essay about protest song

Protest Songs & Protest Music | An Essay

Protest songs against racism, bigotry and oppression..

             Protest songs are a vibrant part of the human heritage, arising from the very social nature of collective living wherein power equations are constantly being re-negotiated.  The term “protest songs” is neither an exhaustive nor a watertight category. There may be as many protest songs as there are causes leading to protest. Protest songs have had a historical tradition which is often evoked when new songs are composed. Working on the powerful systems of references, protest songs either refer to the members of the tradition to which they belong or to the contemporary social, political and cultural references and that these references may manifest in explicit intention of the producer or be implicitly inferred by the listener.

Part I | The Nature and Structure of Protest Songs

With the rapid development of the American Civil Rights movement in the sixties, protest songs not only established itself as a musical genre but also as an effective political tool. A significant question one may ask here is this: What qualifies as a protest song, or to be more precise, what is it in a song which makes it a protest song? This has been the fundamental question asked by theorists who have attempted to define the category of protest songs. In the earlier stages of this process of defining, it was understood that protest songs are such because of their intent , as a result of which it was the lyrics which was subject of analysis. Serge Denisoff goes so far as to categorize protest songs in neat boxes of “persuasion” and “propaganda”, tracing protest songs to the revivalist Protestant tradition.

Furthermore, the place where the protest songs are sung and the manner in which they are sung is another important factor in the effectiveness of the protest songs. Two instances might here serve the purpose of demonstration:

Sometimes I live in town

As the essay will attempt to argue, the category of protest songs is a much broader field which does not and should not be allowed to run into straightjackets. So far, the definition of protest songs has been centred on the idea of expression. The expression of one’s dissent through lyrics, through music, through spatial and strategically timed use of protest songs. This essay argues that the notion of protest song lies not only in its expression but also in its reception, or rather, its impression , not only in the implication but also in its inference. One of the most important reasons why impression and inference should form the parameters while defining protest songs is because the most potent life-force of protest songs lies not only in its reception and re-production but also in its dissemination which depends on the quality of referentiality. This leads us to part two of this paper.

PART II   | The Power of Reference in Protest Songs

“ They  (protest songs) invigorate these movement in the most significant way… These freedom songs give unity to the movement” – Martin Luther King Jr.

The Underground Railroad migration of the African Slaves to the free states and Canada in the late 1700s had been hugely successful, thanks to the reference system of their songs which allowed them to pass the message about escape routes without being detected thus resulting in the freedom of about 100000 slaves.

Follow the drinking gourd Follow the drinking gourd For the old man is a waiting For to carry you to freedom Follow the drinking gourd   The riverbank will make a mighty good road The dead trees show you the way Left foot, peg foot traveling on Following the drinking gourd   –           Follow The Drinking Gourd

One such contemporary protest song where the effective use of references have been employed is seen in the following lyrics:

Well, I heard all about your travel ban Just for countries that don’t fit your business plan But how can you decide who cannot and who can You’re the president now, not a business man With four years in front and only three weeks behind you You’ve somehow already managed to upset China And if I could offer a kindly reminder It’s not okay to grab women by the vagina   –           A Kindly Reminder, Passenger

Similarly, the racial inequality highlighted by K’naan in waving flag harks back Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier:

So many wars, settlin’ scores, Bringing us promises, leaving us poor, I heard them say, love is the way Love is the answer, that’s what they say   But look how they treat us, make us believers We fight their battles, then they deceive us Try to control us, they couldn’t hold us ‘Cause we just move forward like Buffalo soldiers –           Wavin’ Flag, K’naan

Part III  | The Need to Preserve Protest Music

Protest songs have often been associated with the marginalized – be it the African American, LGBTQ community or adolescent teens.  Perhaps, this is the reason why folk music has been a fertile ground for songs of protest. The Punk and Goth subcultures popular among teens is another genre which has proved to be the conservatory of protest songs. One of the reasons for the effectiveness of protest songs is that they live on even after the cause of the protest itself ceased to exist. Songs like John Lennon’s  “ Give Peace a Chance” and Bob Dylan’s “ Blowin’ in the wind” testify to this fact. However, care must be taken while dealing with protest songs for, as much as they are an expression of discontent from the margins  to the centre, the process of appropriation may also take place the other way round. There are instances when the protest songs have been used by the very establishment against which the songs are composed. Furthermore, mass production and popular culture directed by globalization has made this process even more intense.

“US imperialism understands very well the magic of communication through music and persists in filling our young people with all sorts of commercial tripe. With professional expertise they have taken certain measures: first the commercialization of the so called protest music, second the creation of ‘idols of protest music who obey the same rules and suffer from the same constraints as the other ‘idols’ of consumer music industry- they last a little while and then disappear. Meanwhile they are useful in neutralizing the innate spirit of rebellion of young people. The term ‘protest song’ is no longer valid because it is ambiguous and has been misused. I prefer the term revolutionary song.”                                                                                                            – Victor Jara

This essay began by describing the nature of protest songs.  It ends by describing how a protest song was heavily neutralized by commercially reducing it to a happy jingle. Thus, we can see how vast and dynamic the category of protest song is and how the expression and impression, the implied and the inferred is of equal importance while exploring and defining the nature of protest songs, Furthermore, because protest songs occupy the gap between the margin and the center and because it can be used to the benefit of either, the need to reclaim songs of protest is of a great importance. Owing to the necessity and importance of the process of reclamation, this essay ends with the original lyrics of Wavin’ Flag , for which a video link has been attached below. This is a small attempt to recover and reuse a fragment of an identity which remains threatened by oblivion:

Where I got grown, streets we would roam.

But out of the darkness, I came the farthest,

Margaret Smith – Singing along the rails- Songs during the Industrial Revolution

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Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

A change is gonna come

The great civil rights song turns 50 – the political made personal, and heartbreak transmuted into fiery action.

by Manjula Martin   + BIO

In 1993, I, like so many young white people before me, discovered Sam Cooke. It was December. The dry, crisp cold of a California winter permeated the walls of my unremarkable family home. It was quiet. There were no waves at the beach.

I had heard Cooke’s hits, of course, grown up with them in the canon of popular music on radio stations, movie soundtracks, and old records belonging to grown‑ups. But only recently had I started listening to his music. Based on its cover art, I had bought a used copy of Night Beat (1963), an album that predated MTV’s Unplugged series by decades but delivered a similar bare-bones aesthetic.

At 17, anger was the prevailing emotion of my musical life. I already understood the extroverted rage of 1970s punk, 1980s gangsta rap and grunge. Cooke’s music was a challenge. His songs needed to be listened to – to be read closely – for me to understand their weight. He was slick – part pop, part gospel, part R&B – but beneath the clean vocal lines and period string arrangements I sensed something darker. The lyrics mixed racial politics with lovers’ woes. Most of his songs were about experiences I hadn’t had, but they still felt intimate, recognisable. I told my friends about them. They rolled their eyes and turned back to their Rage Against the Machine CDs.

Undaunted, I practiced the rituals of teenage fandom alone: I bought all Cooke’s greatest hits compilations, then searched used record shops for the original albums. I dog-eared Sweet Soul Music (1986), Peter Guralnick’s book about the ascendance of Southern soul (his massive biography, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, wouldn’t be published till 2005). I spent hours staring at CDs and album covers, marvelling at the squeaky-clean cut of Cooke’s jawline and giggling at the dated graphic design. And I took to the living room floor, cuddling with my dusty plastic boom box and pressing ‘play’ again and again.

T o listen to the song A Change Is Gonna Come (1964) closely for the first time – with your head touching the speakers and the crackle of electricity from the living room carpet humming beneath you – is to feel the potential of music made in protest. When I happened upon the song at the end of an otherwise average ‘greatest hits’ compilation, I began to understand how a piece of music can affect a feeling of transformation.

The story about the song is that Cooke heard Bob Dylan sing Blowin’ in the Wind (1963), and wrote A Change Is Gonna Come as a response and a call-out, both to Dylan and himself. The way Cooke saw it, a black man should be singing stuff like that, not some white kid from suburbia. By then, Cooke had crossed over from his gospel roots into mainstream success. He owned his own record label and controlled his career. But he lived with the paradoxes of black stardom.

In late 1963, Cooke and his bandmates had tried to check into a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana and been refused. They made a fuss, were arrested and jailed. A Change is Gonna Come was recorded in February 1964 in a session produced by Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, and was quietly included on Cooke’s album Ain’t That Good News (1964). As Guralnick chronicled in Dream Boogie , after the session, Cooke played the song for Bobby Womack, who was Cooke’s protégé. Womack said the song sounded like death. On 22 December 1964, A Change Is Gonna Come was finally released as a single. Eleven days earlier, Cooke had been shot and killed at a Los Angeles motel, in what was later ruled a justifiable homicide.

The song wasn’t a tremendous commercial hit; it topped out at number 31 on a Billboard chart in 1965. But it became an anthem of the Civil Rights movement and remains an enduring symbol of that era of protest. It was Cooke’s last, and perhaps most lasting, song.

When a piece of art skews too heavily towards rhetoric or sloganeering, the effort often lands cold

It is an unlikely protest song: it is not rough, angry, or street-level. The dramatic backing orchestration invokes glitzy nightclubs and movie palaces, not barricades and lunch-counter sit-ins. Cooke’s purest-of-the-pure voice slides through the strings and timpanis like a three-olive martini slides down your throat. The arrangement, by René Hall, builds and crests atop an obvious sense of its own importance. This is a big song, the production tells us. But when Cooke sings, he does so in an understated first person, narrating everyday scenes of injustice. Each verse culminates in a simple chorus in which Cooke repeats the eponymous line: ‘A change is gonna come.’ The invocation of potential, of change, is undeniable in the way Cooke lingers on the words ‘long’ and ‘know’, the way he revolves the phrase:

It’s been a long a long time comin’ but I know-oh-oo-oh A change gonna come Oh yes it will

It is both prayer and warning.

One of the reasons it’s difficult to make successful art about social change is because people experience injustices as people, not as movements or policies or messages. When a piece of art forgets that and skews too heavily towards rhetoric or sloganeering, the effort often lands cold.

What makes this song work isn’t Cooke’s vocal stylings or the timing of its release. It is so politically potent because it sounds so personal . Cooke stepped back from the royal ‘we’ and the broad metaphoric strokes that folk singers such as Dylan used to gather their audiences to the cause. He didn’t say: ‘Meet me in Alabama and we’ll do some civil disobedience to fight for our rights!’ He said: ‘I was born by the river in a little tent.’ He said: ‘I go downtown and somebody keep telling me, don’t hang around.’ He said it’s been too hard, living like this. So let’s not do it anymore.

N ot long after I first fell for Sam Cooke, I moved to Paris, where an American boy broke my heart. It was December: the sky over pointy rooftops and grand façades was always grey, a few times dusting my nose with translucent snow.

That same week, a general strike against public-sector cuts broke out across the country. The strike shut down the Métro, the post office, all but a few extra-urban trains, and even the Louvre. Suddenly, at all times of day, Parisians were out on the streets in large numbers. People who would normally be in taxis, on subways, or in offices thronged the sidewalks. They walked or hitchhiked to work if they were still working, and they protested if they weren’t, overfilling the streets in the process.

There was not much for a newly arrived American to do without a subway or civic attractions, so I found myself walking the streets with the locals. From the apartment where I stayed, in the 19th arrondissement , I walked across town to Montmartre. I walked across the Seine multiple times a day. I walked when I didn’t have a destination, and when it rained, and at 2am when it wasn’t very safe.

When I got cold, I stopped at cafés or kebab spots. When I was lonely, I ducked into one of the small art-house theatres that dotted the Left Bank, watching my old American friends Humphrey Bogart and Clint Eastwood in macho, black-and-white versions of the romance and the home I had somehow found myself without. I had a Walkman cassette player and just a few of my favourite tapes, and I listened to Cooke sing A Change is Gonna Come over and over as I walked, rewinding until I wore the tape thin and drained the expensive AA batteries I didn’t know how to ask for in French at the tabac .

in the Bastille district I found myself inside a tremendous demonstration, one of hundreds of thousands of people marching and loudly objecting to the way things were

I was 19, heartbroken, and always lost. It feels almost trite now, in adulthood, to look back on a particular emotional pain of my youth and say, I thought I was going to die, it hurt so bad. It verges on humorous, how breezily I can chronicle all the places I cried in Paris: phone booths and doorways; churches and bookstores; the small twin bed next to the paper-thin wall in my host’s apartment; the shared half-bath.

During those months in Paris, my calves shook constantly. I stumbled on stairs and ground my molars into ruin. Deep inside that place of heartbreak, A Change Is Gonna Come became my own personal protest song, a new kind of break-up ballad whose lyrical determination suggested – no, insisted – that I prepare for something better. The hope and almost naive expectation contained in Cooke’s words – I know , someday – was more reassuring than a lullaby.

The pain and hardship he sang of was not my pain, but I could easily transpose my own hurt onto his lyrics. That’s what pop songs are for. They are templates for selfishness, allowing us listeners to take a singer’s heartache for our own. Of course, on some level, I knew that my romantic angst was not a matter of civil rights. Even while I felt my own emotional struggle so palpably in Cooke’s ooh s and aah s, I could never know what it was like to live as a black person in the South in the mid-century US, or anywhere.

I could, however, listen.

I t was in Paris on one of those cold grey mornings that I stumbled into my first political protest. On my daily promenade, the air threatened snow again. There seemed to be even more people out than usual. As I turned down the Rue de Belleville and approached the Place de la République, in the Bastille district I found myself inside a tremendous demonstration, one of hundreds of thousands of people marching and loudly objecting to the way things were.

I remember the pressure of other people’s bodies feeling pleasantly warm. I remember not understanding what people were saying to one another but still understanding its sentiment. I remember being startled by the everydayness, the normality of the protesters – people who looked like my politically Left-leaning friends, but also like my friends’ parents, and middle managers, and taxi drivers, and doctors. They were old and young, racially diverse, and they were all singing and chanting, melodious and angry at the same time.

As I pressed in to the centre of the protest, Marianne de la République peeked over the crowds. Someone had tacked a sign on the statue’s chest that said ‘ solidarité’ and I wondered if that word meant something different in French, something beyond a term used within the labour movement.

It was my first time out of the US, and now I realised how divided, how complaisant a place I came from. I didn’t know there were places where professionals protest in the streets right alongside those who work for them; that solidarity, healthcare and vacations were things in which they all took an interest. I wondered what strange place I’d wandered into, where there was a middle class who felt comfortable shutting down a city to make their power known, who not only weren’t afraid to ask for more, but knew they had a right to.

for the first time in my life I felt it, there, in a moment of private, personal pain and public, political upheaval: something bigger

I kept walking, along my daily route across the city. I walked past the plaza outside the Hôtel de Ville where Robert Doisneau once photographed a couple kissing. I traversed the small island in the Seine where the cathedral of Nôtre Dame sits. I ended up near the Sorbonne, where the protests were more confrontational. Groups of black-clad young people threw rocks and Molotov cocktails into the windows of storefronts. Everyone seemed to be running in opposite directions, and the beep-beep of European sirens blared their own dissonant song.

Snow formed and failed, and tried again to form. I stuck to the margins of the action and kept walking. I put my headphones on. The shiny black of a gendarme ’ s baton caught my eye as he passed me at arm’s length, chasing a young man wearing a hooded sweatshirt. The smell of teargas drifted across the avenues. Sam Cooke sang. And for the first time in my life I felt it, there, in a moment of private, personal pain and public, political upheaval: something bigger. Pressed close by bodies in the bustling mosh pit of protest, my imagination enfolded by the music I imbibed, I shivered into a rudimentary understanding that there is a world beyond my own heartbreak. There are hearts that are struggling just for the right to keep beating. That’s what protest music is for. It can allow people to connect private pain with public injury – to shout it from the barricades or smuggle it inside a sliding rhyme.

To be effective, such resistance must be sustained, like a sweet note on an old record from a long-ago era that still ricochets inside your veins. It remains to be seen whether new generations of classic protest songs will emerge from the current US unrest in response to racism and police brutality. Recently, the musical polymath Questlove put out a public call for new protest songs: ‘Songs with spirit in them. Songs with solutions. Songs with questions. Protest songs don’t have to be boring or non-danceable or ready-made for the next Olympics. They just have to speak truth.’

At a time when it feels like every city in the US, every day, is about to explode in rebellion against the devaluation of black people’s lives, Questlove is challenging artists to keep up. On this particular day, however, I’ll be pulling out my Sam Cooke records and looking back. Perhaps we already have the songs we need for this moment, because this moment is a continuation of the one Cooke soundtracked in A Change Is Gonna Come . Fifty years later, the song remains the same.

Political philosophy

Citizens and spinning wheels

For Indians to be truly free, Gandhi argued they must take up traditional crafts. Was it a quixotic hope or inspired solution?

Benjamin Studebaker

C L R James and America

The brilliant Trinidadian thinker is remembered as an admirer of the US but he also warned of its dark political future

Harvey Neptune

Progress and modernity

The great wealth wave

The tide has turned – evidence shows ordinary citizens in the Western world are now richer and more equal than ever before

Daniel Waldenström

Neuroscience

The melting brain

It’s not just the planet and not just our health – the impact of a warming climate extends deep into our cortical fissures

Clayton Page Aldern

Falling for suburbia

Modernists and historians alike loathed the millions of new houses built in interwar Britain. But their owners loved them

Michael Gilson

Computing and artificial intelligence

Mere imitation

Generative AI has lately set off public euphoria: the machines have learned to think! But just how intelligent is AI?

The New York Times

The learning network | lesson plan | teaching with protest music.

Lesson Plan | Teaching With Protest Music

Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.

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We shall overcome, we shall overcome, We shall overcome someday; Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, We shall overcome someday.

The simple, aspirational lyrics of “We Shall Overcome” have been sung by everyone from churchgoers to civil rights protesters to Southern labor activists to the United States president.

The song is part of a long history of protest music that has helped to open eyes and awaken consciences since the earliest years of American life, and the tradition continues today.

Studying the protest music of the past or present can be a powerful and engaging teaching tool for students, whether the goal is to better understand a historical time period, analyze the power of lyrics and poetry, understand forces of social change or respond to current issues.

In this lesson, we provide teaching ideas from The Times and around the web for incorporating protest music, from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter, into your social studies or language arts curriculum. It is, however, only a starting point: We hope you’ll suggest additional songs, artists and articles in the comments.

Ways to Incorporate Protest Music Into Your Humanities Curriculum

“Ohio” performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Music can be a primary source for studying history, just like a photograph, newspaper article or diary entry. And listening to music can be an engaging way for students to learn more about the attitudes and culture of a particular time period.

Below, we outline a lesson template that can be used to incorporate any protest song into your class. Note that the assumption is students have some background knowledge of the time period — whether it’s the Great Depression or apartheid-era South Africa.

Write and Discuss: Why do you listen to music? How does music make you feel? Does music serve a different role in your life depending on your mood, who you are with or what you are doing? Does music ever cause you to think differently, to feel a part of something larger or to want to rise up and take action?

Then, respond to this quotation by Pete Seeger, a champion of folk music, who died in 2014 :

One of the purposes of music is to help you forget your troubles; another, help you learn from your troubles (some do), and, some will help you do something about your troubles.

Do you agree? Why?

Listen and Annotate: Next, listen to ____________, a protest song from the time period we are studying, while reading along with the printed lyrics. As you listen, annotate by underlining, highlighting or writing in the margins — reacting or responding to anything in the lyrics or in the music itself. (You may want to play the song a second time, if it would be helpful.)

• What did you notice in the song as you listened? How did it make you feel?
• What did you hear that makes you say that?
• What more can you find?

(The above three questions are adapted from the facilitation protocol we use in our regular Monday feature “ What’s Going On in This Picture? “)

Then, once students have responded to the song, ask the following questions (if they haven’t already come up organically): How does the song connect to the time period we’re studying? Do you think the song is effective as a protest song? Why?

Ideas for Going Further

Repeat: You can assign students to small groups to listen to other protest songs from that time period and annotate the lyrics, and then report back to the class about what they heard.

Write Your Own Protest Song or Verse: If you are studying specific content, like the Great Depression or the civil rights movement, students can write their own protest song about that event, or they can compose an original verse for an existing song.

Bring in Contemporary Music That Speaks to an Issue or Era in the Past: What songs today have something to say about the past, whether because people are still struggling with the same issues, or because the lyrics seem symbolic or ironic when seen through the lens of the past?

Create an Annotated Playlist or Podcast of Protest Music That Matters to You: Throughout the unit or as a culminating project, invite students to bring in protest songs that matter to them, from any era and about any topic. As a class, they might then create an annotated playlist or a podcast that features discussion by the students and snippets of each of the songs.

Examples of Protest Music From Different Times, Places and Genres

The Civil Rights Movement

“We Shall Overcome” sung by Mahalia Jackson

In the midst of the civil rights movement, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told The Times in this 1962 article : “The freedom songs are playing a strong and vital role in our struggle. They give the people new courage and a sense of unity. I think they keep alive a faith, a radiant hope, in the future, particularly in our most trying hours.”

