Where Have All the Protest Songs Gone?

This past Thursday, I presented a program at IGE on the state of contemporary protest music. It was, in my mind and according to the feedback I got from several people, a successful event and an enjoyable one too. Here's a summary of what I had to say (and play.)

The program began with a radical/revolutionary rap that leads off the album "Kick Out the Jams" by the MC5, a notorious proto-punk band from Michigan (Detroit, not Grand Rapids!) It's a rabble-rousing rallying cry, about whether we are going to choose between being part of the problem or part of the solution. Real righteous, late-60's, militant hippie stuff. From there, I went on to discuss the following songs:

War - Edwin Starr
Links on the Chain - Phil Ochs & The Broadside Singers
Eve of Destruction - Barry McGuire
No Blood for Oil - Rhonda Walsh
Fuzzy Math - The Bots
What's Going On - A Perfect Circle (cover of Marvin Gaye)
Fight the Power - Public Enemy
AWOL - Paris
With God on our Side - Bob Dylan
Chimes of Freedom - Bruce Springsteen
Know Your Rights - The Clash
Where is the Love - Black Eyed Peas
Army of One - Resident Genius
The Girl With the Sun in Her Eyes - Orbital (recorded in a solar powered mobile studio)
Universal Soldier - Glen Campbell (I think - the recording was brought by someone who didn't know the artist, but it wasn't the Donovan version I'm familiar with)
Where'd All the Good People Go? - Jack Johnson
Choice - Orbital ("Peace ... or annihilation? It's your choice!")

There may be a few tracks that I'm forgetting, but we only scratched the surface of the collection that I brought - plus, other artists and songs were mentioned throughout the course of the evening.

My basic point was that songs that challenge and upset the status quo used to have a better chance at radio airplay and broad popular success than they do today. This can partly be attributed to increased corporate control and oversight of radio playlists, as well as an entertainment culture that seems more prone to escapism and avoiding hard issues, despite the fact that our nation is currently in a war that is divisive and controversial. Still, the picture is not so bleak - the internet allows for rapid access to many alternative and underground artists if one takes the time to learn how to find them. Recording and sound processing technologies have opened up rich avenues for satire, exemplified by the Bots song "Fuzzy Math," a re-working of samples and soundbites created by President Bush in his speeches. Friends have the ability to make custom mix CDs for each other, allowing us to bypass commercial media vendors and their efforts to homogenize or water down controversial messages.

We discussed the role of profanity and confrontational content in protest music in discussing hip-hop and aggressive metal genres. One of our audience wanted to discuss the music of Marilyn Manson, but was reluctant to do so because he didn't think it would be well-accepted in our group - he chose to speak with me about it during a break and afterwards. He also didn't want to get us in trouble since he saw we were making a tape for cable-access TV! And it did so happen that one utterance of the "m-f" word slipped through, on Paris' "AWOL" before I could hit the Mute button on my Windows Media Player. We'll see how that comes through in the final cut!

Actually, the tape should be pretty interesting. We had to deal with a challenge from one participant who seemed to me to be suffering from some kind of a mental disorder that caused him to blurt out very random, and frequently disruptive and impolite, comments. He seized on very obscure word associations and had a number of paranoid/conspiracy theory opinions to offer about computers, the telephone system, Christian missionaries and other phenomena of contemporary life which apparently cause him a lot of struggle. But for the most part, we stayed polite, maneuvered our way past his outbursts and did our best to meaningfully connect with him both during the program and afterwards. You just never know what's going to happen when we hold these meetings!

The turnout was big enough that we are thinking of doing a "part 2" meeting for February. With the tape scheduled to roll several times this month, and the abundance of songs that I didn't even get a chance to play, I think we could put together a second program quite easily.

If anyone would like to get a copy of our tape, email me or leave a comment and I'll see what I can do to get one in your hands...