and appearing onstage in a costume that he – and virtually no one else – claimed was not anti-Semitic.

What was particularly interesting about this piece was that it received a lot of (mostly positive) commentary that was almost entirely independent of the aesthetic merits of the song. The fact that such a protest song even existed was apparently commendable in itself. In a strange way, then, Macklemore’s piece represents a kind of postmodern apotheosis of the protest song as a musical form – at least until someone manages to garner applause for merely announcing an intention to write a protest song.

The protest song has always been a curious subgenre. In the annals of music history, it is a relatively recent invention. It is important to distinguish it from the much older style of lament, a rich poetic form found in most of the world’s great traditions that expresses grief and anguish without necessarily appealing to grievances. For most of history, there was no broad audience to appeal to, which could also be considered a political actor anyway. If you demanded redress, you had to appeal to a narrower hierarchy. (Think of Niccolo Machiavelli’s dedicatory letter at the beginning of the The princeaddressed to the scion of the same family that had recently had him tortured.)

Protest as an art form first required the democratization of political life in modern times. And before the advent of the protest song, there was protest literature – some of it, like that of Emile Zola, was quite excellent. But in his remarkable book The Hero and the Bluesthe American essayist Albert Murray compares protest literature unfavourably with what he calls the “heroic tradition” of literary art, to which he includes the American blues. For a blues singer looks death and destruction straight in the eye; there is no cosmic court of appeal for such things. Thus a figure like Robert Johnson is a kind of heir to Beowulf, who knows that the dragon he is fighting will be his death. Both see the terrible reality of things and do not look away. In contrast, the protest genre tries to make the dragon reform by shaming it, which may be a politically worthwhile endeavour, but not an aesthetically or philosophically interesting one:

In fact, protest or blame fiction like Uncle Tom’s Children And Only Begotten Son turns to the dragon’s humanity by portraying him as a fire-breathing monster: “Shame on you, Mr. Dragon,” it essentially says, “be a nice man and a good citizen.”

When pop music replaced literature as the dominant medium, the protest genre followed. Protest songs are, by their very nature, tied to an immediate context—be it war, economic conditions, an unpopular government, or whatever. But pop music itself is ultimately largely ephemeral. Everyone knows the Boomer litany associated primarily with the 1960s by now, and you can anticipate it aurally when the relevant documentary material plays: “For What It’s Worth,” “Fortunate Son,” “Ohio,” “Give Peace a Chance,” and so on. That era was relatively short. It’s not a very nice thing to say, but what really put an end to it was Nixon’s decision to repeal the draft, and finally abolish the draft in 1973.

The protest song later developed into a broader form of socially and politically conscious music that permeated other musical genres. Perhaps the most enduring is the album-oriented soul music of the post-1960s, in which artists such as Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, War and Stevie Wonder, among others, created true masterpieces, many of which remain among the high points of popular recorded music to this day.

Contrary to the superficial image of the decade, political music did not disappear entirely in the 1980s, but it became more indirect. For example, I am reliably informed that REM’s “Fall On Me” and “Orange Crush” are about the environment and the US military’s use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, respectively. But I would challenge most listeners to understand that subtext without Wikipedia. Likewise, Bono announced U2’s hit “Sunday Bloody Sunday” at a concert with the words: “This is not a rebel song!”

Bruce Springsteen has always been at least somewhat political, and in the mid-’80s he had a huge hit with “Born in the USA,” a very protest-like song that wasn’t generally received as such by listeners. Here, one must insist that pop music as a form is essentially about superficial pleasures, and there’s a reason why The Boss chose to release the anthemic electronic version of the song rather than the mournful acoustic demo, and that reason isn’t irony.

The 1990s saw a resurgence of overtly political music, but it was more of a general attempt to signal commitment to vaguely left-liberal causes—for example, the supergroup Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike,” with its immortal opening line, “I don’t mind stealin’ bread from the mouths of decay.” Most of it felt both lazy and hypocritical, reaching its nadir with 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?”, widely considered one of the worst songs ever written.

There were a few protest songs in the ’90s that filtered into the popular music of rap and rock, like Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” or much of Rage Against the Machine’s work, which evokes a set of very specific left-wing obsessions that make it seem like the band got their political orientation from reading Howard Zinn’s PCP. None of these songs made more than waves in the history of political music. And since then, political music has been a sporadic phenomenon at best, perhaps because during the years of the Trump presidency, COVID lockdowns, Black Lives Matter, etc., the political energy once reserved for art (not to mention actual politics) was channeled into social media.

Of course, you can’t discuss the genre of protest song without mentioning a certain Bob Dylan, who wrote more of them than anyone except perhaps Woody Guthrie. The best known include “Blowin’ In the Wind,” “Masters of War,” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Perhaps the most artistically successful of these, and a candidate for the shortlist of Dylan’s best songs, is “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” which deals with the subject of nuclear war but does so in such an oblique way that it seems more timeless than current.

Dylan, however, has a complicated relationship with protest songs – although there is nothing simple about the man. In a career now in its 65th year, he has written barely a protest song for 60 of them. In fact, he had already recorded “My Back Pages” in 1964, which, with its lilting refrain “But I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now,” is widely interpreted as a rejection of his political phase. Although he once described the later “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” as one of the “most protest” things he had ever written, in the same interview he also claimed to be Swedish and was apparently high on amphetamines.

Dylan himself has declared Jimmy Cliff’s “Vietnam” the best protest song of all time, and here you have to give the master credit. The lyrics of the song are so uncomplicated that they are downright simple: The narrator’s friend writes him a letter from Vietnam, where he is stationed. A verse later, his mother receives another letter informing her of his death. But Cliff, who had one of the greatest voices of the classic rocksteady and reggae era, sings with bravura. And like the children on American Bandstand used to say it has a good beat and you can dance to it.

That alone sets it apart from any other protest song I’ve ever heard, and certainly helps it endure long after the war of its title is over. In fact, I’m listening to it right now.

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David Polansky is a Toronto-based writer and research fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. You can find him at strangefrequencies.co.