Five decades later, Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts reflect on how the story of “We Shall Overcome” illuminates the rich history of the black freedom struggle. In their Op-Ed essay, “ Birth of a Freedom Anthem ,” they write:

Fifty years ago today, on March 15, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced plans to submit a new voting rights bill before a joint session of Congress. His speech came after several weeks of violence in and around Selma, Ala., that had taken the lives of two civil rights activists and left dozens of others bloodied. Seventy million Americans watched on television as Johnson, a Texas Democrat who had supported segregationist policies early in his career, proclaimed racial discrimination not a “Negro problem” but “an American problem.” It is not, he said, “just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” Then, after a pause, he added, “And we shall overcome.” Few Americans could have missed the significance of these four words. Since the early 1960s, “We Shall Overcome” had served as the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement. Protesters sang the song during the 1963 March on Washington, the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign and the demonstrations in Selma. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. watched the broadcast in a Selma living room, a tear ran down his cheek.

Rock and Roll: An American Story, a free online curriculum presented by Steven Van Zandt’s Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, provides a detailed lesson plan that explores the significance of “We Shall Overcome” in the civil rights movement. Included in the lesson are video clips of President Johnson’s “We Shall Overcome” speech and the March on Washington, when the crowd broke into song. The lesson also asks students to listen to “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday and “Mississippi Goddam” by Nina Simone, as well as other movement songs.

The above Op-Ed essay could easily be embedded in that lesson as a way to better understand how “We Shall Overcome” first came to the civil rights movement and how it found its way into the president’s speech.

South Africa and the Songs of Freedom

“Free Nelson Mandela” performed by The Specials

Can songs be more powerful than speeches? This is the question that Angélique Kidjo, a Grammy award-winning Beninese singer-songwriter and activist, addresses in her Opinion piece “ Songs of Freedom .” She writes:

IN 1974, I was a young girl watching the Nigerian newscast on our blinking TV set, sitting on the patio of the family house in Cotonou, Benin. Suddenly I saw Winnie Mandela in the middle of a crowd, talking about her husband in jail in South Africa. That was the first time I heard about apartheid. My whole world collapsed. I had been raised with nine brothers and sisters in a modest and loving family, protected from the harsh realities of my continent. My parents had told me that you don’t judge people by their color and that we’re all born equal. Every day, we welcomed expatriates from all corners of the world. That day, on the TV screen, I could see the anger and the despair in the eyes of the South Africans. I was learning about the injustice of apartheid. I felt a sudden rage. I had been singing on stage since I was six; music was the center of my life. My first reaction was to write a song: instead of screaming my rage I would sing it. The song that came to me was a harsh and hateful song. When my father heard it, he told me: “ You can’t sing this, music is not there to preach hate and violence. I understand your frustration and your pain, but you can’t use your songs to add fuel to the fire. Music is supposed to bring people together and fight for peace, because it is art and beauty, not politics.” Many years later, I truly believe that music helped free Mandela. Johnny Clegg’s “Asimbonanga” comes to mind, as does Peter Gabriel’s “Biko.” So many artists wrote songs for Mandela, putting much international pressure on South Africa. The songs were stronger than speeches. Who will remember a politician’s speeches? But everyone can sing Bob Marley’s lines, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.” The few political speeches that have made a mark in history — from Haile Selassie, Martin Luther King or John F. Kennedy — sound like songs! That is the power of music. The mix of melodies and words carries a message much more powerful than spoken ideas. Why? Maybe because when someone sings, truth speak directly to your heart.

What do you think? Read the entire article and listen to some of the musical tributes to Nelson Mandela to which she refers.

Then consider whether you agree that “music in itself is the expression of freedom.” Do agree that “universal access to music must be cherished”?

Hip-Hop as Protest, Yesterday and Today

In the ’80s and ’90s, hip-hop artists like Public Enemy protested over social issues, urging black solidarity and an end to compromise.

Though they were often condemned for violent words or images , today Public Enemy is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — and the gangsta rap group N.W.A., then seen by outsiders as “ aggressive, profane young black men talking about mayhem ,” is the subject of a hit, mainstream movie .

Some are nostalgic for the early days of hip-hop and question whether music today still has “something to say.” But, as Stereo Williams wrote in 2015 for The Daily Beast:

We love to look back at when hip-hop “meant something.” The block parties that birthed hip-hop were intended to bring black youth together under a banner of unity and creativity, and the uber-classic hip-hop single “The Message” was released all the way back in 1982, but socially conscious rap music didn’t become consistently visible until the late 1980s, when acts like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions were discussing everything from the prison industrial complex to the hypocrisy of the war on drugs in their songs. Against a backdrop of Reagan and Bush, the murder of Yusef Hawkins and the Rodney King beating, rappers raged on wax, and it gave voice to a lot of the frustration that was felt in the community. Hip-hop stars like Chuck D, Ice Cube, and 2Pac were often asked by the media to offer commentary on what was going on — giving credence to Chuck D’s famous adage that hip-hop of the time was “CNN for black people.” In the last year, the seemingly endless proliferation of racially charged incidents and ongoing civil unrest has kept the national conversation fixed on race. And there have been several high-profile releases from hip-hop and soul artists that have been reflective of the tension, frustration, and anger. From D’Angelo’s Black Messiah to Run the Jewels 2 to the latest album from Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp A Butterfly , there are a growing number of releases that are attempting to express some of what the streets appear to be feeling. Beyond the standard musings about the hard-knock life or abstract stabs at “commentary,” these projects are somehow both artistically focused and thematically conflicted. This is no strident preaching; this is emotional, and confused. This is not “Fight the Power” nor is it “A Change Is Gonna Come.” This is “something’s gotta give — and we’re getting tired of asking.” And a lot of it is brilliant.

Last March, Jon Caramanica reviewed Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly,” an album that has already been annotated on Genius by hundreds of people. He wrote:

At its best, it’s a howling work of black protest art on par with Amiri Baraka’s incendiary play “Dutchman,” or David Hammons’s moving decapitated hoodie “In the Hood” (seen most recently on the cover of Claudia Rankine’s poetry collection “Citizen: An American Lyric”) — works rooted in both pride and fear. On “For Free? (Interlude),” he’s indignant, lashing out at a society that gave him only the barest essentials and dared him to thrive: “Like I never made ends meet eatin’ your leftovers and raw meat.” On “The Blacker the Berry,” he returns time and again to a wounded question — “You hate me, don’t you?” — and calls out the structures of power that suggest that black lives don’t matter: It’s evident that I’m irrelevant to society That’s what you’re telling me, penitentiary would only hire me

Salamishah Tillet declared in The Atlantic that, “for the first time since the late-1960s, the U.S. is seeing the revival and redefinition” of protest music. She, too, is talking about the Black Lives Matter movement. Here are three of the songs she mentions:

“ Be Free, ” sung by J. Cole. “ Black Rage, ” sung by Lauryn Hill. “ Glory, ” performed by John Legend and Common.

Is hip-hop music still “CNN for black people “? Is it a positive force for change in society? What role has it played in politics around the world — from Egypt to France to Cuba ? Why is it such an effective form of expression and protest?

Invite students to make their own annotated playlists that look at particular themes, ideas or metaphors in hip-hop history, or that trace the social history of or the public reaction to the genre from its earliest roots.

Protest Music Around the World Now

“Salam” performed by Shahin Najafi

In 2003, Brent Staples expressed his concern that protest music might never again be the force of change and solidarity it once was.

He wrote that “independent radio stations that once would have played edgy, political music have been gobbled up by corporations that control hundreds of stations and have no wish to rock the boat.” But in the dozen years since, a digital revolution has upturned the global music industry. iTunes, YouTube and Spotify completely altered how we discover new music. And protest songs, once again, have a way to reach the people, here in the United States and all around the world.

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s song in support of gay and lesbian equality has been streamed over 150 million times on YouTube.

And Beyoncé’s “ ***Flawless ,” featuring the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, has become a feminist declaration for many.

Shahin Najafi, an Iranian rapper living in exile in Germany, uploads his songs to the Internet and reaches his countrymen living in Iran (if they find a way around the Iranian government censors).

And Pussy Riot , the Russian feminist punk group, whose anti-Putin stunts landed them in prison in 2012 and made them a global cause célèbre, can also release a song in English about police brutality in America.

Have students listen to one or more of the protest songs included in this post. They can listen, annotate and discuss, as we outlined above. Then they should choose the issue or issues they care most about, and write their own protest lyrics. Music is optional.

For more inspiration, students can consider that musicians have sung about almost everything, from standing against domestic violence , to supporting birth control for women , to fighting against poverty , to assailing common attitudes toward Latinos in the United States.

A Beginning Library of Protest Songs

“The Ghost of Tom Joad” performed by Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello

We’ve put together the following abridged list of protest songs from different eras. To provide lyrics, and in most cases annotations and the song itself, we linked to Genius , the crowd-sourced lyrics annotation site.

Do you teach with protest songs in your class? If so, please share the titles in the comments section.

Great Depression “ Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, sung by Bing Crosby

Labor Movement “ Tom Joad, ” sung by Woodie Guthrie “ 1913 Massacre, ” sung by Woodie Guthrie “ Joe Hill, ” sung by Joan Baez “ The Ghost of Tom Joad, ” performed by Bruce Springsteen

Civil Rights Movement “ We Shall Overcome, ” sung by Louis Armstrong “ A Change Gonna Come, ” sung by Sam Cooke “ Strange Fruit, ” sung by Billie Holiday “ Lift Every Voice and Sing, written by James Weldon Johnson “ Birmingham Sunday, ” by Joan Baez “ Mississippi Goddam, ” sung by Nina Simone

Antiwar Movement “ Ohio, ” performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young “ Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation, ” by Tom Paxton “ The Times They Are A-Changin’, ” sung by Bob Dylan “ For What It’s Worth, ” sung by Buffalo Springfield “ War, ” sung by Edwin Starr “ Fortunate Son, ” performed by Creedence Clearwater Revival

Anti-Apartheid Movement (a Times special feature ) “ Free Nelson Mandela, ” performed by The Specials “ Asimbonanga, ” sung by Johnny Clegg “ Biko, ” sung by Peter Gabriel “ Black President, ” sung by Brenda Fassie

Additional Resources

Rock and Roll: An American Tradition | The Protest Tradition

Facing History and Ourselves | The Sounds of Change Resource Collection

Smithsonian Folkways | Protest Songs: A Musical Introduction (PDF)

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame | Digital Classroom

EDSITEment! | The Freedom Riders and the Popular Music of the Civil Rights Movement

POV | Music As Social Protest (PDF)

Gilder Lehrman | Analyzing Protest Songs of the 1960s

The Choices Program | Songs of the Vietnam War

Teaching Tolerance | The Sounds of Change

This resource may be used to address the academic standards listed below.

Common Core E.L.A. Anchor Standards

1   Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

2   Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.

3   Analyze how and why individuals, events, or ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.

Speaking and Listening

2   Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally.

3   Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric.

What's Next

How to Write a Protest Song

Protest songs give a social movement a soundtrack. From a songwriting perspective, they help you connect with your society by engaging with what you want to change, whether it be the minds of the people who disagree with your ideals, or the complacency of those who agree with you, so you can energize them into action.

In Robert Lagueux’s Music, Self, and Society course, the author muses pragmatically on whether a protest song can actually change anything.

Not all music that attempts to bring about social change necessarily does so, of course; but the mere fact that protest songs exist, and that they are often suppressed by the institutions that are being protested, demonstrates that they can. No one would bother trying to suppress something that didn’t have a chance of working; it’s too much energy.

If you’re looking to express your anger and frustration, especially now in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests, put your feelings to song. Here are a few tips from some of the greatest protest singers as well as some of Berklee Online’s songwriting instructors.

If you’re recording your protest song yourself, make sure you are in your truest voice when singing. Because protest songs must be a mirror of society, the vocal must reflect a level of sincerity and honesty that other types of songs don’t necessarily require. In his Vocal Production course, Prince Charles Alexander writes that people just want to be entertained, “but the records that stand the test of time—the vocal performances that we remember—do something else for the audience. They allow the listener to experience a truth that is often not easy for us to express or experience in daily life. This is an aspect of the record as a work of art.” 

Think of the escalating intensity of Rage Against the Machine’s best songs, the measured anger of Killer Mike in “Reagan,” or the matter-of-fact confidence of Kendrick Lamar in “Alright.” This is because they are expressing issues that are close to their heart, and they express themselves with the same emotions that they would use to talk about such issues, but the music amplifies their passion and the sincerity of their performance puts their words on a level that mere speech cannot reach.

Be Direct in the Chorus

The chorus of your protest song should be something that you imagine throngs of people singing as they march. Jimmy Kachulis makes an astute observation about the function of the chorus in his Songwriting: Writing Hit Songs course:

The chorus is the part of the song that keeps coming back with the same lyrics and music, usually after each verse. This helps audience members remember it so they can sing along. Why is it called a “chorus?” Because the audience is supposed to sing along. They are the “chorus.” So, that’s your goal: to get your audience—usually not musicians—to sing along with your song’s chorus.

For protest songs, this is even more true. You need to write what you feel, but also tap into what many other people are feeling if they’re going to act as your chorus. If your song does achieve enough momentum to inspire the masses, then ideally they will sing your song at rallies and protests, which they will probably do without your recording. This means they’ll likely just sing the chorus, so make it count. Make it memorable, and make it direct. Listen to the Wailers’ “Get Up Stand Up.” The message is simple and direct: “Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights, get up, stand up, don’t give up the fight.” It’s easy to chant, and there is power in its simplicity. The revolution will be energized!

Be Direct in the Title

This is another instance where being as direct as possible is best. You want people to find your song, so use the main lyric from your chorus as the title. No need to go all poetic and give it a title that isn’t even in the song. For what it’s worth, Buffalo Springfield’s best known political song, which is titled “For What It’s Worth” may be a brilliant protest song, but they should have titled it, “Stop! What’s that Sound?”

In his course, Lyric Writing: Writing from the Title , author Pat Pattison makes two very effective points about titles:

• A title should be the target area that everything else in the song aims at.
• A title should be able to be developed as the song progresses, so that it gains more impact as we gain more information.

It’s this second point that we should examine specifically in regards to a protest song. Think of “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Each time Bob Dylan sets up the refrain, the context of the title line changes, and the world of the song expands outward and the stakes get higher, until the final apocalyptic allusion of “and the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a-changin’.”

Use Arresting Imagery

Think of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” often regarded as the first protest song. In fact, Ahmet Ertegun famously cited it as “the beginning of the civil rights movement.” In regards to the previous suggestion, this song is definitely an example of a title that gains more impact as we gain more information. If you hear the title out of context, you might think it’s about something else entirely. But this song works so well as a protest song because its imagery is so effective. Songwriter Abel Meeropol wastes no time in getting to the vivid violence: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root, black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze.” 

The imagery in the verse of U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is similarly vivid: “Broken bottles on the children’s feet, bodies strewn across the dead end street.” Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” also uses the verses for vivid imagery. We can essentially see the Vietnam vet from whose perspective Springsteen is singing, as he’s looking for purpose “down in the shadow of the penitentiary, out by the gas fires of the refinery.”

Twist Traditions

One sure way to make a cultural statement is to take allusions to existing songs, and twist them into a context that serves your purpose. Oftentimes this means taking something celebratory and making it revolutionary. The Rolling Stones twisted the opening line of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” for their own “Street Fighting Man” to “summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the streets.” Public Enemy took the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right (to Party)” and turned it into “Party for Your Right to Fight.” Think of “This is America” by Childish Gambino, and the way the intro and bridge give the listeners a false sense of comfort that they’re listening to party music before dropping the bass and opening up a hard, cold reality, “This is America, don’t catch you slippin’ now.”

Use the Verses for the Details

Think about the verses of your protest song as your platform to say what you want to say. The chorus can have the chorus, but the verse is yours. The verse words don’t have to be something people will sing along to—really, does anybody know all the verse words to “Give Peace a Chance”?—but this does not mean the verse words should be throwaway lyrics. Think of the verses as an opportunity to preserve your feelings in a way that it could be repurposed for an inspirational quote about the change you want to inspire.

Think about the lyric in “What’s Going On” where Marvin Gaye sings, “War is not the answer, only love can conquer hate.” The masses don’t sing along to it, but they do listen to it.

Think about all the quotable verse words in Beyoncé’s “Formation,” from the Red Lobster line to the hot sauce in her bag to the “black Bill Gates in the making” line. The verse is a time to get personal, and really examine your thoughts and feelings on what you’re writing about, to solidify your connection to the issue at hand. And then, as the Clash sang, “let fury have the hour, anger can be power, you know that you can use it.” 

It’s easy to feel like there’s more you could be doing right now. Besides marching, reading, and donating, using that anger to write a protest song is a way that musicians can play their part. And creating art during this time is an important role in all of this.

To read more about Berklee’s stance on social change, read “ Our Commitment to Inclusion: A Statement from Berklee’s Center for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. ”

Related Articles

Berklee is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education "NECHE" (formerly NEASC).

Berklee Online is a University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA) award-winner fourteen years in a row (2005-2019).

One, two, three, four! What makes a protest song really soar?

Protest songs have a long history, but the forms and the culture may be changing their purpose.

Dissent sometimes comes with a soundtrack.

As protest marches fill streets in cities across the country, participants are putting their concerns to song and, increasingly, to percussive chants.

It's part of a long tradition of songs sung in protest against racial discrimination, wars, union busting, hippie culture, social injustices — even against protests.

Americans long have cast their emotions in musical form, said Alex Lubet , a professor of music and adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota.

"Scientists have tried to determine why music is so universal, and not one has come up with a single answer," he said. "It's a basic human need. So it's only natural that people use it in protest. Yelling louder can be ­effective, but it's the addition of aesthetics — of putting words to a melody — that creates something that may last."

There's no particular format for a protest song, said Lubet, 61. Some are pointedly about a single topic, while others address the broader human condition.

Of the latter, look to Bob Dylan, a son of Minnesota's Iron Range, who wrote some of the most durable protest songs, notably "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Masters of War." Oh, and "The Times They Are A-Changin.' " Oh, and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall. "

"Dylan's approach was the most mythological and almost oblique," said Brian Laidlaw , 33, a folk musician recently of Minneapolis, now of Denver, who occasionally teaches classes about writing protest songs.

"Blowin' in the Wind" endures, he said, because its message of being responsive to suffering can apply to so many episodes in history.

Some, of course, prefer fire over subtlety, Laidlaw said. "Ohio," about four students killed at Kent State in 1970 when National Guardsmen began firing at an antiwar protest, is such an anthem.

"It can feel good to write a song that's really cathartic, you know, 'What are all you idiots doing?' " he said. "But if you truly want to effect change, that can't be your thesis statement. Dylan realized this. His use of lyric is so subtle, so glacial."

A three-legged stool

So what goes into a good protest song?

Laidlaw has an MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota, taught songwriting at McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul and is in a Ph.D. program at the University of Denver. He regards the protest song as "the ideal form to practice rhetoric as a songwriter."

But just as in an effective essay, he said, a protest song depends on three legs: "It's a strong performance about an urgent topic with a specific audience in mind." Too often, he said, protest songwriters do only two out of three well, and the missing component results in a wobbly effort.

Who sings protest songs?

The usual suspects are considered left-wing, liberal, socialist, unionist, revolutionary, anti-whatever. But those deemed right-wing, conservative, establishment, pro-whatever also can come up with memorable anthems.

Merle Haggard's "Okie From Muskogee" often comes to mind, written in 1969 when Haggard had grown disheartened watching Vietnam War protests. It twanged against drug use, draft dodging and the counterculture in general, and went on to be named song of the year by the Country Music Association.

Likewise, Barry Sadler's "Ballad of the Green Berets" of 1966 protested the protests against the Vietnam War, supporting government policy and the troops. It was named Billboard's No. 1 single for the year.

If there are fewer such hits now, it may spring from a period of relative calm — although controversial police shootings of black men have inspired new artful protest. But there also are so many more pathways for songs to reach a specific audience, diffusing their ability to sweep the country.

Consider Janelle Monáe's visceral "Hell You Talmbout" about police shootings. It's available by streaming, on YouTube and in performance.

"Back in the '60s and '70s, there were only a few widely recognized genres and a limited number of radio stations," Lubet said. "Now you can access all kinds of music without being on broadcast radio."

The rise of the chant

The forms also are changing. Parodies put scathing words to familiar songs. Protest chants are rising, such as Fiona Apple's refrain directed at President Donald Trump at the Women's March on Washington: "We don't want your tiny hands anywhere near our underpants."

Laidlaw wondered if chants are the wave of the future.

"In such a charged political environment, it's tough to be controlled and meaningful," he said. "With a chant, there's no ownership, no barriers to entry. You don't have to sing. You don't even have to be able to read.

"It's inherently populist. You can't have a chant without a bunch of people."

That said, he also pondered the effectiveness of protest songs today.

"These are humbling times to be an artist," he said. "Is it enough to keep doing what we've been doing, or it is time to make the work more pointed? Is it better to spend that time and energy calling representatives and going to protests? Should the art be secondary? That's a hard thing to say, but we have to ask the question."

Listen to a playlist of protest songs below or click here to open it in Spotify.

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Them’s Fightin’ Words: 10 Great Protest Songs

To the barricades! And don’t forget the lyric sheet! With midterm elections approaching, a look back at some anthems and ditties that have challenged the status quo.

By Loudon Wainwright III

Mr. Wainwright is a singer-songwriter whose latest album is “Years in the Making.”

Political persuasion is rarely friendly, and there will be lots more yelling, blaming, placard-waving and marching before we get to the November midterm elections. But I hope there will be some fervent singing as well — maybe even some of what used to be called protest songs.

