“Sing along in the age of paranoia”
The Protest Song Revival That Never Was
IN MAY 2006, Neil Young released Living With War, a hastily recorded blast of ire at President Bush which constituted the singer’s most direct political statement since “Ohio.” “I was hoping some young person would come along and say this and sing some songs about it, but I didn’t see anybody, so I’m doing it myself,” Young later explained, casting himself as an ornery old gunslinger saddling up one more time to do the job that the younger generation was too lily-livered to take on. It was a catchy narrative, but it wasn’t true. Plainly, younger artists were singing some songs about it, if Young cared to listen. By the time of Living With War, President Bush’s approval rating had hit a new low of 31 percent and musicians were queuing up to lob coconuts at the commander in chief’s head.
But that doesn’t mean Young was deliberately lying. He probably felt that what he was saying was true, because most people did. “Are today’s artists just apathetic, or is the audience unreceptive to weighty words?” asked Florida’s St. Petersburg Times in an August article titled “The Dying Protest Song.” During the Vietnam War, a handful of antiwar songs gained such cultural traction that it seemed as if everybody was making them. During the Iraq war, the opposite happened: many people wrote them, yet it seemed like nobody was. Instead of snowballing into a movement, myriad individual protest songs lay on the ground like flakes in a mild spring snowfall: frail, scattered, quick to melt away.
Bush was, by some reckonings, the worst president the country had ever had: the architect of two interminable, unpopular wars, the man who allowed 2005’s Hurricane Katrina to become not just a tragedy but a national disgrace, and a divisive ideological bully. If ever the ground were ripe for a protest song revival, surely it was during his benighted administration. And yet even when the songs emerged, the general perception was otherwise. So the right question is not, “Where have all the protest songs gone?” but, “Is anybody listening?”
AS THE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION SEASON swung into life at the beginning of 2004, the stakes seemed incalculably higher than they had four years prior. The situation in Iraq was looking increasingly dire. In January, CIA officers in Baghdad warned that the country might be facing civil war, as bombings and kidnappings became commonplace. Weapons inspectors were close to concluding that whatever WMD Saddam might have possessed had been destroyed long before the invasion. In April, the coalition’s fragile moral authority was shaken to pieces by photographs of the torture and humilation of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. In August, the U.S. death toll hit one thousand. The time was ripe for a genuinely huge anti-Bush song.*
One day in 2003, Billie Joe Armstrong, front man of Bay Area punk group Green Day, had been driving to his studio in Oakland when a jingoistic Lynyrd Skynyrd song came on the radio. “It was like, ‘I’m proud to be a redneck,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my God, why would you be proud of something like that? That’s exactly what I’m against,’” he remembers. When he got to the studio, he wrote his retort in one furious burst: a taut jab to the ribs called “American Idiot.” “I looked at the guys like, ‘Do you mind I’m saying this?’ And they were like, ‘No, we agree with you.’ And it started the ball rolling.”†
Armstrong perches on a sofa in the hangarlike live room of Green Day’s studio. On the wall behind him hangs a giant U.S. flag, in front of which dozens of guitars are racked like soldiers on parade. He has wide panda eyes, a slight frame, and the jittery energy of an adolescent. He and the “guys,” bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool, had emerged from Berkeley’s Gilman Street scene as teenagers, and suffered Tim Yohannan’s wrath when they signed to a major label in 1993. “It’s good that you have this conscience about what’s going on, but every step that you took had to be politically correct,” sighs Armstrong, still smarting from his expulsion from the Maximum Rocknroll bubble. “You couldn’t enjoy what was happening. It was preying on your conscience so much: Am I doing the right thing? At the time it sucked.” Having written his first political lyrics on 2000’s Warning album, Armstrong felt that he was gravitating back towards some of the ideals, if not the censoriousness, of Gilman Street.
Armstrong does not like to pretend he knows more than he does. He writes songs from the perspective of an anxious spectator, swamped by dismaying information, and wondering where to go from here. “There was something apocalyptic about the whole thing: ‘Oh my God, the country is unraveling,” he says of the Iraq war. “And it was shocking. I never thought I’d see a war brought to you on TV, twenty-four hours a day, and it became like entertainment.” Hurtling along like a stadium-rock Clash, “American Idiot” is in the “This Land Is Your Land” tradition of alternative patriotism, tartly contrasting the “subliminal mind fuck America” with “the faggot [i.e., liberal] America.” But it is also from the school of anti-television songs, buzzing with references to TV news, propaganda, and “information age of hysteria”: a “Trouble Every Day” or “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” for the Fox News era.
