OVER CHRISTMAS 2009, something very strange occurred in the British pop charts. The biggest-selling song in the country was a protest song, and not one of the mild, inoffensive variety but Rage Against the Machine’s explosive 1992 single “Killing in the Name.” What’s more, this remarkable coup came about through the mobilization of grassroots resistance against a perceived tyrant, and the use of music as a weapon. The catch was that the tyrant was Simon Cowell, creator of TV’s The X-Factor, and the whole campaign was merely a stunt to block the show’s latest winner from taking the Christmas number one. Thus a song conceived as a missile to be launched at the institutional racism of the U.S. Army and LAPD was reduced to a water pistol, squirting at a TV talent show. The episode spoke volumes about the state of political music: a protest song can only succeed on a grand scale if it’s turned into a joke.
I began this book intending to write a history of a still vital form of music. I finished it wondering if I had instead composed a eulogy. The failure of protest songs to catch light during the Bush years leaves one wondering what exactly it would take to spark a genuine resurgence. The reason for this apparently terminal decline, I believe, lies as much with listeners as with artists. Remember Ronnie Gilbert at Newport 1963, claiming that Bob Dylan was “a young man who grew out of a need”? Well, the need no longer seems to be there.
The Simpsons Movie (2007) contains a revealing and funny scene in which Green Day is performing a concert in the quintessential Middle American town of Springfield. A weary Billie Joe Armstrong says: “We’ve been playing for three and a half hours. Now we’d like just a minute of your time to say something about the environment.” There is a pregnant pause, followed by a barrage of rubbish and angry cries of, “Preaching!”
In the 1960s, musicians were invested with such significance that they were expected to provide answers to the world’s problems—even to spearhead a revolution. In the late ’70s and ’80s, expectations were lower, but a new generation of iconic figures—Springsteen, Strummer, Bono, Chuck D—were admired for their convictions and encouraged to advance certain causes. It is sobering to note that of all the artists dealt with at length in the preceding chapters, none is younger than 35. The ’60s protest generation were connected, via folk, to the idealism of the ’30s; the most politicized punks had some kind of bond with the ’60s; the outspoken artists of the ’80s and ’90s were the children of punk, or of radical soul music. But for a songwriter coming of age now, the idea that music can, and should, engage with politics seems increasingly distant. This is entangled with a broader loss of faith in ideology and a fading belief in what we might call heroes: inspirational individuals with the power to move mountains.
In the atomized age of digital music, when there are fewer larger-than-life, globally recognizable pop stars of any variety, the age of the heroic activist-musician is decisively over, and the disincentive toward writing protest songs is not HUAC or COINTELPRO but the audience’s impatience with any musician who purports to do more than entertain. It is not just that people have lost faith in any performer to help bring about change, it is that they resent anyone who attempts to do so. Who now would dare to announce, as Chuck D did on “Don’t Believe the Hype,” their desire to “preach to teach to all”?
As the critic Simon Reynolds writes, “The realities of how music is made, distributed, consumed and experienced seem to agitate against investing belief in artists as spokespersons/saviours. . . . These days, a performer who wanted to have any kind of political effect would most likely not bother writing a song about an issue, but get involved in activism . . . But even this will tend to get mocked as superstar grandstanding or noblesse oblige.” It would take bulletproof self-confidence and burning moral purpose for any performer to step into the firing line.
This process has unfolded alongside a waning of faith in hands-on protest. Placards and sit-ins have given way to charity wristbands and Facebook groups: armchair gestures which appease consciences without inviting risk or struggle. Naomi Klein decries what she calls “the stadium rock model of protest—there’s celebrities and then there’s spectators waving their bracelets. It’s less dangerous and less powerful.” The failure of the massive marches against the Iraq war to affect policy led many to doubt the efficacy of the old-fashioned demonstration. Who would be compelled to write, in George Melly’s words, “songs for the barricade” when there are no barricades?
Klein blames the release-valve nature of online protest: “It’s safer to mouth off on a blog than put your body on the line. The Internet is an amazing organizing tool but it also acts as a release, with the ability to rant and get instant catharsis. It’s taken that sense of urgency away.” Not only are we less likely to take risks, and to accept possible disappointment as part of political progress; we are less likely to reward risk. Returning to protest songs, we need once again to be prepared to meet artists halfway.
Take the case of M.I.A, aka Anglo-Sri Lankan singer/rapper Maya Arulpragasam, the daughter of a Tamil activist. Her music is a vivid bustle of styles and ideas which evokes the surging confidence of the developing world in an age of increasingly porous borders. For her, globalization is an arena of friction as well as fusion. She is from everywhere and nowhere, a globe-trotting hustler with a frisson of both radical chic and gangsta rap recklessness. Her 2007 hit “Paper Planes” samples the Clash’s “Straight to Hell” (1982) but the Third World citizens who are downtrodden in Joe Strummer’s lyric are newly empowered in M.I.A.’s: the chorus resounds to the noise of gunshots and cash tills. M.I.A. has variously suggested that the song is a celebration of immigrant culture (hence its appearance in the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire) and a critique of the arms industry, but the lyric insists on neither interpretation: can it somehow be both? It is, as Greil Marcus said of “Street Fighting Man,” “a challenging emotional jigsaw puzzle, not congratulations for being on the right side.”
In interviews however, M.I.A. is prone to hyperbole (she calls the Sri Lankan government’s treatment of Tamils “genocide”), conspiracy theory (she thinks Google and Facebook were invented by the CIA), and fatuous sloganeering (“Give war a chance”). That’s where her use of the vocabulary and imagery of revolutionary violence becomes problematic. It is never clear whether she is in command of this charged language, or just using it for shock value, like a child throwing firecrackers in the street and hoping the bangs will be mistaken for gunshots.
Because of the Internet, M.I.A.’s inconsistencies and missteps have been debated to an extent that earlier political musicians never had to deal with, but the questions extend back to the birth of the modern protest song: What right does a musician have to discuss politics? What place is there for serious political issues in entertainment? And the answer is the same as ever: there comes a point where we have to accept that a musician does not have the same responsibilities as a politician, and that music can contain, and derive energy from, ambiguities that an interview cannot. M.I.A. is not a policymaker or pundit, nor does she preach solutions; she does not have to be sophisticated or exhaustively well informed to be interesting and resonant. Her pop music is always two steps ahead of her politics. The same could be said of Strummer, or Dylan, or Chuck D, but the discourse around politics and pop has become absurdly unforgiving.
To create a successful protest song in the twenty-first century is a daunting challenge, but the alternative, for any musician with strong political convictions, is paralysis and gloom. And what I think this book demonstrates is that it has never been easy. To take on politics in music is always a leap of faith, a gesture of hope over experience, because there are always a dozen reasons not to. It falls to musicians to continue to make those attempts; whether they succeed or not depends on the rest of us.