I think of 16-year-old me in 1963 , hitchhiking to the Newport Folk Festival with my Martin D-28 guitar to witness Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the Freedom Singers, all swaying with locked hands and singing “We Shall Overcome.” Then there’s the memory of Toby Keith on TV four decades later, whipping a huge, scary outdoor audience into a frenzy with “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.”

Throughout my career, I have come up with musical harangues, broadsides, laments, parodies and political potshots, and my forays into folk agitprop tend to be laced with humor, in hopes of encouraging members of the audience to laugh at those they might fear and oppose.

In the spring of 2016, I wrote a song about the candidacy of Donald Trump called “I Had a Dream.” (“His little finger on the button, he was doin’ his thing/Our new national anthem was ‘My Ding-a-ling.’”) The whole thing seemed like a joke back then — the song, him, the idea that the guy could be elected president. When I performed the number during that summer and early fall, most people loved it, and why wouldn’t they? I was preaching to a choir. There were a few unhappy campers, people who walked out in a huff, but part of my job description is ruffling feathers, so I took their displeasure in stride.

I haven’t been singing “I Had a Dream” much these last two years, although not long ago I came up with a little thing called “Presidents Day.” (“There’s a reckoning coming in November they say/In the meanwhile it’s unto Robert Mueller we pray.”)

Thinking of all this, I found myself putting together a list of my Top 10 Protest Songs. It’s entirely subjective and strong arguments could be made for the inclusion of songs by Marvin Gaye, Phil Ochs, the Clash and others. You’ll also notice that most of my picks are oldies. But recently I saw and heard “This Is America” by Childish Gambino and was totally knocked out. The beat goes on.

“We Shall Overcome” Good for almost any oppressive occasion, this anthem of the civil rights movement was popularized by Pete Seeger, but it is said to have descended from “I’ll Overcome Some Day,” a 1900 hymn by Charles Albert Tindley.

“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” Bob Dylan wrote this bitter musical condemnation several months after the 1963 killing of an African-American barmaid by a young man from a wealthy white tobacco family in Charles County, Md. It was the “system,” a popular target for all political persuasions, that led to the perpetrator being given the ridiculous sentence of six months, but Mr. Dylan is really taking aim at public apathy and misplaced sentiment: “You who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears/Take the rag away from your face/Now ain’t the time for your tears.”

“We Will All Go Together When We Go” My foremost influence in musical social commentary was not Mr. Dylan or Phil Ochs, but Tom Lehrer, whose albums of brilliant satirical songs were part of my father’s record collection. In 1959, Mr. Lehrer released this song on “An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer,” and it’s a great example of how you can protest something serious, like global nuclear destruction, just by being silly. (“When the air becomes uranious /We will all go simultaneous.”)

“Little Boxes” In 1963, Pete Seeger had a folk hit with this Malvina Reynolds composition. It’s nursery-rhyme-like melody offers a tinkly condemnation of what used to be called middle-class conformity. Tom Lehrer considered it “the most sanctimonious song ever written,” but I like it. Kate and Anna McGarrigle recorded a fine French version, “Petites Boîtes,” in 2001.

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Protest and music.

• Sumangala Damodaran Sumangala Damodaran School of Develompent Studies, Ambedkar University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.81
• Published online: 05 August 2016

The relationship between music and politics and specifically that between music and protest has been relatively under-researched in the social sciences in a systematic manner, even if actual experiences of music being used to express protest have been innumerable. Further, the conceptual analysis that has been thrown up from the limited work that is available focuses mostly on Euro-American experiences with protest music. However, in societies where most music is not written down or notated formally, the discussions on the distinct role that music can play as an art form, as a vehicle through which questions of artistic representation can be addressed, and the specific questions that are addressed and responded to when music is used for political purposes, have been reflected in the music itself, and not always in formal debates. It is only in using the music itself as text and a whole range of information around its creation—often, largely anecdotal and highly context dependent—that such music can be understood. Doing so across a whole range of non-Western experiences brings out the role of music in societal change quite distinctly from the Euro-American cases. Discussions are presented about the informed perceptions about what protest music is and should be across varied, yet specific experiences. It is based on the literature that has come out of the Euro-American world as well as from parts that experienced European colonialism and made the transition to post-colonial contexts in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

• protest music
• popular music
• socialist realism
• music and politics
• representation in music
• music and identity

Despite the recognition of the social importance of music, and that social structures and developments can be be reflected in varied ways in musical structures, music has not been given a fair hearing in the social sciences. If little systematic investigation into the relation of music to culture or society as a whole has been made, even less effort has been expended on understanding the relationship between music and politics. Music has represented a mode of expression for human beings’ interaction with their surroundings, making it a spontaneous medium for expressing their discontent with it as well. This discontent has, in varied historical and geographical contexts, been expressed through words, without words, through appraisal, evaluation, and often rejection of certain canonical forms, and through creation of new forms. Further, structures of authority have used music as a medium or mode for transmitting political information and values, mobilizing the population, evoking and sustaining pride and identity, and legitimizing patterns of authority. Despite there being a long history of the connection between music and politics, in the role of music as a medium or an instrument of political communication, in critiquing existing social contexts and norms or in expressing protest against those norms, the corpus of work on music and politics has been scant.

It is necessary to make a qualification here. This point, about the corpus of work on music and politics not being substantial, is being made for politics and protest as manifest through collective political movements and the music of protest that arises out of such political mobilizations. Political theory and political philosophy have engaged with the politics of sound and auditory regimes in capitalism, as well as the politics of the emergence of the “visual” against the “auditory” as the dominant sensorial register that acquires prominence, and through which power gets established and played out in society, particularly under capitalism (Attali, 1977 ; Bull & Back, 2003 ; Siisiainen, 2012 ). French theory, through the work of thinkers such as Ranciere ( 2006 ) and Nancy ( 2007 ), to name two, has been concerned with the relationship of music to society, the place of listening with philosophies and cultures of listening, and the place of the sonorous in being and experience. This essay is concerned specifically with protest music arising from politically challenging moments and movements, and the analysis is based on the processes of music making for such purposes.

What is protest music? Within the larger genre of political music, protest music or the music of resistance is a distinct category, encompassing the use of music in politics and as politics. Every period of social upheaval gives birth to songs of discontent. Some songs are crafted specifically as rallying cries to garner support for a cause or to broadcast a grievance, whereas others express or describe conditions in society that give rise to the discontent. The expressions can be based on the individual, can be part of collectives or musical communities, or part of organized political movements. Each period also produces people who, apart from bringing in their everyday experiences and talents into music making, elucidate clearly the reasons why they produce or reject music of particular types. For artists, often, political discourse and the momentous nature of political upheaval become a medium for articulating what might be primarily aesthetic positions as political ones, and this shapes the nature of protest music that is produced.

Much of the vibrant history, as well as diversity of the genre of protest music, is unknown today, including among practitioners or activists who compose and perform protest songs. This neglect has resulted in stereotypes, of protest music having typically standardized structures—for example, sounding agitational and mobilizational, conveying political messages stridently, through lyrics, tunes, and tempo, mostly sung by a collective, and for this reason perhaps not being good enough music “on its own terms.” As a result, the genre of protest music is associated very often with stereotypical forms and styles of rendering, very often encompassing a limited range of styles or types of lyrics. This stereotype has often resulted in, on the one hand, activist musicians, as well as political formations not considering songs as protest songs unless they conformed to the standardized stereotype with respect to form, and content and non-activist musicians, on the other hand, who dismissed protest music as “mere sloganeering.”

This is an important argument that comes from the relative neglect in the study of the music-politics relationship that has been noted above. Apart from the stereotyping of the protest song, the low levels of attention and, in fact, denigration have been seen in the case of popular music in general. This is an aspect of music scholarship that is highlighted by scholars in the field of popular music studies (Frith, 2007 ; Middleton, 1990 ), who note that categories such as “high” and “low” music are continuously employed to judge whether particular kinds of music can even be categorized seriously or not. Largely coming from the European art music tradition from the early part of the 19th century, but also echoed in countries with strong classical music traditions in South Asia, the embeddedness of music in social processes is consciously denied because such embeddedness is seen to distort the tonal qualities of “good” music and interfere with the ability of music to appeal to “higher” human sensibilities. An understanding such as this reflects an ideology of “superior” listening, associated with the ability to undertake a formalistic and cognitive analysis of musical work, which makes music structurally autonomous of social processes. From dominant western musicological frameworks, therefore, the tendency to associate structured and superior listening with autonomy of musical processes from history or society, is reflected in the need to attribute the labels of “high” and “low” to different kinds of music. In fact, even a scholar like Adorno, who argued that all music should be viewed as a distinct field of activity that can only be understood within larger social processes, uses a framework rooted in the discourse of “high culture” to critique popular music (Bennett, Frith, Grossberg, Shepherd, & Turner, 2005 , p. 2; Middleton, 1990 , pp. 34–62). Many forms of popular music, such as jazz, rock, rap, and so on, which have contained within their history and practice strong elements of protest, have been dismissed as inferior music and often dangerous, using ostensibly objective criteria of structure, style, skills, and techniques.

In turn, the forms of protest music have been determined as responses to such critiques and as a conscious attempt to challenge the structures of the canons. In the words of musicologist Chris Ballantine, “The precise nature of 1960s rock music is explicable only in relation to the protest and possibilities for social change that were the lived experience of young people during that decade; the foreclosing of these possibilities and the shrinking of the horizons of change that characterize the 1970s characterize the altered rock music of the 1970s, on the one hand the total sellout of disco music, on the other the brittle and authentic criticism of the repressive social order so well articulated by punk rock” (Ballantine, 1984 , p. 5).

Critical musical scholarship has emerged, particularly in the field of Popular Music Studies that locates the emergence of structured listening and autonomous art in the particular historical period from the 19th century onwards (Middleton, 1990 ) and as constituting an ideological position “because the bourgeoisie then needed to hold such views” (Ballantine, 1984 , p. 6). One of the reasons for the neglect of studying the relationship between music and politics, or specifically protest, arises from the nature of music scholarship that has originated from the West, which in turn is attributable to particular historical factors governing the development of Western classical music.

A perusal of the actual history and experience of protest music shows it as being a highly varied and historically evolved kind of music, and the stereotypical protest song as being a particular type within the larger genre. It becomes necessary and possible, given the wide range and variety that exists, to argue for the legitimacy of protest music as meriting analysis on its own terms, as music.

In practice, protest through music has seen, historically, the adoption of extremely diverse forms across cultures; the actual range and depth of this category of music is extensive, because it is difficult to arrive at a simple set of principles that constitute the category of protest music. The work that we know of, even if it is remarkably scant in comparison to the actual material that exists, has two characteristics: one, the conceptual analysis has been based on Euro-American experiences with protest genres, both as part of and outside of formal political movements. Two, the focus of scholarly work has, to a large extent, been on individual genres and their use in politics. For example, Bennett et al. ( 2005 ), which presents a critique of the method of using “high” and “low” categories to understand any music, is a detailed collection of essays on the rock tradition in Europe and North America. Barker, who reviews conceptual issues that have arisen in analysis of protest music, bases his own research on the American counterculture, and Drott ( 2011 ) describes ways in which rock, jazz, and contemporary music all responded to the events of 1968 in France, often in contradictory ways.

However, in societies where most music is not written down or notated formally, the discussions on the distinct role that music can play as an art form, as a vehicle through which questions of artistic representation can be addressed, and the specific questions that are addressed and responded to in using music for political purposes, have been reflected in the music itself and not always in formal debates. It is only in using the music itself as text, and a whole range of information around its creation, often, largely anecdotal and highly context-dependent, that such music can be understood. Doing so across a whole range of non-Western experiences brings out the role of music in societal change quite distinctly from the Euro-American cases. For example, Aadnani ( 2006 ) is a survey of protest music and poetry in North Africa in the contemporary period, discussed in the context of the Rai musical tradition. There are numerous studies of the Nueva Cancion movement in Latin America (Elliott, 2011 ; Gasparotto, 2011 , to cite two), of rebetiko (Tragaki, 2007 is an important example), of the Anti-Apartheid movement (Ballantine, 1993 ; Olwage, 2008 ; Schumann, 2008 ), and so on. While there are numerous case studies of such experiences, again, the conceptual analysis that takes it beyond the limits of the case that is being studied is limited.

While the insights from all such work are valuable in locating the emergence of or engagement with specific genres of music in expressing political positions or locating their politics historically, a conceptual framework that encompasses diversity of experience and yet culls out basic principles around which the relationship between music and protest can be understood is yet to be worked out.

This article reviews some of the discussions that have informed perceptions about what protest music is and should be across varied, yet specific experiences. It is based on the literature that has come out of the Euro-American world, as well as from parts that experienced European colonialism and made the transition to post-colonial contexts in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Through these examples, we attempt to raise some of the broad concerns of protest music from different parts of the world and across different periods in recent history.

The category of protest music, as a consciously conceived musical as well as a political genre, may have come into existence with the combination of political circumstances that characterized the early part of the 20th century. Anti-colonial struggles, movements for civil rights, socialist revolutions, peasant and trade union movements accelerated from the second decade of the 20th century. Nationalist movements in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the pre- and post-revolution political movements in China and Russia, the Greek Resistance, May 1968 , the Civil Rights Movement, Popular Frontism, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Nueva Cancion Movement in Latin America are some examples of massive political upheavals and movements that created repertoires of protest music over the course of the 20th century. In most of these cases, protest song movements saw the creation of organizations that would undertake the task of creating the repertoires and organizing musical activity. Further, whether or not they were part of organized movements, protest music genres have been numerous, making a detailed listing difficult.

Function and Form in Protest Music

In the broadest sense, protest music expresses discontent with perceived problems in society, covering a wide variety of issues and concerns ranging from personal and interpersonal to local and global matters.

If music has been used to convey protest, in what ways does it do so? Several sets of issues have been important in the creation of protest music. First, how can music be political, or what constitutes political expression in music? Is it related to its political function or to its own structure, mode of expression, and rules? Can music be political without text? Can music be political without relying on the explicit meaning of words?

In one of the relatively early and few works that attempt to define protest music, Serge Denisoff ( 1968 ) categorizes protest songs from a teleological point of view, presenting a functional model of protest song. The functions of political protest, whether in individualistic terms or as part of political movements, are what become important in judging whether a song or a form of music is political or not. Protest songs, by this classification, are defined as such by the ends they seek to achieve, “whether in highlighting social ills, recommending solutions to problems, serving as a form of political propaganda, recruiting members for a cause, or contributing toward feelings of solidarity.” While for Denisoff himself, it is song lyrics that ultimately achieve these aims, the actual variety seen in the category of “functional” protest songs takes it far beyond song lyrics.

In practice, the functions that are served by protest music range from being able to rouse and hold the attention of large gatherings, being part of campaigns, and telling stories of injustice to reproducing music of ordinary people and depicting their lives through lyrics as well as form. Stated more elaborately, “The music of protest has been used to transform consciousness, stir emotions, impose ideology, arouse courage, mobilize forces, ameliorate anger, incriminate power, organize workers, provoke outrage, inspire reflection, express fear, …” (Edmondson, 2013 , p. 902). Thus, from singing anthems that propagate a cause or songs that exhort people into action, to those that merely lyrically describe ordinary peoples’ lives, various functions of protest music are fulfilled. Further, the functions depend upon whether the music is being produced and performed by individuals, musical groups/collectives/communities, or by organized movements.

Denisoff, in focusing on the political functions being served by protest music, makes a distinction between magnetic and rhetorical protest songs, with the former referring to songs with simple melodies and lyrics that can easily catch the attention of listeners and convey a direct political message, and the latter describing songs that are less direct, point out to some specific problem, and appeal to the audience in emotional terms (Denisoff, 1983 ). Pointing out that the American protest song movement has seen a relative decline in magnetic songs and an increase in the rhetorical kind, he suggests that this reflects a decline in class-consciousness, political organization in the politics of protest over time, and an accompanying ineffectiveness, in large mobilizational terms, of protest music.

However, despite the variety in protest music that plays an explicit political function, critics like Barker have argued that the functional approach results in “an excessive focus on song text, a reductive assertion of a unidirectional causal relationship between intended political message and political function, a subordination of the form of protest music to its function, and a prioritization of abstract categories over context”.

Even within a functional understanding of protest music, how has music without text been understood? Hanns Eisler, the German composer who also composed music for many of Bertolt Brecht’s plays, developed what might be considered a hardline view of what should come under the category of “workers’ music” in the 1920s and the 1930s. He rejected purely orchestral music as not being suitable for a worker’s music repertoire and advocated the creation of simple, direct songs. In writing about the importance and role of a workers’ music movement, he argued that “… all music forms and techniques must be developed to suit the express purpose, that is the class struggle. In practice, that will not result in what the bourgeoisie calls style, … in the workers’ music movement we do not aspire to style but to new methods of musical technique, which will make it possible to use music in the class struggle better and more intensively” (Grabs, 1978 , p. 68). Music without words, or orchestral works alone, according to him would be “not right” for a proletarian audience because “such symphonic music … is not accessible to workers either materially or ideologically, … the problem of symphonic orchestral music of a proletarian character is just as insoluble as the attempt to change a dress suit into overalls by painting it red” (Grabs, 1978 , p. 68). What would be appropriate would be programs that consist of fighting songs and orchestral music with choruses, practiced with the public, a “new revolutionary style of music (which) enables novel and original compositions to be so contrived that they can also be executed by untrained amateurs” (Grabs, 1978 , p. 220). The Socialist Realist tradition from the 1930s, which originated in the Soviet Union but was influential in left cultural movements in different parts of the world, emphasized a greater role for the texted genre as against purely symphonic music in representing revolutionary consciousness. Creating anthem-like music with lyrics that were uplifting, heroic, and optimistic, in often grandiose representations of the “new socialist man,” were considered part of the creation of revolutionary music.

Inscribed into such a view of protest music are its exhortatory as well as its didactic roles, recognizable by the qualities of simplicity, accessibility and focus on lyrics. The didactic and explanatory elements of music for the revolutionary cause also came from Brecht’s theatre, which developed these ideas as aesthetic devices in theatre. This meant an eschewal of “lyricism,” in progressive theatre music, of expression for its own sake, in favor of “gestic” music, or music that can explain the social context of the issues taken up by such theatre. Often, it also meant a denouncement of formalism, defined officially as “the separation of form from content” in music, which took many forms. An interpretation of a position such as this in East Germany, in the 1950s, for example, resulted in a critique of atonal music as “not comprehensible to the masses” (Frackman & Powell, 2015 ), along with an understanding that performers should not get too absorbed in their own performances to communicate effectively with their audiences. Underlying these positions was a didactic element for the “masses,” which was often accompanied by arguments for simplicity and accessibility, as in the case of Denisoff’s magnetic protest song. In fact, it is the magnetic protest song that perhaps represents the “stereotypical” protest song that has been referred to earlier, with effectiveness being judged by the immediate inspirational and rousing effect it has on audiences, allowing it to be an effective tool for political mobilization.

However, the functional argument apart, the debate has gone beyond encompassing the form that protest music should take, as is apparent.

History, Context, and Form

This brings up a question that has been important in the history of protest music: what are the kinds of music that need to be represented in a radical political movement or to express protest? Here political questions, as well as issues of aesthetic representation, become important, including the question of function raised earlier and the preceding section indicated. The role of form in representation, in being an intrinsic component of what protest music is but also being important in what protest music does , who to represent, and how to represent politically, has generated some of the most important debates in the history of protest music, involving the relevance of history and context that go beyond the immediate political questions being raised. Issues of nation, nationalism, tradition and that of modes of representation such as modernism, formalism, and realism have been important aspects where history and context have been seen to influence the creation of protest music repertoires.

Over the entire 20th century and into the present, expansive and varied notions of “the people” or the “popular classes,” as Gramsci was to characterize those who emerged as the objects of subjugation, were employed in the creation of protest music. Music, like other art forms, came to be employed in establishing the “ordinary person” as a legitimate subject of history and art, resulting in a varied musical iconography of “the people.” In music, as in the other art forms, realism, interpreted in various ways, emerged as the mode of representation.

In the first half of the 20th century, the ideologies that constituted globally the left and democratic politics of the time, notably nationalism, anti-fascism, and an emancipatory socialism, were being explored and expressed musically in different ways within and across political movements, pointing to interesting similarities and contrasts. Recurring questions that were being asked were: should people’s music be spontaneous and faithfully represented, or consciously crafted out of whatever forms are considered appropriate, or through newer forms? When spontaneous music emerges that reflects the lives of ordinary people, how should it be assessed?

With anti-colonial struggles gathering momentum in countries like India, for example, a crucial question that came up was the degree of engagement with “tradition.” Within a political understanding that colonialism had destroyed and marginalized the cultures of the people, one of the tasks of musical representation, it was felt, was to “bring back” traditional music on behalf of the people. A significant part of the protest music repertoire in India in the 1930s and 1940s, under the aegis of organizations such as the Indian People’s Theatre Association set up in 1943 , consisted of music that was excavated, retrieved from, and played back to “the people” (Damodaran, 2008 ). This creation of a “documentary aesthetic” was a feature of China in the buildup to the revolution from the 1920s as well, and this led Chinese musician Guo Moro to give a call to activist musicians to “be a phonograph” (Jones, 2001 , p. 28). This aesthetic of “phonographic realism” was an important component of leftwing mass music produced in China in the 1930s, which “recorded” the struggles and aspirations of the proletariat and subsequently played them back to society as a means of social mobilization. A large part of such repertoires in different contexts consisted of folk music, involving folkloric revivals; and underpinning their creations were particular notions of nation, nationalism, and “the people.”