The making of the American Idiot album, a hugely ambitious, politically inclined rock opera which also featured the even angrier “Holiday,” took several months, and it wasn’t ready for release until September 21, 2004, just weeks before the presidential election. After a few warm-up dates, Green Day began their tour, quixotically, in the belly of red-meat America, so there they were in Fort Worth, Texas, Bush’s home state, singing the Jello Biafraesque line from “Holiday”: “Sieg heil to the President gasman.” Armstrong remembers, “It’s one thing when you’re in California and you’re saying ‘Fuck George Bush,’ but when you’re in Texas….” He winces. “It was a mixed response. That’s a weird noise, man: half the crowd cheering and half the crowd booing.”
By the time they finished touring, in December 2005, they would be doing so to nothing but cheers, and American Idiot would have sold thirteen million copies, but those first weeks were strange. Armstrong remembers being accosted while getting off a plane in Orange Country, California, by a woman who told him, “I just want you to know that I am proud to be an American idiot.” He also had a somewhat awkward encounter with the Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, when they both appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman on September 20. “There was a sense of him going, ‘I don’t want to run with this. I got people to impress,’” says Armstrong.
KERRY WAS A DECORATED FORMER SWIFT BOAT CAPTAIN who had become a charismatic spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War before entering the Senate in 1985. He had voted for the war in Iraq on the understanding that Saddam had WMDs, and now expressed a widely shared sense of betrayal. A stiff, cerebral, patrician figure, he was not the most inspiring candidate imaginable, but, as Lou Reed told Rolling Stone: “We must all unite and work for whomever opposes Bush, regardless of whatever differences we may have. Our motto: Anything but Bush.”
Thus, several artists swung into action behind the Democratic challenger. Fat Mike of Bay Area punk band NOFX established the Punkvoter coalition to drum up turnout. Steve Earle returned with the bluntly angry The Revolution Starts Now. “We are preaching to the choir,” he told Rolling Stone, “but we want to make sure that the choir sings really loud.” Maynard James Keenan of prog-metal band Tool chose Election Day to release an album of antiwar cover versions, including “Imagine” and “What’s Going On” under the name A Perfect Circle. Willy Mason, a nineteen-year-old neophyte from New York, attracted so much attention with the plaintive “Oxygen” (“Do you remember the forgotten America?”) that excitable critics held him up as the new Bob Dylan. “That’s what scares me with what’s going on now, if people start taking me too seriously,” Mason fretted. “I’m saying the same shit that everyone’s saying.”
Even the hip-hop star Eminem, who tended to reserve his considerable bile for his estranged wife and his mother, released an eleventh-hour election single, a glowering battlesong called “Mosh.” Eminem, a practiced character assassin, moved from opposing the war to attacking the man who conceived it. “Strap [Bush] with an AK-47, let him fight his own war,” he spat. “Let him impress daddy that way.” Bush, he concluded, was a “weapon of mass destruction.”
The president was a gift to songwriters because he allowed so many lines of attack. To Public Enemy in “Son of a Bush” it was his execution-happy record as governor of Texas. To the Beastie Boys in “In a World Gone Mad” it was his bellicose posturing: “looking like Zoolander / Trying to play tough for the camera.” To Pearl Jam in “Bu$hleaguer” he was a “confidence man” who “got lucky.” It wasn’t just the Iraq war which enraged people: it was his tax cuts for the rich, his cavalier approach to the environment, his disregard for civil liberties, his pandering to the religious right, and so much more.
“I’d have almost anyone who isn’t a convicted killer,” said R.E.M.’s Peter Buck. “As much as I disliked Reagan’s politics, he seemed like a charming person. George Bush seems like every rich college kid you’ve ever had the misfortune to meet—uneducated, doesn’t care, and has that smirk at all hours of the day because he knows that money is more important than thought. This is such a weird time. I’ve never seen the country so polarized since I was 13 and the Vietnam war was going on.”
R.E.M., along with Springsteen, Pearl Jam, and the Dixie Chicks, spearheaded the Vote for Change tour which played thirty-four shows in battleground states in the weeks before the election. “You can’t tell people what to think,” said Springsteen, ever the diplomat. “You can say, ‘Let’s think about this together.’” Predictably, several old protest songs were pressed into service. Springsteen sharpened the attack of the oft-misread “Born in the USA.” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty played “Fortunate Son,” a song that might have been written for the privileged, Vietnam-avoiding commander in chief. Neil Young led a ragged, savage version of “Rocking in the Free World.”