In the second half of the 20th century, the Nueva Canción or New Song Movement involving thousands of musicians throughout Latin America, produced a huge corpus of music. One of the frontrunners of the movement in Chile, Violetta Parra, collected hundreds of folkloric musical pieces from different region of Chile and reproduced and introduced them in urban areas of the country as part of the celebration of indigenous music and traditions in affirming socialist values.

A version of the need to reproduce the conditions of life of ordinary people, in their own languages and using traditionally existing modes of expression, was seen in the music that came out of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa. While the early influences on South African popular music were strongly from the West, by the mid‐1930s, African elements were consciously brought into the music to make a political statement. As in Latin America, a new musical consciousness emerged that stressed on everyday life and on indigenous forms that were embedded in the music being created. In the words of Miriam Makeba, one of the most significant singers of the protest movement, “People say I sing politics, but what I sing is not politics, it is the truth” (Ewens, 1991 , p. 192).

The engagement with tradition in colonial countries encompassed not only indigenous folk music but classical traditions as well, with serious debates on whether or not protest music was to engage with classical traditions, which might have emerged as elitist and hence not representative of “the people.” In this, protest musicians, as part of anti-colonial struggles, had to respond to and contend with conceptualizations of nationalism, where holding up classical traditions became important in representing the people in a nationalist sense, but then having to simultaneously depict exploitative social and class structures through alternative nationalist symbols, like the folk music mentioned earlier. The Indian example is interesting to illustrate this point. As part of the organization called the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), mentioned earlier, which was formed to consciously articulate protest through cultural means, the classical musician Ravi Shankar and many others produced protest music that was strongly based in the Indian classical music tradition; they also took the position that music intended for a political cause should not compromise on complexity and rigor in its effort to be accessible to large numbers of people (Damodaran, 2008 ). The accessibility needed to be ensured, according to such a view, not by a forced simplicity of form, but by depicting political situations through the music and democratizing performance practices and venues of all music, including that which is inspired by the classical tradition.

In countries like the United States, the relationship of the protest musicians with the classical music tradition in the first half of the 20th century was somewhat different from what has been described above. Professional composers such as Elie Siegmeister, Marc Blitzstein, Aaron Copland, and others who were beginning to question and break out of what were perceived as the bourgeois and elitist trappings of classical music in the European, particularly French tradition, as it existed in the United States at the time, also became part of the protest music tradition. Their engagement with classical music involved imbuing it with “modernist” idioms, symbols of industrialism and class exploitation, and creating socially responsive music (Oja, 1988 ).

By the second half of the 20th century, disappointments with the nationalist project in post-colonial contexts led to critiques that identified people on the basis of identity and difference. Protest music was, in ways different from before, perhaps, asking questions about authenticity in representation and hence questioning overarching expressions of nationhood. For example, the scholar Josh Kun, who analyzes aspects of the creation of an “audiotopia” in the United States in the 20th century, argues that with Langton Hughes’ 1925 poem “I, Too, Sing America,” and his essay titled “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” he gave a call for a “re-hearing and a re-singing of American culture through black ears and black sounds … Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing blues penetrate the ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand” (Kun, 1995 , p. 144). Even if the marking of such differences and the absorption of sounds of difference were understood as essential for protest music in different contexts, it was the denial of rights and the conscious attempts to obliterate difference, in societies like the United States and in ex-colonial countries in South Asia, that led to questions about authenticity in representation. A whole tradition of music from the Dalit movement in India, exemplified by the work of the singer Sambhaji Bhagat, is an example where such assertions of difference and the associated foregrounding of authenticity of representation of “real people” has been seen. Bhagat, in his performances is known to make clear distinctions between what is “heard” by those who belong to upper caste groups and Dalits, those who belong to the lowermost castes in the hierarchy in India.

Thus, the understanding that musical forms are important means of identity creation, and that identities get represented and affirmed by music, became integral to the creation of protest music, with form acquiring priority in the assertion of such identity. So while the function, in this case, of representing difference, is paramount, the nuances of the music itself and what is “heard” by audiences become important elements in understanding and decoding protest music.

Eyerman and Jamison ( 1998 ) make an important point about “tradition” in their study of the role of music in social movements in the 20th century, that “Music, and song, we suggest, can maintain a movement even when it no longer has a visible presence in the form of organizations, leaders and demonstrations, and can be a vital force in preparing the emergence of a new movement. Here the role and place of music needs to be interpreted through a broader framework, in which tradition and ritual are understood as processes of identity and identification, as encoded and embodied forms of collective meaning and memory” (Eyerman & Jamison, 1998 , pp. 43–44).

Another dimension of the relationship between music, politics, and identity comes across when identities of particular groups are asserted through the difference between them and the dominant groups in their own societies through the adoption of genres of “others” who might be nationally, ethnically, or socially removed from them. For example, Eric Drott, in his study of the musical trends that arose in the wake of the May 1968 uprising in France notes that “… identification with Anglo-American youth culture opened a space where their lived experience of difference could take shape … Such was the case with free jazz by a younger generation of enthusiasts in the years around 1968 ; in the short-lived infatuation with contemporary classical music during the same period; and in the appropriation of ‘The Internationale’ by youthful protesters in May 1968 ” (Drott, 2011 , p. 271).

Thus, while the structure of particular kinds of protest music (through lyrics or form) might represent particular identities of groups that wish to assert their own identities, it has not always been through identification with own origins, necessarily. The creation of newer political identities, for example, that of the “working class,” have involved musical mixing and borrowing between cultures, apart from projecting music of one’s own cultures. Performing work and labor songs from specific cultural contexts and also from other, sometimes culturally far removed international contexts, has been a typical feature of protest song movements in many countries. The translation into several languages and the popularity of “The Internationale” in different parts of the world is but one example of such identification and solidarity.

Further, identities have not only been asserted through the forms that denote origins but have also been questioned and reconstructed through those very forms. Thus, the aesthetic nuances of the forms themselves might get used to subvert conventional or essentialist understandings of identity, as an “imagined transcendence of difference” (Drott, 2011 , p. 271) or in fact to project new identities.

Musical Structure and Protest

Conceptually, this takes us to a third set of debates around protest music: is the formal structure of music important to consider when we analyze political or protest music? How can music, with or without text, represent dissent through its own grammar? Here, while some debates have been overt and reflected in open disagreements between musicians, often written down, some have been reflected through the kinds of music created.

In the period immediately following the Russian Revolution, the maverick futurist composer Arthur Lourie, who headed Muzo, the music department of Narcompros, the Culture Department of the post-revolution Soviet Union, argued that the spirit of music needed to reflect the ideology of revolutionary chaos because for him, the revolution itself was music. Creating music that symbolized the chaos by its structure, thus, was the essential ingredient of articulating protest (Schwarz, 1972 ). The first couple of decades of music production in the Soviet Union after the revolution are replete with such examples, how the category of revolutionary music was vigorously debated, and how form itself became an important ingredient of understanding revolutionary music.

One of the important debates in the discussions on revolutionary aesthetics, especially from the 1930s, has been around the idea of socialist realism, defined and declared as the appropriate mode of representation in socialist art in the Soviet Union, but also becoming influential in many parts of the world influenced by socialist ideology. The controversies around the interpretation and implementation of the term in actual practice in political movements have been many, and beginning from art practice in the Stalinist period in the Soviet Union under Stalin to various other contexts, including Asia and many parts of Europe, the association of Socialist Realism, with rigid organizational positions and censure of artists who did not conform, has been common. More contemporary research argues that socialist realism was, to begin with, visualized only in terms of how art forms “would reflect the new life of the proletariat, it would be a truthful reflection of the progressive, revolutionary aspirations of the toiling masses building communism” (Swiderski, 1979 , p. 4); hence, it could be reduced to demands for accessibility, tunefulness, stylistic traditionalism, and folk-inspired qualities in music, but it got established as a credo and was subsequently interpreted in more strict organizational terms. In the Soviet Union particularly, the socialist-realist idiom in music was expected to focus on particular forms, such as cantatas and symphonies, and use musical materials from folk melodies (especially of non-Russian nationalities). What is not as apparent is whether the “doctrine” of socialist realism, as understood by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as well as musicians making music for the Revolution, necessarily denounced experimentation and modernism in music, as is often held. Following from material published from the 1970s onwards, about socialist realism being an outright rejection of modernism, with the two ideas being polar opposites, more recent work on the relationship between modernism and socialist art (Titus, 2006 , drawing from Fay, 1980 ; Schwarz, 1972 ) argues that this was an extreme view, “encouraged by historians who illustrated a split throughout the twenties between the modernists and proletarian factions, with the proletarian factions ‘winning’ in the end” (Titus, 2006 , p. 63).

The pitting of simplicity against modernism, mentioned in the earlier section with regard to the United States, was fundamentally to do with musical grammar, something that went beyond the lyrics or the message and engaged with the structure of the music. While on the one hand, the simplicity or “directness” argument was important and pervasive, hinging on the need to appeal to large numbers of people, avant garde experiments with modernism in music were reflected in the use of atonal sounds depicting industrialism. The latter was a structural recording of protest against the stated oppressiveness of the European classical tradition, by challenging its grammar and rules of composition.

In India, the music of the Kerala People’s Arts Club in the southern Indian province of Kerala, consciously crafted a musical tradition where the tunes and lyrics had a distinct character that attempted to assimilate with as well as break from certain established traditions in the late 1950s. This conscious crafting of the music took place as a result of significant deliberations and debates within the movement about what the music needed to sound like to herald a new era. Specifically, this new crafted repertoire adopted the rendering practice from the North Indian classical music tradition in a cultural context that was in southern India, imbuing tunes with local flavors and combining them with lyrics that were also consciously created to convey an ethos of a “new beginning,” part of a left political movement to overthrow an existing exploitative system of landlordism. Similarly, a harmonic tradition of songwriting and composition, initiated by the musician Salil Chowdhury in the province of Bengal, fundamentally challenged the structures of Indian songwriting, while retaining Indian melodies and modes of rendering, crafting a new kind of protest song from the 1940s, that also became very popular (Damodaran, 2008 ).

The debates around musical grammar across different contexts had to do with the sounds and instruments that were used, the scales and modes of rendering, and the use of voice, the principles of tonality, and the notions of local and foreign elements in musical cultures. Again, the use of history and specific context in repertoires of protest movements have been important in discussions around musical grammar; but the focus extends to what might stretch the boundaries of known traditions in the quest to express dissent or project a new future. Thus, if the allusion to the modern involved challenges to the Western classical tradition through atonality and the sounds of industrialism in Western countries, it had to be in the adoption of Western musical formats and features, such as harmonies in non-Western musical cultures like India or China. If radical representation had to be about “the people,” it had to sometimes be “a phonograph,” or at some other times play an interpretative role, which meant breaking out of the boundaries of existing musical forms. Thus, while politics might mediate what form is employed in different contexts, often form mediates political expression in different and changing ways.

To sum up, the debates around the relationship between music and politics have, in practice, been around questions that straddle the realms of both aesthetics and politics. The combined aesthetic-political considerations have involved issues of representation (who, why, and how to represent political identities) as well as function (what the functions of protest music are). History and social context have influenced both representational and functional aspects, generating the wide variety that has been seen. Thus, different kinds of music, performed or conceptualized in different contexts, have engaged politics in different ways. The functions and meanings of different types of music are employed variously, making the protest music genre complex and highly evolved, historically, as this article has attempted to bring out.

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• Kun, J. (1995). Audiotopia. Music, race, and America . Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Protest Music: Songs and Free Speech

Home / Exhibits / Virtual Exhibits / Protest Music: Songs and Free Speech

Protest music is the soundtrack behind the great historical events that shaped our country, from the American Revolution to the 2020 Presidential Election.

Music is one of our most powerful forms of free speech. History has shown that it is also one of the best ways to reach a mass audience.

Writers, performers, and artists have harnessed the power of music to spread political messages, advocate for causes, bolster hope in change, and to dream of a better world- the essence of the First Amendment. Music, especially protest music, is one of the many ways Americans can live their freedoms. 

The First Amendment protects the freedoms that allow free expression and the creation of protest music.

This exhibition explores the evolution of American protest songs and samples various styles, genres, and causes that have been advocated for and represented through music. Songs are listed in chronological order and a brief description accompanies each. 

Content warning: This exhibition contains explicit language, inflammatory pieces of art, adult content, and controversial politics. 

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Songs Of The Summer In A Time Of Protest

Protestors play music and sing during a rally in response to the death of George Floyd in 2020. Music and protest have long gone hand in hand, and the political outrage of recent years is finding expression in song. Ricardo Arduengo/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Protestors play music and sing during a rally in response to the death of George Floyd in 2020. Music and protest have long gone hand in hand, and the political outrage of recent years is finding expression in song.

It may be too soon to crown the "song of the summer". NPR Music's Stephen Thompson says there's no one quality that the songs that carry that title have... it's a collective feeling, a shared vibe. For so many Americans on this July 4th, songs of the summer and songs of protest feel one and the same. NPR's Ann Powers is a music critic, and Shana Redmond is a professor at Columbia University, and the author of "Anthem: Social Movements And The Sound Of Solidarity In The African Diaspora." They explain the role of protest music in this moment. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community. Email us at [email protected] .

This episode was produced by Mia Venkat and Noah Caldwell. It was edited by Jonaki Mehta and Sami Yenigun. Additional reporting from Stephen Thompson. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

8 Powerful Protest Songs Of Today’s Generation

HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - JULY 09: Beyoncé attends the premiere of Disney's "The Lion King" at Dolby ... [+] Theatre on July 09, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Jean Baptiste Lacroix/WireImage)

Following the tragic death of George Floyd, a number of Black Lives Matter protests have taken place in cities nationwide, including Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta, Denver and Minneapolis. 

A video surfaced online showing a police officer pinning Floyd down with his knee for minutes until he could no longer breathe. Now, demonstrators demand justice as they march the streets for not only Floyd, but also for all the others who have died at the hands of police. 

As protesters make their voices heard, it is vital to note that Black musicians have been addressing racial injustice and speaking out against police brutality with their music for decades on end.

From Beyoncé to Tupac, music figures have made profound statements calling for much-needed change in regards to race relations, class, police brutality and the many layers that come with these matters.

Here are a few empowering songs that call for free-speech, protest, creative expression and equality. 

“Alright” by Kendrick Lamar

Kendrick Lamar’s visual for “Alright” uses a black and white aesthetic and thought-provoking poem to establish the tone of the concept video. Various images of helicopters, glass breaking and conflicts with white police officers also preface the music video for what’s to come in the latter half. He transitions into the song with these moving words:

“While my loved ones was fighting a continuous war back in the city, I was entering a new one. A war that was based on apartheid and discrimination.”

Lamar begins spitting “Alright” while in the driver seat of a car held by four police officers. ScHoolboy Q, Ab-Soul and Jay Rock accompany him in the vehicle.

As the visual continues, Kung Fu Kenny puts life in the neighborhood front and center, showing appreciation for the vibrant culture and paying homage to his hometown Los Angeles when he can.

One of the most noteworthy parts of the music video is when K Dot stands on a light pole across the Staples Center, commanding an invincible presence, but the moment comes to an end when a white police officer points his fingers in the form of a gun towards him. He, then, falls to the ground from the light pole as the same poem from the beginning of the video is recited. The MC concludes the visual with a smile despite the act of violence, indicating he still has hope for the future.  

“Fuck Tha Police” by N.W.A. 

“Fuck Tha Police” is the ultimate protest song performed by West Coast group N.W.A. The anthem was truly revolutionary for its time, pioneering free-speech in hip-hop music in the late ‘80s. It was essentially the first song in history to question popular music censorship and first amendment rights. N.W.A. came out on top standing by the track and refusing to be censored, ultimately making strides for rap music.

The hip-hop group interjects trial excerpts throughout the song to evoke the true nature of corruption that occurs too frequently in the justice system. 

The song was created after the group was forced by the police to lay down in the street with guns to their heads. 

“Glory” by Common featuring John Legend

Inspired by the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, the emotional ballad once again fights against inequity and police brutality. Common’s verses address how the Black community has stood up time and time again for civil rights by referencing notable Civil Rights activists, including Jimmie Lee Jackson, Rosa Park and Martin Luther King Jr.

“One son died, his spirit is revisitin' us / True and livin' livin' in us, resistance is us / That's why Rosa sat on the bus / That's why we walk through Ferguson with our hands up / When it go down we woman and man up / They say, "Stay down", and we stand up. / Shots, we on the ground, the camera panned up / King pointed to the mountain top and we ran up.”

Common and John Legend are determined not to give up, using melody and intentional lyrics to create a sense of hope that one day Black brothers and sisters will live their lives free of oppression. 

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“FDT” by YG and Nipsey Hussle

Premiering on WorldStar, the music video begins with a statement in regards to the 2016 Presidential Election:

“As young people with an interest in the future of America… we have to exercise our intelligence and choose who leads us into it wisely. 2016 will be a turning point in this country’s history… the question is… in which direction will we go?”

The messaging continues by acknowledging President Obama for his dutiful efforts while in office and emphasizing the true impact leadership has on this nation. 

YG and Nipsey Hussle’s “FDT” launches with what seems like a reporter’s voice reciting, “YG and Nipsey Hussle’s video got shut down by cops for an anti-Trump song called ‘Fuck Donald Trump,’” while a man pens those very words on a wall. 

Some of West Coast’s bests bring the community together to protest Trump and his discrimination towards Black and Brown people. The visual is also in black-and-white — similar to Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” — and contains images of helicopters and tense interactions with cops. Most importantly, it highlights the community uniting to collectively fight for equal opportunity — just like the George Floyd protests.

The most striking part of the video is how the demonstrators are protesting on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, as that was the exact street many protested on to make their voices heard yesterday (May 30). The video’s foreshadowing is chilling. 

“Tina Taught Me” Interlude and “Don’t Touch My Hair” by Solange 

The interlude “Tina Taught Me” on Solange’s A Seat at the Table is a beautiful account of one’s love for their culture recited by Tina Knowles.

“It's such beauty in Black people, and it really saddens me when we're not allowed to express that pride in being Black, and that if you do, then it's considered anti-white. No! You just pro-Black. And that's okay. The two don't go together. Because you celebrate Black culture does not mean that you don't like white culture or that you putting it down. It's just taking pride in it…”

The interlude eventually transitions into Solange’s meaningful track “Don’t Touch My Hair” featuring Sampha. The singer-songwriter uses the song to demonstrate how she uses her power to set boundaries, claim her inner peace and express her identity. She reiterates this point with her verses: 

“Don't touch my hair / When it's the feelings I wear / Don't touch my soul / When it's the rhythm I know / Don't touch my crown / They say the vision I've found / Don't touch what's there / When it's the feelings I wear.”

“Changes” by Tupac 

Ahead of its time, Tupac’s “Changes” reflects on racism, class, society and the harsh realities of unjust politics. Throughout the track, he frequently touches on how police have targeted the Black community, emphasizing that law enforcement will “pull the trigger” and then oddly be considered some sort of “hero.” 

He poses the following verses on “Changes”: 

“I see no changes, all I see is racist faces, Misplaced hate makes disgrace to races / We under, I wonder what it takes to make this / One better place.”

He further elaborates on the various ways the Black community is kept down and simply says it’s time for “change.”

“Formation” by Beyonce 

Beyoncé takes a stand with her 2016 “Formation” song and music video. The Black Power anthem showcases the pop powerhouse appreciating her roots (“they never take the country out of me”) and who she is as a Black woman. She claims her power with conviction and her self-love lyrics. 

Set in New Orleans, the visual, which was released on Trayvon Martin’s birthday and the day before Sandra Bland’s birthday, is even more striking when you see Beyoncé standing on a police vehicle, rocking her natural hair, paying homage to the Black South and including queer and trans members of the community. 

As the video nears the end, Queen Bey makes it a point to show a young Black boy dancing in front of police officers in riot gear. In the subsequent moments, the same boy faces them and raises his arms to the line of cops, who then also raise their hands up. “Stop shooting us,” says the following image after the exchange between the young boy and the police officers. 

Again, it’s Beyoncé way of standing up against police brutality in an undeniable way.

“This is America” by Childish Gambino 

Childish Gambino’s provocative “This Is America” visual immediately begins showing the musician dancing and pulling a gun on an anonymous person. He proceeds on grooving throughout the video as a diversion, shedding light on how distracted the masses tend to be even though violence and chaos are happening in the world — as seen in the background of the video. He makes a solid point: People tend to be occupied with social media and Black culture, yet don’t stand up for Black people when violence is inflicted upon them. 

He also references the 2015 Charleston shooting in the latter half of the video when a choir is shown singing hymns and yet, a gun is fired. A white supremacist Dylan Roof murdered nine Black individuals during a Bible study in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church’s basement. 

Childish Gambino uses imagery and symbols in “This Is America” to wake society up to the various discriminatory acts occurring on a daily basis.

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The Twenty Best Vietnam Protest Songs

Sunday marks fifty years since the  first U.S. combat troops arrived  in South Vietnam. To mark the anniversary of the war that changed America, I am doing a series of posts on the best  histories , memoirs , movies , and novels about Vietnam. Today’s topic is protest songs. Much as poetry provides a window into the Allied mood during World War I, anti-war songs provide a window into the mood of the 1960s. It was one of anger, alienation, and defiance. Vietnam has continued to inspire songwriters long after the last U.S. helicopters were pushed into the East Vietnam Sea , but my interest here is in songs recorded during the war. So as much as I love Bruce Springsteen (“ Born in the USA ”) and Billy Joel (“ Goodnight Saigon ”), their songs don’t make this list. With that caveat out of the way, here are my twenty picks for best protest songs in order of the year they were released.

Bob Dylan , “ Blowin’ in the Wind ” (1963). Dylan debuted a partially written “Blowin’ in the Wind” in Greenwich Village in 1962 by telling the audience , “This here ain’t no protest song or anything like that, ‘cause I don’t write no protest songs.” “Blowin’ in the Wind” went on to become possibly the most famous protest song ever, an iconic part of the Vietnam era. Rolling Stone magazine ranked “Blowin’ in the Wind” number fourteen on its list of the top 500 songs of all-time.

Wars and Conflict

Phil Ochs , “ What Are You Fighting For ” (1963). Ochs wrote numerous protest songs during the 1960s and 1970s. In “What Are You Fighting For,” he warns listeners about “the war machine right beside your home.” Ochs, who battled alcoholism and bipolar disorder, committed suicide in 1976.

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Barry McGuire , “ Eve of Destruction ” (1965). McGuire recorded “Eve of Destruction” in one take in spring 1965. By September it was the number one song in the country, even though many radio stations refused to play it . McGuire’s impassioned rendition of the song’s incendiary lyrics—“You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’”—helps explain its popularity. It still feels fresh fifty years later.

Phil Ochs , I Ain’t Marching Anymore (1965). Ochs’s song of a soldier who has grown sick of fighting was one of the first to highlight the generational divide that came to grip the country: “It’s always the old to lead us to the war/It’s always the young to fall.”

Tom Paxton , “ Lyndon Told the Nation ” (1965). Paxton criticizes President Lyndon Johnson for promising peace on the campaign trail and then sending troops to Vietnam. “Well here I sit in this rice paddy/Wondering about Big Daddy/And I know that Lyndon loves me so./Yet how sadly I remember/Way back yonder in November/When he said I’d never have to go.” In 2007, Paxton rewrote the song as “ George W. Told the Nation .”

Pete Seeger , “ Bring ‘em Home ” (1966). Seeger, who died last year at the age of ninety-four, was one of the all-time greats in folk music. He opposed American involvement in the Vietnam War from the start, making his sentiment abundantly clear: “bring ‘em home, bring ‘em home.”

Arlo Guthrie , “ Alice’s Restaurant Massacree ” (1967). Who says that a protest song can’t be funny? Guthrie’s call to resist the draft and end the war in Vietnam is unusual in two respects: it’s great length (18 minutes) and the fact that it is mostly a spoken monologue. For some radio stations it is a Thanksgiving tradition to play "Alice’s Restaurant Massacree."

Nina Simone , “ Backlash Blues ” (1967). Simone transformed a civil rights poem by Langston Hughes into a Vietnam War protest song. “Raise my taxes/Freeze my wages/Send my son to Vietnam.”

Joan Baez , “ Saigon Bride ” (1967). Baez set a poem by Nina Duscheck to music. An unnamed narrator says goodbye to his Saigon bride—which could be meant literally or figuratively—to fight an enemy for reasons that “will not matter when we’re dead.”

Country Joe & the Fish , “ Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die ” (1967). Sometimes called the “Vietnam Song,” Country Joe & the Fish’s rendition of “Feel Like I’m Fixin to Die” was one of the signature moments at Woodstock. The chorus is infectious: “and it’s 1, 2, 3 what are we fighting for?/Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn, next stop is Vietnam.”

Pete Seeger , “ Waist Deep in the Big Muddy ” (1967). “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” has a nameless narrator recalling an army patrol that almost drowns crossing a river in Louisiana in 1942 because of their reckless commanding officer, who is not so fortunate. Everyone understood the allusion to Vietnam, and CBS cut the song from a September 1967 episode of the Smothers Brother Comedy Show . Public protests eventually forced CBS to reverse course , and Seeger sang “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” in a February 1968 episode of the show.

Richie Havens , “ Handsome Johnny ” (1967). Oscar-winner Lou Gossett, Jr. co-wrote the song about “Handsome Johnny with an M15 marching to the Vietnam War.” Havens’s rendition of the song at Woodstock is an iconic moment from the 1960s.

The Bob Seger System , “ 2+2=? ” (1968). Still an obscure Detroit rocker at the time, Seger warned of a war that leaves young men “buried in the mud, off in a foreign jungle land.” The song reflected a change of heart on his part. Two years earlier he recorded “ The Ballad of the Yellow Beret ,” which begins “This is a protest against protesters.”

Creedence Clearwater Revival , “ Fortunate Son ” (1969). John Fogerty , CCR’s lead singer, says he was prompted to write “Fortunate Son” after seeing news coverage of the wedding of David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon . He wanted to protest the fact that not everyone would bear the burden of the war: “Some folks are born, silver spoon in hand.” In 2014, the Library of Congress added “Fortunate Son” to the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

John Lennon , “ Give Peace a Chance ” (1969). Lennon’s first solo single after leaving The Beatles hit number 14 on the Billboard charts despite being recorded in one take in June 1969 while he and wife Yoko Ono were holding a “bed-in” in Montreal. Five months later, half a million people sang “Give Peace a Chance” at a protest rally against President Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War.

Jimmy Cliff , “ Vietnam ” (1970). Bob Dylan hailed “Vietnam” as “the greatest protest song ever written.” The lyrics are simple; the story is powerfully sad.

Crosby, Stills, Nash , & Young , “ Ohio ” (1970). Neil Young wrote “Ohio” in reaction to the Kent State University shootings on May 4, 1970 that left four students dead. The chorus “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/We’re finally on our own/This summer I hear the drumming/Four dead in Ohio” kept the song off many AM radio station playlists. The song still managed to peak at number 14 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.

Edwin Starr , “ War ” (1970). “War” got straight to the point: “War, huh yeah/What is it good for?/Absolutely nothing, oh hoh, oh.” The song was originally written for The Temptations to release as a single but that idea got nixed out of fear of alienating the group’s fans. Too bad for The Temptations. “War” reached number one on the Billboard charts and ranked number five overall for 1970.

Marvin Gaye , “ What’s Going On ” (1971). Berry Gordy , the founder of Motown Records and Gaye’s then brother-in-law, called “What’s Going On” the “worst thing I ever heard in my life.” Fortunately, a Motown sales executive disregarded his judgment and got the song into record stores. It became a hit. Rolling Stone magazine ranked “What’s Going On” number four on its list of the top 500 songs of all-time.

John Lennon , “ Imagine ” (1971). Lennon’s call to “Imagine all the people/Living life in peace” remains a radio staple more than four decades after it was recorded. Although it peaked at number three on the Billboard top 100 charts, BMI ranked it the 96 th most played song on radio in the twentieth century, the only song on this list to make the top one hundred. Rolling Stone magazine ranked “Imagine” number three on its list of the top 500 songs of all-time.

Yes, I know. I left a lot of great songs off this list. So my apologies to fans of George Harrison (“ Give Me Love ”), Steppenwolf ( “ Monster ”), The Doors (“ The Unknown Soldier ), or Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods (“ Billy Don’t Be a Hero ”), among others. Feel free to list your favorites that I overlooked in the comments below.

For more suggested resources on the Vietnam War, check out the other posts in this series:

• “ The Best Histories of the Vietnam War ”
• “ The Ten Best Memoirs of the Vietnam War ”
• “ Top Ten Vietnam War Movies ”
• “ Ten Vietnam War Novels to Read ”
• “ TWE Remembers: The First U.S. Combat Troops Arrive in Vietnam ”

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Fight The Power: 11 Powerful Protest Songs Advocating For Racial Justice

From Childish Gambino's "This Is America" to James Brown's "Say It Loud," these racial justice protest anthems demonstrate the ongoing—and still deeply relevant—sound of activism

From the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to the streets of Ferguson, activism certainly has a sound. Whether it’s the slow hum of Pete Seeger' s "We Shall Overcome" or the energetic repetition of YG’s "FTP," when the chants of freedom slow, we often hear an emotional outcry about political issues through music. The current state of unrest in the United States surrounding the violent treatment of Black people and people of color at the hands of police has caused a resurgence of music addressing the current state of affairs directly in lyrics and tone.

As we celebrate Juneteenth  (not to mention  Black Music Month ), a date that signifies liberation for African American people as Gordon Granger announced in Galveston, TX that the enslaved people there were free in 1865, we have to recognize the importance of music when it comes to freedom, protest, survival and celebration in Black culture. 

Music has always been deeply rooted in African culture. It only continued after men and women were captured and enslaved in the U.S through the Middle Passage. For slaves, it was a form of communication and later became so much more. That tradition of music has continued over centuries as each new movement—specifically involving the fight for self-love, equality, and fair treatment for Black Americans—creates its own soundtrack.

2020 will see its own host of songs that highlight the times, from Meek Mill’s "The Otherside of America" to H.E.R.'s "I Can’t Breathe," which she recently premiered in her performance for IHeartRadio’s Living Room Concert Series . But before this moment, there were a few of the songs that have been at the center of protest, revolution, and radical political change over the years.

"Say It Loud," James Brown (1968)

Being proud to be Black was almost a foreign concept commercially during this time and James Brown took the lead on empowering Black people all across the world. "Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud," became an affirmation recited far and wide specifically in such a turbulent year as 1968. This was at the height of the Civil Rights movement and the same year Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

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"Comment #1," Gil Scott-Heron (1970)

A poem featured on his debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, Heron was challenging the white left-wing student movement. In his estimation, there was no common ground based on what Black people had endured for centuries that college-educated students from the suburbs would understand. The song was later sampled by Kanye West in "Lost In The World" featuring Bon Iver .

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"What’s Going On," Marvin Gaye (1971)

Based on the real-life experience of Gaye’s brother who returned from Vietnam with a much different outlook on life, this song asked what was happening in America. This was a turbulent time where Black soldiers were not receiving the same benefits as their white GI counterparts when returning home from the same fight. And much like Scott-Heron, Gaye was exploring the hippie era clash that, to many Black people, didn’t have a real grasp on poverty and systematic racism plaguing the community.

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"F**k Tha Police," N.W.A. (1988)

A song met with much discourse including the arrest of N.W.A. members in Detroit during a 1989 tour stop. The group was apprehended following their show after being told by the DPD not to play the song in their set. Unfortunately, not much has changed and streams have skyrocketed amidst global protests for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor more than 20 years later

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"Fight The Power," Public Enemy (1989)

The song originally appeared in Spike Lee's "Do The Right" thing, which explored racial tension in a Brooklyn neighborhood and would become Public Enemy’s most popular song to date. Later released on their album Fear of a Black Planet , the song was received with high acclaim including a GRAMMY nomination for Best Rap Performance.

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"Changes," 2Pac featuring Talent (1998)

2Pac was seen as both an activist and a young man wise beyond his years, though his career was also marred by controversy and rap beefs. Songs like "Changes" are more representative of the former. Here, Pac was chronicling the fact that things have been the same in Black communities over the years. When listening back, you can hear how poignant his words were over 20 years later.

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"Glory," John Legend and Common (2014)

The Oscar-winning song from the original motion picture soundtrack to "Selma" directed by Ava Duvernay came at the epicenter of the country’s most recent unrest. Two years after the death of Trayvon Martin, the song was the perfect bridge from the Civil Rights movement of the '60s depicted in the film into today's current fight for equality. 

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"Alright," Kendrick Lamar (2015)

To Pimp a Butterfly , Lamar’s sophomore release, was a sharp contrast to the cinematic good kid, m.A.A.d. City but yielded the freedom song of a generation. Crowds at protests and university auditoriums across the country erupted into the song's potent lyrics, "But if God got us then we gon be alright!" The GRAMMY-winning song became the unofficial anthem to the Black Lives Matter movement after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mich., and Sandra Bland in Waller County, TX at the hands of police.  

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"F.U.B.U.," Solange (2016)

A nod to the 90s hip hop apparel company, the acronym stands for For Us, By Us. The song appeared on her third studio album A Seat at the Table, her most critically acclaimed and political album to date. Both the song and album highlight Black entrepreneurship, culture, and trauma.

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"Freedom," Beyoncé ft. Kendrick Lamar (2016)

This hard-hitting track samples "Let Me Try" by Frank Tirado and comes as a reprieve in the album sequencing but packs a powerful message. The ending also features audio from Jay-Z’ s grandmother Hattie White. At her 90th birthday party she explains, "I was served lemons, but I made lemonade"—apropos in the discussion of the American Black experience.

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"This is America," Childish Gambino (2018)

Accompanied by a captivating visual directed by Hiro Murai that paired dancing with African influence, and violent yet thought-provoking imagery, Gambino's effort made everyone pay attention. The song garnered the multi-disciplined artist a GRAMMY for "Song Of The Year," and his first No. 1 single while leaving both critics and fans alike in deep conversations about its political symbolism.

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Torae Talks Fighting For Change & Overhauling The Music Industry's Business Model

Photo: Mike Rosenthal

John Legend On How His Kids, "The Voice" & Sufjan Stevens Helped 'My Favorite Dream' Come To Life

On the heels of releasing his first children's album, John Legend details how his latest passion project came to be.

There are few things 12-time GRAMMY winner John Legend has not achieved. Six years after achieving EGOT status, Legend has conquered a new goal: releasing an album of sing-alongs and lullabies. 

Legend's debut children's album, My Favorite Dream , is the result of a creative partnership with Sufjan Stevens . Yet the album's true origins can be traced to an Instagram video of Legend singing Fisher Price's "Maybe" to his wife Chrissy Teigen and their youngest daughter, Esti. The video has been viewed 9.3 million times on the platform since Teigen posted it in November 2023. 

"As soon as Chrissy posted me singing that song, all the parents who have had young kids with Fisher Price toys were like, 'Oh, my God, you're doing this song that we have known for years, and we love,'" Legend tells GRAMMY.com. "'Why don't you make more songs like this for parents out there?" 

Teigen then suggested that her husband make a lullaby album. Fisher Price reached out and followed suit, and so did Legend's label. "Everybody was saying, 'John, you got to make a children's album.' And so I started to think about it." 

My Favorite Dream features 15 tracks: nine originals written by Legend, one solo piano track, and five covers (yes, including a full recorded version of "Maybe"). True to form, Legend put a unique touch on childhood favorites such as "You Are My Sunshine."

"When you listen to the lyrics, there's a hint of sadness that goes through, especially the second verse," he says of the reimagined track. "I wanted to capture some of that as well, the idea that you're sad when you miss someone that you love, someone who is your sunshine." And when it came to crafting the nine originals, his inspiration was simple: "the things me and Chrissy like to talk to our kids about, concepts we like to teach our kids, and messages we like to share with our kids, how we like to inspire them and motivate them." With that in mind, Legend channels imagination and love throughout the new songs. "Deep In The Ocean Blue" transports kids and parents alike to the wonders beneath the ocean's surface, while "We're A Family" and "When I Feel Sad" explore the undeniable strength of a family bond. "Always Come Back" combines both, interpolating the Willy Wonka classic "Pure Imagination" to soundtrack Legend's heartfelt promise to his kids that he's never too far away: "I may ride the planes and trains and distant highways/ But I know I'll be finding my way home… I'll always come back to you."

There's even a personal touch on the album's rhythmic lead single, "L-O-V-E," which features background vocals from Tiegen and their two oldest children, Luna and Miles.

By expanding his musical repertoire with My Favorite Dream , Legend has put his artistic versatility on full display. The album is an amalgamation of the distinctive features that form Legend's musical calling card — from his enchanting piano playing that listeners were first introduced on his 2004 debut, Get Lifted , to the raw and soulful lyrics of his 2013 smash "All of Me," to the richness of textures he explored on 2020's Big Love . Legend's musical abilities empowered him to create a children's album that is not only timeless, but deeply meaningful in its themes and narratives. While Legend wrote all of the original songs on his own — a career first — he insists My Favorite Dream wouldn't have been as impactful without Stevens' production. Legend was first introduced to Stevens' work through his critically acclaimed 2005 LP, Illinois. "It's such an iconic album, and it has some of that whimsy music and some of those dreamy soundscapes you would want for a children's album. The more I listened to him, the more I was like, 'You know what? He's the only person I could imagine producing this album the way I want it to sound.'" Legend and Stevens viewed the album as two halves, each with its own distinct sound. As Legend explains, the duo wanted the tone of the first half of the album to be more uptempo: "we wanted to sound like a Muppet band, just fun, playful sounds that were very musical, but also very fun and adventurous at the same time." The second half of the album centers on soothing, timeless lullabies. The hypnotic "Go To Sleep" encapsulates the idea of a whimsical and dreamy soundscape; "Safe" is a tranquil tune that explores the comfort and security of the bond between parent and child. The latter's baroque pop background vocals — a characteristic of Stevens' unmistakable sound — complements Legend's rich baritone voice, serving as a testament to their fruitful partnership.

The passion behind My Favorite Dream is undeniable, but it's also a smart business move on Legend's part. In the past decade, some of YouTube's most viewed videos were children's songs, bringing in over a combined total of over 40 billion views . As a father of four, Legend knows firsthand the role that music plays in parenting — and made a conscious effort to ensure that the album's songs appeal to both kids and their parents. 

"For the kids, I wanted it to be lyrically appropriate [and reflect] things that we legitimately would say to them. At the same time, I wanted it musically to be something that everybody would want to listen to, that felt timeless and classic, and that parents would enjoy just as much as their kids would." 

Judging by the reactions to "L-O-V-E" alone, Legend succeeded in his mission. As one YouTube commenter wrote, "Us grown ups need this song just as much as the kiddos do!" Whether or not more children's music is in Legend's future, he hints that he may explore more new genres with forthcoming projects. He attributes his time as a coach on the popular competition series "The Voice" for expanding his musical horizons. "You hear such a cross-section of music," he says of the show. "And I think that really has helped me become a more complete songwriter. It's definitely prepared me well for all the things I've been writing lately." 

After seamlessly producing his debut children's album, Legend has proven that his versatility and talents are boundless — and now, he just might have fans old and young waiting to hear what's next. 

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How Ravyn Lenae Found Comfort In Changing Perspective

"I really wanted to give people a glimpse into my life," Lenae says of her new album, 'Bird’s Eye.' The singer/songwriter discusses taking the right risks, and the song that helped repair her relationship with her father.

With massive crowds and countless critics raving about her debut album, Ravyn Lenae knew what she had to do: completely ignore all of the expectations that led to it.

"I knew in order for me to keep evolving as an artist and a person, there was no choice but to let those boundaries go,"she says from her home in Los Angeles.  

After building up a growing following in Chicago alongside other members of the Zero Fatigue Collective (which includes producer Monte Booker and rapper Smino ), Lenae relocated to the West Coast. She made a massive mark on 2022’s Hypnos , which featured a beguiling mix of alt R&B, house and soul alongside Renae’s magnetic vocal presence.

And rather than coast , Lenae dug deeper for the followup , Bird’s Eye (due Aug. 9). Working with frequent Kendrick Lamar collaborator and in-demand producer DJ Dahi , Bird’s Eye flutters across genres and influences — pulling from Fleetwood Mac on one track, drawing in Childish Gambino on another, and adding Jimmy Jam ’s bass elsewhere. Indicative of these multifarious influences are two pre-release singles: the retro pop-leaning "Love Me Not" and the soulfully skipping "Love Is Blind."  

Lenae uses that shapeshifting methodology as a way to interrogate the concepts of love and relationships — never content to rest on her laurels, learning how best to grow and adapt. "Making the songs and getting to the bottom of what they meant for me was me kind of retracing my steps a little bit and really acknowledging all these moments in my life, in my childhood, that were pivotal for me and my identity," she says.  

Nearing the release of Bird’s Eye , Lenae spoke with GRAMMY.com about directing the video for "Love Me Not" in Chicago, blending Brazilian music with Prince inflections, and how the album helped her reconnect with her father.

A lot seems to have happened in the two years since 'Hypnos.' On a month-to-month, day-to-day basis, how much do you shift creatively?

It feels like night and day to me, even though it's been a really short amount of time. During this time between Hypnos and this album — the recording and creating process —  a lot unlocked with me. [There was] a lot of personal growth that happened that allows me to approach music in a much freer and kind of impulsive way.

With the last album and that process, I think I did place a lot of parameters around what I had to be, what I had to sound like, what it had to feel like, who I had to connect with. And I kind of just released all of those expectations with this and made music that I wanted to hear.

How easy was it to actually release those boundaries and work more more in the moment?

I knew in order for me to keep evolving as an artist and a person, there was no choice but to let those boundaries go, if I wanted to keep pursuing music in a way that felt honest. And then being able to collaborate with people such as Dahi, who has kind of mastered that in a lot of ways, and learning from him and seeing his process, seeing how easy and natural it is to just fall into what feels right…

I think the longer you're in an industry or you're in something, the more rules you place on [creativity] and the more you overthink it and try to mold it in a way that doesn't feel impactful. As an artist, being around him and him encouraging that type of process, I think that was a lot of it, too.

Dahi's worked with some incredible artists, and clearly in a way that accentuates that artist rather than making it about DJ Dahi. That must have been so perfectly aligned with your openness, to go in and let yourself learn what you wanted to do. They always say if you know too much and plan everything out, you’ll end up stifled creatively.

It's so true. And that's why I describe it as me kind of returning back to that 12-year-old me, that 13-year-old me, before I cared about opinions, what people thought about me and what I was doing, what I was wearing . I think we start off that way, and then the older we get, the more we get so self-conscious and we judge ourselves more harshly than everyone else.