The question of whether any of this would sway undecided voters was moot; some in the crowd even proudly wore Bush T-shirts. Buck remembers sitting backstage with Springsteen’s guitarist, Steve Van Zandt. “We both said, ‘Y’know, I’m glad we’re doing this but it’s not going to do anything. [Kerry]’s losing.’ I was saying Bush is going to get 55 percent and he said nah, he’s going to get 53 percent.”
They were both a little too pessimistic—it was 50.7 percent—but the bottom line was the same. Bush managed to center the debate on security fears, where Kerry was least convincing, while mobilizing his core support with more efficiency than the Democrats. On the morning of November 3, the electoral map of the United States resembled two nations: a blue one extending along the West Coast and the northeast and around the Great Lakes, and a red one blanketing the rest. The closeness of the result—again—made it all the more crushing to those on the losing side. “We had the money, we had a ground operation the likes of which has never been seen, and we had a good candidate,” wailed Democratic fund-raiser Harold Ickes. “We had all that, and we still lost. People are going to ask, ‘What do we have to do?’”
A few weeks later, the young Nebraskan singer-songwriter Conor Oberst debuted a new song, “When the President Talks to God,” at New York’s Town Hall. It is not, to be frank, a great song—it is callow, overstated, and clumsy with anger—but that very failure of poise spoke powerfully to Oberst’s young, liberal audience. “I can’t think of many occasions when I felt an audience was so engrossed in the drama of a song,” observed critic Rob Tannenbaum, “and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a singer project as much sincerity. There was a point when I thought he was going to start crying.”*
Two wars, and a litany of domestic failures, couldn’t bring Bush to his knees. That would take a hurricane.
DAMIEN RANDLE AND MICAH NICKERSON, the two rappers who call themselves the Legendary K.O., noticed the first evacuees arriving in Houston during the last week of August 2005, a few days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast. The migrants came from New Orleans in cars stuffed with family members and piled high with possessions, desperate to get out of the path of the oncoming storm.
But around 250,000 New Orleans residents, a fifth of the city’s population, either refused to leave their homes or lacked the transport to do so. As a state of emergency was declared in parts of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, the National Hurricane Center raised the dreadful possibility that the storm might overwhelm the levees protecting New Orleans. Some of the citizens remaining in the city began sheltering in designated refuges such as the Louisiana Superdome. On the morning of Monday, August 29, Katrina, now a Category 3 storm, smashed into New Orleans, and levee after levee collapsed. Broken-hearted Louisiana senator John Breaux described the city, 80 percent of which was now submerged, as “Baghdad under water.”
The images on TV seemed incompatible with life in the USA in the twenty-first century. The city was swamped in a thick brown soup of flood-water and sewage, glinting with spilled oil and leaked chemicals, dotted with wreckage and corpses. Babies, old people, and victims of exhaustion died in front of the cameras. Survivors perched on the roofs of their drowned houses and sent distress signals to passing helicopters. Rumors circulated of rampant looting and other crimes, involving both the genuinely desperate and the violently opportunistic, because nobody seemed to be in charge anymore. Electricity, fresh water, and phone services had been snatched away in a stroke. Inside the darkened, overcrowded Superdome and New Orleans Civic Center, tens of thousands of weary refugees broiled in the heat and stink. Not until Friday—four days after the storm hit—did the National Guard and supply convoys arrive in the city to begin rescuing survivors.
Randle and Nickerson volunteered, respectively, at the convention center and the Astrodome as postflood evacuees began arriving in Houston. “It reminded me of a shanty town somewhere in Jamaica,” says Randle. “The news coverage started to get to a lot of people. They weren’t degenerates, they weren’t casualties of war. They were normal people caught in a very bad situation. A lot of us started to realize that these people who were still stuck in New Orleans had no idea how they were being portrayed. They didn’t even have an outlet to tell their side of the story.”