Why do we do that?!

[ Laughs. ] I think it's just human nature. And then we try to unlearn all of it.

Even just in daily life, it's so hard to not think about what I could have done at any given moment. And when you’re creating music, there are 5 million ways you can create the same idea and you have to just land on that one.

A hundred percent. During this process, we would have a song idea and then three different versions of that song that hit completely different feelings — maybe a more soft rock version of it, maybe a more indie version of it, maybe a more soulful version. Then it was about having to settle into what is "the one" and what feels the best, versus like what's going to chart or what's going to get in the club. Having to release all of that and just really lean into what feels good is what works every time.

That relates even to how the album was announced, with two tracks that almost speak in conversation with one another. Those songs balance such clever hooks with more nuanced conversation about how conflicted and complex love and relationships can be. How did you find that balance between emotional realism and such immediate music?

It was just really feeling empowered and confident in my decision making. And that's something that's developed over time, too. Really listening to my voice and what I want out of music in my career and my rollout, you know?

Listening to that, obviously having people around me who are like-minded in that way like my management and my team. We all kind of empowered each other to lean into those feelings. At no point in this process did anything feel forced or like I was reaching for something.

That’s so interesting. You want your team to feel supportive but you also want to feel empowered to take risks away from that support. And that reminds me of “Love Me Not,” which has some really smart risks. It's that vintage pop feeling, right down to the clap-along beats, and the vocals feel right in your ear. So when you started working on that track, for example, did you always imagine it being that nostalgia, that warmth?  

I thought that there was just something so cool and timeless, a classic feeling about it. And my songs are the ones where you can really pinpoint what the influences are, or when this was made, or the person behind it. Having a song like that, that really reminded me of Outkast . Like, What is this ?

Even before it dropped, I remember having some anxiety around maybe my fans not liking it because it feels a little different from Hypnos . I think anytime you kind of jump outside of the bubble you've kind of created, it's scary because there are people living in that bubble with you who like the temperature in there.  

It’s so important to be constantly revitalized in your work. If you’re doing the same thing, even if your fans are demanding it, you’re not going to get that. And hopefully when your fans see all that you can do, they’ll follow it.  

Yeah. And there's so much left in me to explore into and put out into the world. And look at an artist's career, someone like Tyler, the Creator : Seeing where his sound started and how he's almost trained his fans’ ears to be receptive to something new every time. They've completely grown up with him in a lot of ways and expanded their palate. Kind of forcing the hand of listeners is something that's really interesting to me. [ Laughs. ]

I love that idea of pushing yourself and pushing your fans, but still within the realm of what's good. [Laughs] Not just experimenting for the sake of it. Speaking of growing and experimenting, I wanted to ask about the “Love Me Not” music video that you directed. It feels so well shot but still so intimate and casual.

I knew with the album and how I wanted the imagery to feel, it would be very homey. Making the songs and getting to the bottom of what they meant for me was me kind of retracing my steps a little bit and really acknowledging all these moments in my life, in my childhood, that were pivotal for me and my identity, those first moments where I felt like I was getting closer to myself in a way.  

A lot of that started on the South side of Chicago, at my grandmother's house, in the basement. Even the cover of the album symbolizes that transition for me. That's where I dyed my hair red for the first time in the basement, in the sink, so coming back to the sink and dyeing my hair ginger on the cover was something that felt so powerful and defining for me. It just made perfect sense that we were going to go back to Chicago for the first video, in my grandmother's house, with all my family members involved. Those are my grandparents, my mom, my sisters, so that's why it feels so loose and candid. I really wanted to give people a glimpse into my life and what it felt like walking into my childhood home.

Getting to see a place through someone else’s eyes is so extraordinary. It really makes the little details pop. For example, the plantains cooking on the stove at the beginning.

Yeah. I associate plantains with my grandparents, my family. We’re of Panamanian West Indian descent, so those smells and those sounds, I really wanted to incorporate into the video.

That really speaks to bringing some comfort along with the risk-taking, same as having your family around. The features do a great job of bolstering you, setting up that stability, particularly Ty Dolla $ign on "Dreamgirl."

I think we just had the idea to kind of take the song into a different world in a way. When we first started the first section of the song, I just knew there was magic there. Those Prince drums and that Brazilian guitar — why do those make sense together? It shouldn't ever make sense together. But when I heard it? Oh my god, this feels like something fresh and new, but also like I've felt this feeling before .

Dahi's brain is just incredible, and then even bringing in Jimmy Jam on it to do bass was a dream come true. I knew it kind of felt like it existed in that Janet stratosphere, and I thought it would be such a cool touch for him to do that personally. Dream come true on all spectrums. I love Ty Dolla $ ign , obviously grew up listening to him. He's incredible and I was so honored that he wanted to do it.

Besides Janet, were there any particular artists who were kind of central inspirations for this album specifically?

Sonically, Janet is always in the mix. With this one in particular, some Gwen Stefani , No Doubt , a little bit of Fleetwood Mac in there. I just love taking these worlds that are very different from each other and kind of mashing them and seeing what happens. It's like my favorite thing ever.

You’re trained in classical music, and it's so clear that you understand the range of emotion that you can convey. I'm just curious what happened when you went into recording — or even before that, in the writing. What was it like digging into yourself to find the narrative that matched the mashing?

Honestly, I don't think there was much premeditation with the writing and what I wanted to touch on in a way. Really leaning into those impulsive initial first feelings that a song gives me is something I really valued with this album. And moving forward, that'll be my process.

What was premeditated with the writing process with this album was, with every song, trying to really peel back those layers in my brain and those barriers lyrically. Like, What would I naturally say? Think of that and then think, Okay , how can I make this even more literal, even more personal? Even in working with my girl [songwriter] Sarah Aarons, I learned a lot from her as far as songwriting and how to really paint a picture that feels clear and concise and emotional. Not trying to find the prettiest words or the most interesting words, but really writing what feels real. And that's something that I've really, really valued and learned with this process.

Even with “One Wish” with Childish Gambino, the whole album feels like this big conversation on relationships. Being more direct feels like some advice someone would get with a relationship itself, let alone writing about it. Did that process help you actually process what was happening in your life too?

Oh man, 100 percent. And that's why music is so beautiful to me. It's really a means of opening dialogue between me and myself, and then me and the people in my life. With a song that's so important to me like “One Wish," it’s not just because it's a great song, but because this has really catapulted me into this different part of my life and repairing relationships, opening up difficult conversations — like with my father in particular . Hearing such a simple song and the response I've gotten from it has only validated me much more in the fact that these real stories, real emotions are what connects.

Have you played the album for your father?

We started repairing or rekindling our relationship maybe two years ago. The making of Bird’s Eye was at its peak and I felt like it was important for me to have a song on the album that addressed my relationship with him in order for me to release it and start to move on in a positive way.

So sharing the song with him, inviting him to be in the music video was huge for us. And then even after debriefing about maybe some feelings that came up when he heard certain lyrics or when he saw certain scenes in the video, it just opened up this really honest , candid dialogue between us and I couldn't be more grateful that I have this outlet.

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Afropop Legend Yemi Alade On New Album, 'Rebel Queen,' Historic Hits, & Working With Beyoncé

Ahead of the release of her latest album, 'Rebel Queen,' Yemi Alade discussed her career over the last decade and what it meant to work with Beyoncé. "That lady has really touched my life in a way that I will never forget"

Before Afrobeats icons Burna Boy , WizKid , and Tyla became globally recognized household names, Yemi Alade was the continent’s biggest pop star. On July 26, she will release her sixth studio album, Rebel Queen, which expands her repertoire with a world of adventurous pop sounds.  

The Nigerian singer/songwriter burst onto the African pop music scene in 2014 with " Johnny ," a now-classic tune that gained acclaim by its iconic video featuring a TV news reporter tracking the titular womanizer. The video made her the first Nigerian female artist to hit 100 million views on YouTube.   

Since then, Alade has had an illustrious career, collaborating with artists including Rick Ross , earning another 100 million-view video for " Oh My Gosh ," and featuring alongside fellow Africans Mr. Eazi and Tekno on the Beyoncé -curated soundtrack for The Lion King .

Her latest album, Rebel Queen , includes high-profile collaborations with Angélique Kidjo , Ziggy Marley , and dancehall star Konshens . The album promises a genre-jumping journey across the globe, incorporating amapiano ("Soweto to Ibiza"), highlife ("Chairman"), and even reggae ("Peace and Love") and dancehall ("Bop’).

Ahead of Rebel Queen ’s release, GRAMMY.com caught up with Alade about her progression as an artist, what it was like to work with Beyoncé and her team, and bridging international success.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Your new album, ' Rebel Queen ', contains influences from all over Africa and beyond. Was that intentional?

Yes, you're correct that I wanted to make sure that the album had sounds that I actually genuinely love, from the amapiano influence to dancehall. And also , I personally wanted to go back to the foundation of Afrobeats , which are sounds and genres that I listened to growing up as a kid. When my parents took me to family parties, there were certain melodies and guitar strums that I fell in love with. And I wanted to revisit those nostalgic moments and put it all in this album.

There are a lot of high-profile collaborations on this record, such as Anjélique Kidjo and Ziggy Marley. How did you decide who to work with on ' Rebel Queen '?

Honestly my life is a roller coaster, same for every touring artist. We try to gather as much as we can while being in motion. Anjélique Kidjo is like my music mum, I love her. And when I made the record, "African Woman," who else would I feature on such a song if not Anjélique ? And as for Ziggy, he and I have a song that we did previously (" Look Who’s Dancing Now "), which was his song, and he featured me. And I wanted a tit-for-tat moment. So I sent the song to him. I felt like, who else but him? Every feature was necessary to complete the melody for each song, they are such a huge part of each one, not just in the fresh vibe that they bring.  

Learn more: Watch Yemi Alade's Enchanting Performance Of "Tomorrow" | Global Spin

It’s been ten years since you broke out with the massive hit " Johnny ." Back then, African pop music was relatively unknown in America. Since then, African artists have gained global recognition. Do you see yourself as a pioneer for the current Afropop movement?

I agree with you 100 percent, there is no way you authentically go through the history of, you know, building a bridge between Africa and the rest of the world via music without mentioning a song like "Johnny." It's definitely an honor for me to be the vessel that delivers such amazing music to the world. Of course, there were people way before me who also did the same thing. We're talking about Fela [Kuti]. We're talking about King Sunny Ade . At the end of the day, yes, music is metamorphosing into so much more. And definitely, I'm a pioneer [laughs].

You have a strong sense of storytelling, especially in your music videos. "Johnny" has an entire storyline about a news reporter investigating a womanizer. How important is that kind of storytelling to your music?

Storytelling is a big part of my artistry, because I feel everybody loves a good story. I find that even when I'm writing most times in the studio, there's always a picture I'm trying to paint, and it only makes sense for the visuals to kind of match that most of the time. Except sometimes we decide to make it a performance video because I just feel like dancing.

What’s the most memorable video you’ve ever done ?

Every one of my videos has taken a lot of pain, sweat, and even some tears. But I think "Johnny" is such a masterpiece, because it resonated with the entire world, and Africa especially. And it pretty much helped me to stay on my way through the industry, because it became my identity. That song and that video was the platform for the brand and everything that I am today. you know, so that is definitely the most memorable, in a good way.

You've traveled to and performed in America several times in your career. What's your overall impression?

I think I've done four or five American tours. And yo , America is so big [laughs]. My first American tour had me in shambles, because of the flights. I didn't realize that to go from one city to another, I might have to connect once or twice depending on how far I'm going. So the flights had me in shambles, but the energy of the people? Oh my days, lit! America is definitely one of my favorite places. I’m always reminding my agents to make sure that they include American cities on my tours, which is why even for the album listening parties for Rebel Queen , we did the first one in Paris, then London, and then we had to come to New York as well. And then just yesterday, we had one in Lagos as well.   

Since you first became popular, a lot of Afrobeats artists have gained a following abroad like Burna Boy and WizKid . It seems as though , at least looking at the artists that break outside of Africa, that the genre is still very male-dominated. Do you agree with that? And do you think there’s potential for more female artists to break out internationally?

Honestly, when I started out, the odds were really way more against women than they are right now, in that, there were female artists sprouting maybe once every two years, or once every year, and barely hanging around long enough. But now, the story is different. And I give kudos to all the women before me and all the women with me. Yes, in a male dominated society, it seems as though my male counterparts get their roses and their flowers for a second. And you know, once in a while someone comes back and remembers, "Oh, there's Yemi Alade." Do you know what I mean?  

I was speaking to someone earlier today and I was saying, I think what surprises me the most is that, I feel like there are no expectations of female artists. So like, if we do or we don't, people are just moving on. But I'm not the one to play victim, never. Despite the odds, you see that the females continue to be resilient, because we know. I know deep within that my existence is definitely of value to so many people out there.

What do you think of the upcoming generation of talent like Tems and Ayra Starr and Tyla, who recently won the first GRAMMY Award for Best African Music Performance for "Water?"

Exceptional, exceptional artists. As you just mentioned, they're doing amazingly well. And, you know, these women are unique in their own ways. And I want to just say that I believe it's just the starting point for them. There's so much to come. And there's so many other females that are still en route to greatness.

How have you seen the music industry in Africa evolve? And what sorts of challenges do you think African musicians face today?

I personally feel like, with all the momentum that Afrobeats has got, we need authentic platforms that can actually check the streaming numbers that are coming in for music, especially within Africa. Because at the moment it’s mostly Apple, Spotify, etc. But there are other platforms here in Africa that most Africans use, and they have more of a database compared to Apple and Spotify. We've come to a point where we need to have more credible numbers, because there's millions of people streaming music in Africa that are not on those platforms.

So you think that these local platforms need to be counted alongside Apple and Spotify?

100 percent. In Nigeria there’s two: Audiomack and Boomplay . Boomplay is a big deal.

You’re going on a decade in the industry. In all that time, what's one moment or one achievement that gives you the greatest sense of accomplishment? What are you most proud of in your career?

That’s a big question…I think I have an idea, because there've been so many moments in my life and in my career that have aligned with my dreams coming true. Number one is each time that I'm approached by a complete stranger and the stranger tells me "Oh my God, Yemi. You don't know what your music has done for me. Your music has gotten me through so much grief." Some people walk up to me and tell me that they just had the biggest struggle in their life and they listen to my music, and it always sends them into a realm of joy and happiness. Honestly, I feel accomplished in those moments, because when I record my music, I always say, the thing I'm trying to spread through my music the most is love, joy and happiness. So to have people testify to that, it means to me that the magic is complete, that my job is actually effective. So that makes me feel very accomplished.  

On a personal note, an accomplishment that I am most grateful to is the fact that I'm always able to comfortably take care of my family. It's something that I would never play down. You know, I'm just grateful to God for that.  

And lastly, aside from winning a GRAMMY through Angelique Kidjo — you know, I've met a lot of amazing people, and Beyoncé is one of them. So at the end of the day, it's a full circle moment for me. I'm just enjoying the ride.

You know, it’s funny you mentioned Beyoncé, I was just about to ask you what it was like to work with her.  

Oh my days — wow, working with her, it was such an experience for myself and my team. It was like, we're literally awake, walking in the dreams that we have dreamt for so long.The process of her team contacting us was a bit weird, because my management didn't realize that Parkwood [Entertainment] was a real company, that they were emailing them and talking about Beyoncé. They assumed that it was some kind of scam artist. But when they had sent it to me, I was like "What? Parkwood? Who doesn’t know Parkwood is Beyoncé?"  

So it turned out that it was for real, and we went to L.A. where the studio was, and I lost my voice for 24 hours — I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t sing. I just soaked up all the vitamin C's and hot teas and Throat Coats I could get. I managed to regain a little bit of my voice back and that's what I was able to record that day. That was a miracle for me. But one of the most memorable moments was actually meeting her in person. After the album, Lion King , came out, the movie was being premiered in London, and I happened to be in London at that time. We had met her in person, we met Jay Z . It was such a full circle moment. Honestly, that lady has really touched my life in a way that I will never forget. Because she could have lived her life without doing what she did, but she decided to reach out to people she felt were pillars of African music and pay homage to Africa. And I'm happy to have been part of that moment.

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Photo: Paras Griffin/Getty Images for BET

New Music Friday: Listen To New Releases From Childish Gambino, JT, Rauw Alejandro & More

With July being more than halfway through, take a look at the new tracks, albums, and collaborations from Alessia Cara, Joe Jonas and more that dropped on July 19.

This summer continues to dazzle us with an electrifying array of music, with new releases arriving from Jimin ( MUSE ), Ivan Cornejo ( MIRADA ), Koe Wetzel ( 9 Lives ), Denzel Curry ( King Of The Mischievous South Vol. 2 ), and Adam Lambert ( Afters ), and many more this week. From eagerly awaited comebacks to iconic collaborations, July 19 has an abundance of new music to offer across all genres.

As you continue shaping up your summer playlists, be sure to check out the following 11 new songs and projects.

JT — 'City Cinderella'

Following the release of "The City Cinderella Documentary," which chronicles JT's inspiring journey from overcoming challenging circumstances to embarking on a solo career, the rapper unveils her highly-anticipated 16-track mixtape, City Cinderella . The project is a showcase of talent and growth, featuring powerhouse collaborations with DJ Khaled and Jeezy , the latter of whom features on a remix of her hit "OKAY."

City Cinderella is JT's first project since parting ways with her former City Girls cohort, Yung Miami. Speaking to Paper Magazine about her new venture, JT explained that the inspiration for the project was simple: "I just wanted to authentically be myself and make music."

Rauw Alejandro — "DEJAME ENTRAR"

Puerto Rican star Rauw Alejandro has been a song machine since his Sony Latin/Demars Entertainment debut with 2019's Trap Cake, Vol. 1 . He'll be releasing his fifth album in five years later this year — and judging by his latest release, it may be his sexiest yet.

"DEJAME ENTRAR" sees Alejandro getting close to a woman who once was just a crush, but has now turned into his latest love affair. The singer debuted the sultry, pulsing track with a smooth performance on "Today" on July 12; one week later, the song's official release also included the official video, which co-stars actor Adrian Brody. 

Though Alejandro hasn't revealed a release date for his next project, he teased on "Today" that it will hopefully be done "soon." "These songs [are] too good to be inside the studio," he said.

Childish Gambino — 'Bando Stone & the New World'

Just two months after re-releasing his 2020 project, 3.15.20 , under the new title Atavista , Donald Glover is back with another Childish Gambino album, Bando Stone & the New World . The LP features stylistic musical choices that parallel Gambino's past albums, including 2011's Camp , 2013's Because the Internet , and 2016's "Awaken, My Love! , " as well as features from Amaarae and Jorja Smith, Flo Milli, Fousheé, and Yeat.

As Glover revealed in April, Bando Stone & the New World will be his last album under the Childish Gambino moniker. But he's going out with a bang: along with a massive world tour, Bando Stone & the New World is accompanied by a sci-fi film titled Bando .

According to a recent interview the New York Times , it seems Glover feels a sense of completion with the project, too. "Success to me is, honestly, being able to put out a wide-scale album that I would listen to," he said. "For this album, I really wanted to be able to play big rooms and have big, anthemic songs that fill those rooms, so that people feel a sense of togetherness."

'Twisters: The Album'

Nearly 30 years after the 1996 release of Twister , the blockbuster finally gets a sequel with the highly anticipated Twisters — and an equally exciting accompanying soundtrack. The sprawling Twisters: The Album features some of the biggest names in country music today, with tracks from Luke Combs , Lainey Wilson , Jelly Roll , and many more.

Combs was the first to tease a taste of the soundtrack with his gritty, uptempo tune "Ain't No Love In Oklahoma," which was released alongside a music video that featured clips from the movie. Scenes from the film can also be seen in the clip for Jelly Roll's "Dead End Road," which arrived the day before the album's release. 

But there's so much more to discover across the soundtracks 29 songs, from Megan Moroney's "Never Left Me" to Charley Crocket's "(Ghost) Riders In The Sky." And though the track list is stacked with country stars, there's a few gems to enjoy by hitmakers from other genres, too, including Benson Boone ("Death Wish Love") and Leon Bridges ("Chrome Cowgirl").

Alessia Cara — "Dead Man"

It's been two years since we last heard from Alessia Cara , but she's ready to begin her next chapter. The GRAMMY winner unveils "Dead Man," the lead single from her forthcoming fourth album — and if the kiss-off track is any indication, Cara's in her fearless era.

Backed by crisp drums and harmonious saxophones, "Dead Man" is an edgy ode to someone she's cutting off because he's no longer serving her. "If you really care, then why am I feeling you just slipping through my hands?," she questions in the chorus. "If you're really there, then why can I walk right through ya?/ Talkin' to a dead man."

James Bay feat. Noah Kahan & The Lumineers — "Up All Night"

In the folk-pop collaboration that dreams are made of, James Bay teams up with longtime friend Noah Kahan and genre giants The Lumineers for "Up All Night." The track boasts a vibrant instrumental layered beneath the harmonious blend of each artists' vocals — a perfect soundtrack for warm, starry summer nights.

The week "Up All Night" arrives also marks a full-circle tour moment for Kahan and Bay. Five years after Kahan first opened for Bay on the "Let It Go" singer's Electric Light Tour in 2019, Bay is now opening for Kahan — at New York City's Madison Square Garden and Boston's Fenway Park, no less — on the We'll All Be Here Forever Tour.

Sueco — 'Attempted Lover'

After four years and two projects with Atlantic Records, Sueco unveils his first independently released studio album, Attempted Lover . Across 12 tracks, the L.A. native delves into the complexities of love and relationships, while navigating the tangled emotions that accompany these themes.

Sueco set the stage back in March with the project's lead single, "Drama Queen" — a raw, high-energy track that drew in both new and loyal listeners. He soon followed up with "Mulholland Drive," a stripped-down acoustic gem, showcasing the impressive range of musical styles that Attempted Lover has to offer. 

In celebration of the release, Sueco will embark on the Attempted Lover Tour in Sept. 13, kicking things off in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and hitting 32 cities in North America until Nov. 2.

KALEO — "USA Today"

During a short break from their Payback Tour, KALEO is back with new music — and making a statement and an impact with their latest release.

The rock band deliver the emotionally charged "USA Today," a reflection on gun violence in America. Though frontman JJ Julius Son first wrote the track in 2019 with Shawn Everett and Eddie Spear , he felt compelled to release the track after an innocent bystander was killed during the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13.

"So here we are/ Fighting for america/ Fighting for a new day/ Trying hard to change/ USA today," Son sings over gritty guitar riffs and dark synths . KALEO invites listeners to join the movement, pledging to donate a portion of the proceeds from the song to the gun violence advocacy group Everytown .

"USA Today" is the second track KALEO released from their forthcoming fourth album, which is due later this year; it follows the acoustic lead single, "Lonely Cowboy."

Avery Anna — 'Breakup Over Breakfast'

After being named an Artist to Watch by Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, and CMT in 2023, country newcomer Avery Anna further displays her promise and prowess with her debut album, Breakup Over Breakfast . The Arizona native co-wrote all 17 tracks on the project, including standout track "girl next door," a powerful ballad that puts Anna's golden vocals on display.

"These songs mean the world to me. It's a little bit of rock, country, acoustic, pop, and everything personal," the singer/songwriter wrote in an Instagram post. "I really wanted to give you guys an album that you can confide in. I carefully chose the songs and track listing, and creating it was an adrenaline rush / a relief all at the same time."

Role Model — 'Kansas Anymore'

With his 2022 debut album, Rx , Role Model dove deeply into themes of love. Two years later, the rising bedroom pop star offers a different take on that same topic, grieving the very relationship that inspired Rx with Kansas Anymore .

Along with offering a different take on love and relationships, Role Model's latest effort is also inspired by his longing for his native state of Maine. Drawing inspiration from artists like Zach Bryan , the War on Drugs and Caamp, Kansas Anymore chronicles Role Model journeys back home, attempting to fill the void created by leaving his East Coast roots for California. The project represents a mature step forward, navigating the rollercoaster of heartbreak and homesickness — and moving listeners in the process.

Joe Jonas — "Work It Out"

Since releasing his first solo album, Fastlife , in 2011, Joe Jonas has been plenty busy, from landing a megahit with his pop-rock group DNCE to bringing back the Jonas Brothers with his siblings Nick and Kevin . Thirteen years later, the singer makes a solo comeback with "Work It Out," the bouncy lead single from his sophomore solo album, Music for People Who Believe in Love , due Oct. 18.

"This album is a celebration of gratitude, hope, and love. These songs reflect on my life from a bird's-eye-view acknowledging the many blessings around me," Jonas shared on Instagram , referencing both his own experiences as an individual and as a recent father of two. "I hope it brings you as much joy as it brought me creating it."

• 1 Fight The Power: 11 Powerful Protest Songs Advocating For Racial Justice
• 2 John Legend On How His Kids, "The Voice" & Sufjan Stevens Helped 'My Favorite Dream' Come To Life
• 3 How Ravyn Lenae Found Comfort In Changing Perspective
• 4 Afropop Legend Yemi Alade On New Album, 'Rebel Queen,' Historic Hits, & Working With Beyoncé
• 5 New Music Friday: Listen To New Releases From Childish Gambino, JT, Rauw Alejandro & More

The Power of Protest Songs

MAGAZINE OF SMITHSONIAN'S NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

• From Issue: Spring 2013 / Vol. 14 No. 1
• by Buffy Sainte-Marie

A great three-minute protest song can be more effective than a 400-page textbook: immediate and replicable, portable and efficient, wrapped in music, easy to understand by ordinary people. It’s distributed word-of-mouth by artists, as opposed to news stories marketed by the fellas who may own the town, the company store and the mine. 

Buffy Sainte-Marie. Photo by Christie Goodwin

From Kinzua Dam to Idle No More:  Buffy Sainte-Marie’s songs have marked five decades of protests, from vigils against the 1961 seizure of Seneca lands for Pennsylvania’s Kinzua Dam project to the current Idle No More movement.

August 1961 protest by Seneca Indians and Quakers from Philadelphia against evictions from treaty land for Kinzua Dam project. Vigil and Mountain View. Photo by Theodore Brinton Hetzel. Courtesy of Swarthmroe College Peace Collection, Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College

From Kinzua Dam to Idle No More:  Buffy Sainte-Marie’s songs have marked five decades of protests, from vigils against the 1961 seizure of Seneca lands for Pennsylvania’s Kinzua Dam project to the current Idle No More movement.

January 2013 Idle No More demonstration at the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa. Photos by Santee Smith

Many protest songs are about rank-ism of some kind, and made by people trying to create change, during times when the status quo wants things to stay the same. From the Robin Hood ballads of the 1400s to contemporary hip hop, there’s an expressed plea for fairness. For example, a classic theme is relevant to songwriters throughout the centuries: the rich and powerful want to stay that way, even if others are exploited.

A song can be an effective tool for common people in non-violent struggle. But information tentacles reach both in and out of a protest song, and, yes, although it can change things, it can also get you into trouble, same as any other act of non-violent self-expression. My 1963 song “Universal Soldier” impacted thousands of soldiers, students and families during the Vietnam war. It made a difference to the lives of people who are still thanking me 50 years later. On the other hand, along with “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone” and other Native American issue songs, it got me blacklisted by two political administrations and effectively silenced my voice in the United States, just when Native peoples most needed to be heard. 

I wrote “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone” about a specific incident: the building of the Kinzua Dam, which pushed the Senecas off their land in the 1960s, breaking one of the oldest treaties in America’s history, authorized by George Washington. Although the song is emotional, the story it tells is factually bulletproof, although under-reported. It surprised audiences, most of whom had never thought about Indians much. I believed people would help if only they knew about the greed, the unfairness, the way Native Americans were and sometimes are treated. And a lot of people did help, both Indian and non-Indian. 

For me, the power of a protest song is not about getting a hit or making a buck. It has to do with how useful it is to making the world better, to crystallizing raw emotions into thought because of a well-turned phrase, reaching people and ripening those inner inspirations they’re just starting to understand. If a song is useful to a movement impacting the lives of people in need, I’m happy. The current, globally viral Idle No More action, which originated with four women in Canada deals with reservation poverty, the environment and exploitive legislation. They are using my song “No No Keshagesh,” and it’s pretty humbling to be part of that grassroots effort. A song can be a lens through which people can focus and see unfamiliar issues better. 

Both the style and the emotional content of protest songs vary. Consider the musical diversity of this list: “We Shall Overcome” by Pete Seeger; “Fortunate Son” by John Fogarty; “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” by James Brown; “Imagine” by John Lennon; “I Ain’t Marching Any More” by Phil Ochs; “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell; “Masters of War” by Bob Dylan; “Waving Flag” by K’Naan. 

For me, a good protest song is like good journalism: brief, well-focused and catchy for the short attention spans of ordinary people. Quick and engaging, like Sesame Street. For a protest song to be effective you need to make your point clearly in about three minutes, and do it in a way that truly engages people who might not know they’d want to hear it. 

My song “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” is shocking to people who hear the list of facts around which the song is built. Therefore I deliberately wrapped the words in a hard-rock track, so that the listener is already caught up in the music before ever hearing the tragic story it tells about Anna Mae Aquash, Leonard Peltier and uranium exploitation on Indian lands. All I did was connect the dots...in music. Although the information is factual, most audiences have had no previous exposure to the facts of grassroots Native America. Sometimes the system misses the boat, in spite of education and journalism, and a song can help. 

Other Native American songwriters beside myself have written protest songs. Peter LaFarge (Narragansett) wrote “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” “Custer,” “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow” and more, several recorded by Johnny Cash; and my friend Floyd Westerman (Lakota) wrote one that I sing at almost every concert, “Relocation Blues,” which deals with the residential boarding schools. He also wrote “B.I.A.,” “Custer Died for Your Sins,” and more. Shannon Two Feathers, Curtis Jonnie a.k.a. Shingoose, and Art Napoleon are a few of the Aboriginal Canadian songwriters who have written protest songs. 

Some “Indian” protest songs are more authentic than others, and, like Wikipedia, they may or may not reflect accuracy. Some are full of well-intentioned second-hand emotion but lack any Native experience, and factually just don’t hit the mark. On the other hand, I’ve always been impressed that Bob Dylan, although not Native, wrote “The Walls of Redwing,” a scathing indictment of the Minnesota reform school in the heart of Indian country, and “With God on Our Side,” both songs tangentially but pointedly related to Indian issues.

When I was recording my own latest CD, Running for the Drum, I included a version of the famous “America the Beautiful,” for which I wrote new sections. That beautiful melody has carried a lot of diverse messages in anonymously written verses, some of them rather racist. Besides my own new sections, which added Native information little known to most people, I selected the anonymous verses that I thought expressed the kindest, most enriching Native American-like values: America not as nation-state, but America as Mother. One of the loveliest anonymous verses says “America, America, God shed His grace on thee; til selfish gain no longer stain the banner of the free.” Very strategic, very positive. And check out Ray Charles’ gorgeous version of “America the Beautiful,” noted in Wynne Alexander’s book Get It from the Drums: A History of Protest and Protest Songs of the 1960s and 70s. 

Protest songs can mirror the violence and pain of real life; or they can soft-pedal it and still be effective. Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” are examples of treading easy in the system. And each has its message, but they are subtle. Contrast that approach with Dylan’s “Masters of War,” or my own “My Country Tis of Thy People You’re Dying,” which I wrote as a six-minute “Indian 101” for people who knew nothing about the historical and contemporary genocide of everything Native American. This more cutting approach does shake people up, but it also delivers rare factual information. 

Loud or soft, abrasive or seductive, protest songs have confronted rank-ism of every kind for a very long time, and been effective tools for ripening social change. I say long live the courageous, strategic, informative art of the great protest song. 

Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree) is the Academy Award-winning songwriter, singer, composer, activist and star of Sesame Street. Her 18th and latest album Running for the Drum is available from her website creative-native.com. She will present the program The Art of the Protest Song on Thursday, March 14 at the George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian in lower Manhattan, where she is also featured in the exhibit Up Where We Belong on the Native presence in American popular music.

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How to Write a Protest Song

Home » How to Write a Protest Song

Perhaps two of the only things left that we can all agree on is that we live in a world divided, and it is now a time of protest. Whether people are protesting truth to power, or power to truth, protesting a certain ideology, or defending it, it appears that protest and social justice songs will be in demand soon, perhaps before we can even get them written.

This article is not going to be about the validity of anybody’s particular viewpoint or about our politics, but about how to craft an ideological protest song that will offer the greatest representation of your views, should you choose a guitar over a placard when your cause takes to the streets. If your cause has already taken to the streets, then you had better get writing because as the Bob Dylan song goes, “Your old road is rapidly aging, please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand”.

Here are 10 points you’ll want to know before you start singing angry stuff all over the place.

• Research your Topic. You may have a very strong passion for a certain social or political view but there is a difference between being passionate about a cause, and being well informed. School yourself up on both sides of the argument and write a lyric you can defend.
• Write to the Center. When writing your lyric you will convert more uncommitted listeners if you craft some nuance into your viewpoint. This does not mean you have to acknowledge a personal validation of the opposing view, but writing as if the issue is above debate will inevitably work against you. You do not want people to get the impression that your song was written in an ideological vacuum because that will make it easy to argue against and satirize.
• Write to your Passion. Considering the point in #2 taken, do not compromise your passion for the cause, and write with the bravery and conviction that your view deserves.
• Use a Traditional Song Form. By using a traditional song form, you will allow your protest song to tap into the historical representation of the protest songs that have preceded it and give your song some grounding in that tradition. This also helps your protest, or social justice song, retain some simplicity and help the listener stay focused on the lyric ideas dedicated to your cause.
• Write into a Metaphor. Songs that are based on an abstract or written as a parable are more powerful and illustrative than songs that are directly teachy or preachy. Bob Dylan knew what the answer was, my friends, and could easily have stated it in plain language, but he chose to let us know that it was “blowing in the wind”. The lyric was a metaphorical invitation to get out there and find the answer for yourself.
• Refrain from NOT using a Refrain. Some of us have never even written a refrain since the chorus took over the world about 50 years ago, but the refrain is a great convention for the kind of song you want to write here. For a great example of a refrain we look again to, “The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind”.
• We Want 5 Notes, We Want 5 Notes… Protest and social justice songs need to be easy to chant, and as “sing along” friendly as possible. It is advisable to write a simple catchy melody that primarily uses the 5 note pentatonic scale. This will make your song easy for your crowd to learn and easy for them to remember for the next rally.
• What the Anthem? Anthems are historically a celebratory kind of musical work but, of course, when you protest one side of a cause, you are also celebrating the side of that fence that you reside on. Study anthems. There are national anthems, songs like Queen’s “We are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You”, and other songs that tap into a sense of belonging to your certain faction of society. You will find that some of these songs have a chorus but notice the use of lots and lots of repetition and how the chorus melody and lyric ties in with the verses.
• Dude, Where’s Your Song? Once you have written your song, make certain that organizers who work for the cause know you have written it. It does you no good if nobody hears your timely song, and for those who share that view your song may be considered an essential element that was previously missing from their movement.
• To Sing… or not to Sing! Once the song is written and ready to go, determine if you are the right voice for the song and for the movement. There is a lot to be said for the honesty of the songwriters rendition, but it can also be argued that having the right performance can also be a huge factor in having your ideas gain traction and produce the greatest impact. Try to not make this decision with your ego, or your own ambition, and let the song win the day.

Above all other kinds of songs, protest songs and social justice songs have been able to influence culture. Some have even become the soundtrack to seismic shifts in how people feel about one another by providing the words and music to that particular moment in human history.

James Linderman is a music journalist for more than 25 songwriting organizations and PRO’s around the world. He teaches film composition and songwriting for film at the Canada Film Centre and is an Academic Ambassador to Berklee College of Music. He teaches guitar, piano, bass and coaches songwriting over Skype to students around the world and is the author of the new book Song Forms for Songwriting. Feel free to contact James at [email protected] or visit www.jameslinderman.com for more information.

Tags: protest , songwriting

• Protest Song Music - Music News Beat 06-17-17

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Jazz — Analysis Of Billie Holiday’s Song Strange Fruit

Analysis of Billie Holiday’s Song Strange Fruit

• Categories: Billie Holiday Jazz Song Analysis

About this sample

Words: 720 |

Published: Aug 6, 2021

Words: 720 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Song analysis essay outline, song analysis essay example, introduction to "strange fruit" by billie holiday.

• Overview of the song's theme and historical context
• Significance of the song in the context of civil rights

Extended Metaphors in the Song

• Comparison between lynching victims and fruit
• The symbolism of trees and fruit in the song

Verse Analysis

• Analyzing the lyrics of each verse
• How Billie Holiday uses metaphors to convey the horrors of lynching
• The importance of "Strange Fruit" as a protest song
• The use of extended metaphors in highlighting the dark imagery of the song

Works Cited:

• Pew Research Centers. (2011). Global Christianity - A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Christian Population. Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project. https://www.pewforum.org/2011/12/19/global-christianity-exec/
• Ryrie, C. C. (2006). Basic Theology: A Popular Systematic Guide to Understanding Biblical Truth. Moody Publishers.
• Stott, J. R. W. (1994). The Living Church: Convictions of a Lifelong Pastor. IVP Books.
• The Bible. (n.d.). BibleGateway.com. https://www.biblegateway.com/
• The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2001). Crossway.
• Vischer, P. (2010). The Gospel According to Paul: Embracing the Good News at the Heart of Paul's Teachings. Thomas Nelson.
• Black, C. C. (2012). The Church: What Is It? Nashville: Gospel Advocate Company.
• Lutzer, E. W. (2018). The Church in Babylon: Heeding the Call to Be a Light in Darkness. Moody Publishers.
• Merriam-Webster Dictionary. (n.d.). Church. In Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/church
• Schreiner, T. R., & Wright, M. J. (Eds.). (2018). Believer's Baptism: Sign of the New Covenant in Christ. B&H Academic.

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The Music and History of Our Times Summer 2012

Past Issues

70 | World War II: Portraits of Service | Spring 2024

69 | The Reception and Impact of the Declaration of Independence, 1776-1826 | Winter 2023

68 | The Role of Spain in the American Revolution | Fall 2023

67 | The Influence of the Declaration of Independence on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era | Summer 2023

66 | Hispanic Heroes in American History | Spring 2023

65 | Asian American Immigration and US Policy | Winter 2022

64 | New Light on the Declaration and Its Signers | Fall 2022

63 | The Declaration of Independence and the Long Struggle for Equality in America | Summer 2022

62 | The Honored Dead: African American Cemeteries, Graveyards, and Burial Grounds | Spring 2022

61 | The Declaration of Independence and the Origins of Self-Determination in the Modern World | Fall 2021

60 | Black Lives in the Founding Era | Summer 2021

59 | American Indians in Leadership | Winter 2021

58 | Resilience, Recovery, and Resurgence in the Wake of Disasters | Fall 2020

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography | Summer 2020

56 | The Nineteenth Amendment and Beyond | Spring 2020

55 | Examining Reconstruction | Fall 2019

54 | African American Women in Leadership | Summer 2019

53 | The Hispanic Legacy in American History | Winter 2019

52 | The History of US Immigration Laws | Fall 2018

51 | The Evolution of Voting Rights | Summer 2018

50 | Frederick Douglass at 200 | Winter 2018

49 | Excavating American History | Fall 2017

48 | Jazz, the Blues, and American Identity | Summer 2017

47 | American Women in Leadership | Winter 2017

46 | African American Soldiers | Fall 2016

45 | American History in Visual Art | Summer 2016

44 | Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination | Winter 2016

43 | Wartime Memoirs and Letters from the American Revolution to Vietnam | Fall 2015

42 | The Role of China in US History | Spring 2015

41 | The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Legislating Equality | Winter 2015

40 | Disasters in Modern American History | Fall 2014

39 | American Poets, American History | Spring 2014

38 | The Joining of the Rails: The Transcontinental Railroad | Winter 2014

37 | Gettysburg: Insights and Perspectives | Fall 2013

36 | Great Inaugural Addresses | Summer 2013

35 | America’s First Ladies | Spring 2013

34 | The Revolutionary Age | Winter 2012

33 | Electing a President | Fall 2012

32 | The Music and History of Our Times | Summer 2012

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars | Spring 2012

30 | American Reform Movements | Winter 2012

29 | Religion in the Colonial World | Fall 2011

28 | American Indians | Summer 2011

27 | The Cold War | Spring 2011

26 | New Interpretations of the Civil War | Winter 2010

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23 | Turning Points in American Sports | Spring 2010

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3 | Immigration | Spring 2005

2 | Primary Sources on Slavery | Winter 2004

1 | Elections | Fall 2004

The Sixties and Protest Music

By kerry candaele.

But wars also create their unique antagonists who transform their empathy, concern, anger, and other emotions into poetry, prose, or in our time, popular music. This was particularly true of the war in Vietnam. Given this era’s unique historical circumstances, the musical soundscape to the Vietnam War was strikingly different from the music that accompanied World War II. While there were patriotic songs that did very well, most notably Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler’s million-selling number-one hit "Ballad of the Green Berets" in 1966 and Merle Haggard’s "Okie from Muskogee" in 1969, the vast majority of Vietnam War songs fell into the category of anti- rather than pro-war songs.

American involvement in Vietnam had evolved through the United States’ support of French colonial rule after World War II. The United States saw the anti-communist Viet Diem and his regime as a "proving ground for Democracy," in the words of then US senator from Massachusetts John F. Kennedy. After being elected president in 1960, Kennedy increased military aid. By the time of his assassination in November 1963, there were 16,000 American military personnel stationed in Vietnam.

Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s vice president and successor, escalated American involvement in Vietnam throughout 1964 and 1965. By early 1968 there were 550,000 combat troops in Vietnam and rising casualties with no end in sight. The anti-war movement, and the anti-war music, that ran parallel to the increasingly large numbers of young men drafted into the Army was also rooted in broader changes that were taking place in America.

The soldiers drafted to fight in Vietnam were born during the massive baby boom that began in 1946, following the victory of World War II. By 1960 the number of undergraduates in colleges and universities had doubled in twenty years to 3.6 million young men and women. And by 1964, seventeen-year-olds were the largest age cohort in the United States.

Rock and roll, fully born in the 1950s, and called "noise" by parents, turned millions of these young people toward this exotic and transformative new art. Along with sexual experimentation and the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement in the South, it created a youth culture that shared the black writer James Baldwin’s insight: "The American equation of success with the big times reveals an awful disrespect for human life and human achievement." [1] Youth "counterculture" carved out new spaces for experimentation and alternative views about what constituted a good society, while a New Left made up of civil rights and anti-war activists developed as the war in Vietnam dragged out and became increasingly bloody, confounding, and ultimately unpopular.