The Chicago rapper Kanye West was just one of a phalanx of celebrities recruited to drum up donations on NBC’s telethon that Friday night.* Famous as much for his braggadocio as his talent, he was accustomed to making outlandish statements but only on the pressing subject of Kanye West, and the matchless brilliance thereof. But when you watch a clip of the telethon, you see something else come over him. While comedian Mike Myers diligently reads the autocue, West clears his throat and, in a breathless, uneven voice, begins: “I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says they’re looting; if you see a white family, it says they’re looking for food.” He rambles on for a while before Myers takes a deep breath and plugs on robotically with the script, and then you can almost see the cogs in West’s brain click into place as he blurts out: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” It’s a remarkable piece of television; Myers’ open-mouthed double take is certainly the funniest thing he has done in years. “I was just flipping the channels and I turned to the telethon maybe twenty seconds before he said that,” remembers Randle. “I hadn’t even got a chance to digest what I was watching. I was floored for a second because I didn’t really think what I was looking at was real! People never really knew him to take a stand on something so heavy.”
NBC edited the outburst from the version that was broadcast three hours later on the West Coast, but that February had seen the launch of the revolutionary video-sharing Web site YouTube, and the clip circulated the globe regardless. As was the case with Natalie Maines two years earlier, West’s extemporaneous comment carried more political weight than any song. But whereas Maines had spoken with cheerful confidence, West’s moment of truth was shaky, indeed borderline incoherent, with emotion. Those seven words resonated because they expressed a national mood of betrayal and disappointment with the president. In the days and weeks following Katrina, fingers were pointed at New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, Louisiana governor Mary Landrieu, and Michael Brown, the hapless director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, all of whom failed to move quickly or effectively enough, but West captured a growing feeling that the buck should stop at the Oval Office.
It didn’t really matter that his focus on race rather than class was inaccurate. “I would like to say yeah, he was right but he wasn’t,” the Black Eyed Peas’ Will. I. Am said soon afterwards. “I’m sure George Bush has a lot of black friends. He loves black people with a fuck of a lot of money. He doesn’t care about people that don’t have money. It just so happens that those people are black.”
The Legendary K.O. talked about the comment over the weekend. On Tuesday, Randle received an e-mail from Nickerson containing the first half of a song, set to the beat of West’s recent hit “Gold Digger” in the same repurposing spirit as a 1960s freedom song. As soon as Randle got home from work, he recorded the last verse in less than twenty minutes. “A lot of what we were saying was stuff we’d already been saying amongst ourselves,” he says. “It was just a matter of putting it into a song format.” The duo promptly e-mailed the finished song to friends, one of whom posted it on his hip-hop Web site. The next morning, Randle had two hundred complimentary e-mails in his inbox. By Friday, just a week after West’s comments, he was getting calls from major newspapers and TV stations, and hundreds of thousands of people had downloaded the song. It was the first protest song to become a viral Internet sensation. “The immediacy of it was astounding to me,” says Randle. “This song would not have been possible three or four years before.”
One reason “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” was so effective is that it was as vividly topical as an old folk ballad about a mining disaster. Another is that it’s funny. In contrast to the mute, huddled victims portrayed on the news, the song’s storm-hit narrator is pithy, pugnacious, resilient, flipping West’s chorus about a mercenary girlfriend—“I ain’t saying she’s a gold digger / But she ain’t messing with no broke niggas”—in George Bush’s direction. “Unfortunately a lot of people don’t take to serious songs too easily,” says Randle. “You almost have to sugar coat it in order to trick people into listening to it. Some people said, ‘You guys should do a remix of that track with your own beat—make it grittier and darker in order to fit the mood.’ And we said, ‘No, we’re going to leave it as it is. That’s what caught people’s attention the first time.’”
The song seemed to spur other rappers into action. New Orleans–born Lil’ Wayne, who lost friends in the hurricane, drolly sampled Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind” on “Georgia . . . Bush.” “Hurricane Katrina,” drawled Wayne, “we should’ve called it Hurricane Georgia Bush.” Brooklyn’s Mos Def rushed out “Katrina Clap.” Other MCs, like the superstar-turned-mogul Jay-Z, took longer to respond. “I personally felt that Jay-Z’s approach was somewhat disingenuous because his [‘Minority Report’] came well after the fact,” says Randle. “Most of the big artists who did speak up still didn’t give it the kind of bite they should have. They stand to lose more if they don’t calculate their moves.”
But it was soon apparent that Katrina had swept away the last teetering struts of George Bush’s authority, and with it any sense of risk that accompanied criticizing him. “After Katrina happened, people in the South saw people starving to death because of ineptitude by the government,” says Michael Franti. “And Bush came down and made a bunch of bullshit speeches and everybody was like, What the fuck? And that really changed the attitude of the country overnight.”
The president’s approval rating went south. Opposition to the war in Iraq was growing by the week, as was the U.S. death toll. When Natalie Maines was interviewed by Time in May 2006, she felt comfortable retracting her 2003 apology. “I apologized for disrespecting the office of the President,” she said. “But I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t feel he is owed any respect whatsoever.”
NEIL YOUNG’S SUSTAINED ASSAULT on the president in 2006, Living With War, was therefore notable less for its timing than for its ferocity: with one song called “Let’s Impeach the President,” he could not be accused of hedging his bets. The McGovern liberal who became a Reagan cheerleader had come full circle, surpassing even “Ohio” in the scale of his scalding indignation.* Young turned his Web site into a news service about the war, and invited fans to send in their own protest songs. In a shrewd stroke of realpolitik, he decided that the album would have more impact if he harnessed it to a Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young reunion, so he issued a take-it-or-leave-it invitation to his quondam bandmates: tour the album, as a complete body of work, adding only those old songs which fit the antiwar theme.
Hence the confrontational “Freedom of Speech Tour,” timed to precede the midterm elections in November, resurrected old Vietnam-era songs like “Ohio,” “Military Madness,” and “For What It’s Worth”: what the enduringly cantankerous Stills, who required the most persuasion, called “the dated, boring-assed fucking protest music.” For years, Young had felt unable to sing “Ohio” because it felt too much like “a rush of nostalgia. . . . But in this period of time that doesn’t apply. What it is now is a history. We’re bringing history back. That’s what folk music does.”
Old warhorses like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young weren’t the only ones reaching for classic protest songs. Hip-hop act the Roots turned “Masters of War” into a funk-rock battlefield, the Flaming Lips and the Dresden Dolls both covered Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” (1970), Bruce Springsteen recorded an album of songs made famous by Pete Seeger—including “We Shall Overcome” and “Bring ’Em Home”—and antiwar demonstrators could still be heard singing “Give Peace a Chance.”
Newer songs such as Pink’s “Dear Mr. President” and Ian Brown’s “Illegal Attacks” did not stand up so well.* More artistically successful were those who translated their disgust with Bush into opaque protest. Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, Gorillaz’ Demon Days, TV on the Radio’s Dear Science, and Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) all embodied the distemper of the times, while Muse, Nine Inch Nails, and the Flaming Lips framed opposition to the president in the language of science fiction on, respectively, Black Holes and Revelations, Year Zero, and At War With the Mystics.† “We really do love having someone we can all hate.” says the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne. I liked the idea that we had this one common bond between us. Even if we can’t all like the same kind of music we can all hate George Bush.”
Even as he was performing these songs, however, Coyne scented something half-hearted behind the cheers and jeers. “I thought we’d reach this tipping point where everybody just went, Oh my God, we have to do something,” he says. “But it’s not like Vietnam. My brothers knew guys at high school who got drafted, and two weeks later they were dead. That’s a powerful experience. When Green Day are singing a song you’re like, ‘Cool song, dude, I got my new iPhone.’ That’s not a powerful experience. The youth aren’t dying in the same way. There’s no protest, really. They weren’t powerless—they just didn’t give a shit.”
The singer-songwriter John Mayer examined this feeling on “Waiting on the World to Change,” which took its chord progression from Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” but replaced Mayfield’s call to action with a manifesto for apathy. It was profoundly passive and defeatist, and whereas Radiohead explored the existential agony induced by political impotence, Mayer served up a pablum of glib cynicism. According to Mayer, “We see everything that’s going wrong” but “we just feel like we don’t have the means to rise above and beat it.” As he told the Advocate, “It’s saying, ‘Well, I’ll just watch American Idol because I know that if I were engaged in changing anything for the better, or the better as I see it, it would go unnoticed or be completely ineffective.’ A lot of people have that feeling.” True enough, but Mayer did nothing to interrogate or challenge that feeling. The song’s answer is simply to hang around until this generation gets old enough to govern the country, at which point, for reasons Mayer does not specify, the world will finally become a better place.
Willy Mason’s “Oxygen” was also a young man’s lament, both pained and consoling, and, yes, a little jejune, but Mason took some responsibility by calling on his peers to “speak louder than ignorance.” Mayer, instead, gave his listeners license to stay quiet, just “waiting on the world to change.” Fatuous in its assumptions about one generation’s moral superiority, delusionally smug in its passivity, dishonest in its pretense that it is part of the solution rather than the problem, this spineless shrug of a record was perhaps the protest song its listeners deserved.