This was the context in which popular music in general, and certainly anti-war music specifically, became a space for cultural and political conflict and dialog, and at times a product and resource for broad movement against the war. The Vietnam War was accompanied every step of the way by an anti-war soundtrack that touched on every tone—melancholy and touching, enraged and sarcastic, fearful and resigned—and that captured the long demoralizing impact of this war. And like the anti-war movement itself, it began without a significant audience in the early sixties, but grew to a critical mass by the war’s termination.

Bob Dylan opened up that cultural space for an oppositional voice to the Vietnam War during the first half of the 1960s. Initially connected to a folk music revival that was simultaneously a political and cultural phenomena—an attempt at a kind of singing mass movement as the scholar Richard Flacks described it—Dylan wrote "Blowin’ in the Wind" and "Masters of War" in 1962, the latter as venomous, and self-righteous an indictment of militarism as popular music had seen.

You that never done nothin’ But build to destroy You play with my world Like it’s your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly. [2]

Dylan followed up in 1963 with "With God on Our Side," in which the notion that God plays favorites with countries at war is considered both crude and foolish. None of these early anti-war songs is explicitly about Vietnam, as the war in Southeast Asia was on the minds of only a few Americans in 1963. But Dylan’s lyrics combined a revisionist history of what true patriotism meant, opposition to what Eisenhower called the Military Industrial Complex, and an existential angst caused by the prospects of nuclear annihilation. There were other colleagues and competitors in the Greenwich scene in which Dylan blossomed, especially when it came to topical songs with anti-war themes. Phil Ochs wrote a jukebox full of anti-war songs, including "I Ain’t Marchin Anymore" and the witty "Draft Dodger Rag."

As the Cold War and the hard reality of death, both in the United States and four thousand miles away in Vietnam, escalated anti-war songs kept the pulse of individual and collective dissent.

Any observer could track the changes in musical attitude by looking at how some artists were transformed during the war years. Bobby Darin began his pop career as a teen idol in 1958 with the million-seller "Splish Splash," an imitation of Jerry Lee Lewis. By 1969 Darin, in a leather jacket with buckskin fringe, was writing songs of political activism and denouncing the war in his "Simple Song of Freedom." Dion Di Mucci (Dion) followed a similar trajectory. In 1960 he had his first hit with "Lonely Teenager," about young love gone astray. But in 1968, after eighteen follow-up hits about the same subject, Dion offered a song-survey of domestic and international violence in "Abraham, Martin, and John."

Yet the music industry’s concern for a song’s chart location each week, and the fear of upsetting large distributors, made radical anti-war statements in popular music a relatively rare occurrence. Songs by popular musicians were written for the radio and often with a popular audience in mind. This growing and eventually gargantuan record business had its demands. An artist with enough clout or record sales could occasionally get out a song with a political or social message. For example, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s "Fortunate Son," a caustic attack on militarism and the class- and race-based unfairness of the draft, was released and sold well.

"Fortunate Son," written in 1969 by Creedence lead singer John Fogerty, was an uncompromising two-minute-and-twenty-one-second manifesto about how those with connections and money avoided the draft while the poor and working class had to go to war. Fogerty understood the emerging anger that this disparity created: "In 1968, the majority of the country thought morale was great among the troops. . . . but to some of us who were watching closely, we just knew we were headed for trouble." [3]

Perhaps the high-water mark of this protest genre came on August 18, 1969, when guitarist Jimi Hendrix stood on stage at Woodstock and played his version of "The Star-Spangled Banner." With this performance, Hendrix put an exclamation point on a decade of protest music aimed at America’s military adventures in general, and the Vietnam War in particular. His blistering and ironic version of our country’s most cherished musical symbol also showcased a host of changes and contradictions that summarized the anti-war music and movements of the 1960s and beyond. For, unlike the folk tradition that played a part in the movement for civil rights, late-sixties anti-war music did not focus on solidarity and shared risk-taking. Hendrix was not a guitar-strumming troubadour embedded in and at the service of a social movement. He, and his sound—loud, technologically sophisticated and stunning in its virtuosity, avant-garde in its musical language—was by 1969 a very big business. As venues grew larger, the rock performer—now designated a "star"—was increasingly separated from the audience. And while Hendrix himself may have wanted his audience to be transformed into active participants in their own history, the medium could not deliver that message with sincerity. Who could sing along to, or reproduce with an acoustic guitar in a dorm room, his version of "The Star-Spangled Banner"?

Often enough, then, the cultural unity and shared experience the music evoked lasted only the length of the concert. Yet, Hendrix’s wordless inversion of our patriotic standard would eventually reach millions when the film Woodstock was released in 1970. The song inventoried not just the progress of anti-war music but also the "anti" of the era itself. The "Banner" that Hendrix played that day eviscerated the anthem it parodied. It celebrated not the honor and virtues of the United States, but instead performed an act of exorcism as Hendrix’s guitar mimicked with frightening accuracy the screams of those who died in Vietnam. Hendrix pushed the reality of the Vietnam War into the public’s face and ears, as if Pablo Picasso had convinced him to put Guernica to music for the Vietnam era. And like Picasso’s painting, the song was angry and accusatory.

There was no linear path down which anti-war music moved, but as a safe generalization, the more carnage the Vietnam War wrought, the hotter in temper became the songs expressing opposition. On the same stage at Woodstock where Jimi Hendrix performed, Country Joe McDonald delivered perhaps the best-remembered anti-war song of the time. A darkly satirical critique of the war, "I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag" added heft because Country Joe had earned military stripes in the Navy.

Come on mothers throughout the land, Pack your boys off to Vietnam. Come on fathers, don’t hesitate, Send your sons off before it’s too late. Be the first one on your block To have your boy come home in a box. [4]

The song was a savage swipe at what the anti-war movement considered American hypocrisy. "I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-to-Die" was a long way from "blowing in the wind," Dylan’s rueful and elusive answer to the question of how many more would have to die.

The increasing anger within the anti-war movement peaked during the presidency of Richard Nixon. Nixon was elected in 1968 on a platform that included a "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam and a promise to "bring us together"; however, Nixon’s Vietnam policy further divided the nation. While Nixon did decrease the number of troops in Vietnam, he also ordered secret bombings of North Vietnamese supply routes that ran through neutral Cambodia.

When, in April of 1970, Nixon decided to send troops into Cambodia, campuses across the country erupted in protests and a strike of hundreds of thousands students on more than 700 campuses. On May 4, four Kent State students were killed and nine were wounded by Ohio National Guardsmen, and ten days later two were killed at Jackson State College.

After seeing photos from the Kent State massacre, singer-songwriter Neil Young wrote "Ohio," recorded with Crosby, Stills, and Nash in two days and distributed as quickly. "Ohio" was a message to America to do something about the deaths, the war, and the breakup of the country:

Gotta get down to it Soldiers are cutting us down Should have been done long ago. What if you knew her And found her dead on the ground How can you run when you know? [5]

It was a call to arms that many AM radio stations, their formats focused on harmless pop hits, refused to play.

As an epic moment of truth, "Ohio" did sound a call to action, but like the vast majority of successful rockers, none of the members of CSNY was truly part of a social movement. They stayed clear of day-to-day organizing and ongoing moral support of activists. The truth didn’t last, nor did the "language of showdown, shootout, and face-off," as Todd Gitlin described the discourse of the extreme right and left at the time. [6]

This fact has on occasion prompted historians and others to ask some tough questions of the times. George Lipsitz asks, was the music of the sixties the "product of young people struggling to establish their own artistic visions, or was it the creation of marketing executives eager to cash in on demographic trends by tailoring mass media commodities to the interests of the nation’s largest age cohort?" [7] After all, by 1970, records and tapes brought in over $2 billion, close to 80 percent of the revenue from the ranks of rock and roll.

The questions are important for thinking about youth culture as a whole, but anti-war songs were certainly not the best sellers of the time. In fact the only song to reach anthem-like influence in anti-war circles—but in no way as influential as "We Shall Overcome" for the Civil Rights Movement—was John Lennon’s "Give Peace a Chance," which was sung by half a million demonstrators at the Vietnam Moratorium Day protest in Washington, DC, in October 1969.

Recorded at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal as part of Lennon and Yoko Ono’s "bed-in-for-peace," the song is essentially a one-liner, "All we are saying, is give peace a chance," chanted over and over. At the time Lennon claimed that he was bored with hearing "We Shall Overcome" all the time, and offered his simple ditty as an alternative. "Our job is to write for the people now ," he said. "So the songs that they go and sing on their buses are not just love songs." But the fact remains, the musicians who wrote the anti-war music that became an organic part of political protest were not themselves riding on those buses with "the people." [8]

Though white male rockers received most of the attention, both in the streets and on stage, it is important to remember that the anti-war music of the Vietnam era was much wider and more diverse than people now recall. There were other tempos and temperaments on display across barriers of ethnicity and gender, perhaps a love song to a soldier far away, or a meditation on a domestic tragedy when a husband returned a hurt and tormented man, as in the case of country singer Arlene Harden’s bitter "Congratulations."

African Americans contributed much of this sometimes forgotten anti-war music. Martha Reeves and the Vandellas released "I Should Be Proud" in 1970, the first anti-war song from the Motown label. It was followed a few months later by "War," recorded first by the Temptations (not released as a single for fear of conservative backlash) and then rerecorded by Edwin Starr. With its simple but memorable refrain—"War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!"—the song went to number one on the Billboard Pop Singles chart. More tender and soulful was Marvin Gaye’s plea for peace and love in "What’s Going On," where "war is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate." "In 1969 or 1970," Gaye said, "I began to re-evaluate my whole concept of what I wanted my music to say. I was very much affected by letters my brother was sending me from Vietnam, as well as the social situation here at home. I realized that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people. I wanted them to take a look at what was happening in the world." [9] For a brief moment during the years of the war, millions of young people, and a few oldsters, believed that political music could help make a social revolution, remake a country, and stop a war. As it turned out music did not accomplish these things. What anti-war music did do, as all protest music has done throughout American history, was to raise spirits while doing battle, help define the identities of activists, and turn passive consumption into an active, vibrant, and sometimes liberating culture.

[1] James Baldwin, "Fifth Avenue Uptown: A Letter from Harlem," in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 61.

[2] Bob Dylan, "Masters of War," The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (Columbia Records, 1963).

[3]  "The Rolling Stone Interview with John Fogerty," Rolling Stone , February 21, 1970.

[4] Joe McDonald, "I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag," Country Joe McDonald and the Fish, Rag Baby: Songs of Opposition , EP (1965) and I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag , Studio album (Vanguard, 1967).

[5] Neil Young, "Ohio," Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, single (Atlantic, 1970).

[6] Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, rev. ed. (New York: Bantam, 1993), 287.

[7] George Lipsitz, "Who’ll Stop the Rain? Youth Culture, Rock ’n’ Roll, and Social Crises," in David Farber, ed., The Sixties: From Memory to History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 211.

[8] Jann S. Wenner, Lennon Remembers: New Edition (London and New York: Verso, 2000; orig. 1971), 93.

[9] "Marvin Gaye: ‘What’s Goin’ On’" in "500 Greatest Albums of All Time," Rolling Stone online: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-20120531/marvin-gaye-whats-going-on-19691231 . Accessed July 7, 2012.

Kerry Candaele  has produced and directed several documentary films, including  Iraq for Sale . He also collaborated with his brother Kelly on the documentary  A League of Their Own,  about his mother’s experience in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), which was later turned into a blockbuster movie. He is co-author of  Bound for Glory: From the Great Migration to the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1930  (1996) and  Journeys with Beethoven: Following the Ninth, and Beyond  (2012).

Recommended Resources

Kerry Candaele recommends the following resources for more information:

Flacks, Richard, and Rob Rosenthal.  Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements.  Boulder CO: Paradigm, 2011.

Gitlin, Todd.  The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage . Toronto and New York: Bantam Books, 1987.

Isserman, Maurice and Michael Kazin.  America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s . New York: Oxford, 2000.

Lipsitz, George. "Who’ll Stop the Rain? Youth Culture, Rock ’n’ Roll, and Social Crises." In David Farber, ed.,  The Sixties: From Memory to History.  New York: Oxford, 1994.

Lynskey, Dorian.  33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holliday to Green Day . New York: Ecco, 2011.

Miller, James.  Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll . New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.

Next Stop  Is  Vietnam: The War on Record 1961 – 2008  (Bear Family). This boxed set tells its story of the Vietnam War through 14 CDs of music and newscast commentary plus a 300-page book. The nearly half-century time frame includes over 270 artists and 300 songs.

Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music , the 25th Anniversary Collection  (DVD). New York: Atlantic, 1994.

Anti-war music website:  http://www.jwsrockgarden.com/jw02vvaw.htm

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Protest Song: “Eve of Destruction” by PF Sloan Essay

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“Eve of Destruction” by P.F. Sloan is an iconic piece which describes an epoch. It was written in 1965 when the USA endured really hard times. In fact, the song is a response to the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam. Notably, it was written by a nineteen-year-old boy who had graduated from school only a year before.

The song is the general attitude of young Americans towards the conflict in Vietnam. Americans did not want any wars or violence. It is also necessary to note that the American society was also torn by a conflict as the tension between African Americans and white Americans was at its peak (Benarde 90).

Caribbean Missile Conflict also made people anxious. The fear of atomic war and the horrors of “red” countries made people think of destruction and decay. Besides, there was a lot of violence within the boundaries of the country as young people were shooting in their school and killed their peers. The song is a reflection on these constraints.

The music was composed in June-July 1965, during the conflict when the American society was torn into two camps (Perone 14). The majority of Americans did not want the war, but there were some who still tried to justify the war in Vietnam. It is necessary to note that American troops only started landing on the territory of Vietnam but many foresaw that the war would take many American lives.

Sloan was against the war and any violence. He was also against the hypocrisy in the American society. He did not want to escalate the conflict. On the contrary, he wanted to make people stop killing each other. Remarkably, the song reached its intended audience as it became number one in 1965 in the USA (Benarde 90).

All Americans were inspired by the song and it became a kind of an anthem to create a better life and a more righteous American society. Nonetheless, it did not have a direct effect on the development of the conflict as it did not stop the war. However, it contributed greatly to development of public opinion on the matter.

The song became popular when Barry McGuire sang it in summer 1965. It was a great success due to the piece itself and due to the inspirational performance of the singer. The lyrics discuss wrongs of the American society. The Vietnam War and the threat from ‘red’ countries are the core elements of the song.

Sloan wrote, “Think of all the hate in Red China” and this line reveals Americans’ fears of those times (quoted in Benarde 90). It is possible to note that the lyrics reveal that the writer of the song is on the side of the American society. However, the song is also a way to help Americans see their vices and become a better society.

The piece pertains to folk rock. Thus, the texture of the piece is homophonic. The instruments used are typical for folk rock. Thus, a guitar, drums and harmonica are used. The melody is conjunct. This type of melody may have contributed to the piece’s popularity. The song is performed in quite slow tempo.

These means make the song inspirational as every musical peculiarity stresses the idea of the song. Thus, the melody is quite simple and very catchy. The words are full of meaning. People listened to and sang the song as it was easy to perform and it revealed a particular viewpoint.

Works Cited

Benarde, Scott R. Stars of David: Rock ’n’ Roll’s Jewish Stories . Lebanon, NH: UPNE, 2003. Print.

Perone, James E. Music of the Counterculture Era . Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2018, December 11). Protest Song: "Eve of Destruction" by PF Sloan. https://ivypanda.com/essays/eve-of-destruction/

"Protest Song: "Eve of Destruction" by PF Sloan." IvyPanda , 11 Dec. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/eve-of-destruction/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Protest Song: "Eve of Destruction" by PF Sloan'. 11 December.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Protest Song: "Eve of Destruction" by PF Sloan." December 11, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/eve-of-destruction/.

1. IvyPanda . "Protest Song: "Eve of Destruction" by PF Sloan." December 11, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/eve-of-destruction/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Protest Song: "Eve of Destruction" by PF Sloan." December 11, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/eve-of-destruction/.

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Collection Civil Rights History Project

Music in the civil rights movement.

African American spirituals, gospel, and folk music all played an important role in the Civil Rights Movement. Singers and musicians collaborated with ethnomusicologists and song collectors to disseminate songs to activists, both at large meetings and through publications. They sang these songs for multiple purposes: to motivate them through long marches, for psychological strength against harassment and brutality, and sometimes to simply pass the time when waiting for something to happen.

In their interview with the Civil Rights History Project, folksingers Guy and Candie Carawan sing the songs "Tree of Life," "Eyes on the Prize," and "We Shall Overcome." The Carawans worked at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where activists from around the country came to be trained in nonviolent philosophy and learned the songs of the movement. She explains, “There were songs for every mood.  You know, there were the very jubilant songs.  There were the very sad songs when someone was killed.  You know, there were the songs you used at parties.  There was all the humor where you picked fun at people, the satire.”

Activist and folk singer Pete Seeger also remembers how important music was to the Civil Rights Movement in his interview. He performed many concerts to raise money for civil rights organizations, and helped spread the song “We Shall Overcome” to civil rights workers  at the Highlander Folk School. In 1964 he came to Jackson, Mississippi, to support the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. While he was there, three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney went missing. He remembers, “I was in singing to about two hundred people in a church when they gave me a piece of paper that said, ‘They’ve found the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney.’  And I made this announcement.  There was no shouting.  There was no anger.  I saw lips moving in prayer.  And I think I sang this song that Fred Hellerman made up, ‘O healing river, send down your waters.  Send down your waters upon this land’ … It’s a beautiful song.”

Jamila Jones grew up in Alabama and sang professionally as a teenager with the Montgomery Gospel Trio and the Harambee Singers. In 1958, she came to the Highlander Folk School for nonviolent activist training. As Jones recalls in her interview, Highlander was raided by the police, who shut off all the lights in the building. She found the strength to sing out into the darkness, adding a new verse, “We are not afraid,” to the song, “We Shall Overcome.” Jones explains, “And we got louder and louder with singing that verse, until one of the policemen came and he said to me, “If you have to sing,” and he was actually shaking, “do you have to sing so loud?”  And I could not believe it.  Here these people had all the guns, the billy clubs, the power, we thought. And he was asking me, with a shake, if I would not sing so loud.  And it was that time that I really understood the power of our music.”

For more about music in the Civil Rights Movement, read these two Folklife Today blog posts on “Tracing the Long Journey of “We Shall Overcome” and “Photographs of the Southern Freedom Movement in the Alan Lomax Collection.”

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On this program , we look at Puerto Rican protest songs over the past two centuries; including Paracumbé on subversive bomba dances from the time of slavery, Las Barrileras 8M, an all-women drumming group demanding an end to violence against women and a new plena from Hector Tito Matos about the death of George Floyd.

The past three years have been incredibly traumatic for Puerto Rico: Two hurricanes followed by slow recovery efforts led to the deaths of 3,057 on the island, a text message scandal mocking women’s rights that eventually brought down a governor, the deaths of more unarmed Black men, women and children across the United States, and of course, the coronavirus pandemic. Grammy-nominated plenero Hector Tito Matos joins us from Cabo Rojo to discuss the history of political plena, and shares his new song dedicated to George Floyd: “The Death of Another Black Man.”

For Black Puerto Ricans, like their brothers and sisters in the mainland of the United States, marching against injustice can be extremely dangerous. Imagine the conversation a Black mother has to have with her young daughters who want to take part in marches to demand equal rights. That’s what Nelie Lebron-Robles, lead singer of the bomba group Paracumbé, had to do when her children wanted to join the protests. “The government alerted and used the military branch of the police to be present at the protests. There was tear gas and rubber bullets. We knew that these policemen who were military trained and didn’t have any type of proper identification. And they are trained to arrest civilians in a very violent way, which include when they arrest women, touching their parts in inappropriate ways. They just throw them on the floor and handcuff them and grab different parts of their bodies as an excuse. It’s a way of humiliating the person who is arrested. It is not only done with women but also with LGBT+ communities.”

Nelie Lebron-Robles is a professor at Puerto Rican Conservatory of Music, and together with ethnomusicologist Emanuel Dufrasne-González (University of Puerto Rico), leads the group Paracumbé (pictured above), which is dedicated to researching and performing bomba music, a subversive Afro-Puerto Rican form that dates back centuries. “Bomba dances were used by enslaved people to conspire uprisings and freedom movements,” explains professor Lebron-Robles from her home in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 1826, new restrictions were passed forbidding slaves from one plantation to attend dances at neighboring plantations. Once this ban came into effect, it meant that families were separated. Members of one family of slaves were often sold to other plantation owners, and these dances were among the few opportunities where family members could briefly reunite. “These dances were opportunities where families could see each other, but these were often used for other things besides recreation,” adds Lebron-Robles.

This history is described in the book, Esclavos Rebeldes (Rebel Slaves) by Guillermo Baralt. Professor Emanuel Dufrasne-Gonzalez, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Puerto Rico explains: “The owners of the haciendas or the foremen would be distracted by the dance. Some slaves would go apart and hide and conspire to escape and rebel. That’s how bomba dances were associated with slave rebellions.”

Nelie Lebron-Robles and Emaunuel Dufrasne-Gonzalez have been traveling to rural parts of Puerto Rico for nearly four decades to learn music from the island’s elders and to gather repertoire for Paracumbé. During today’s program, we’ll hear their latest work, “La Maquinita.” Paracumbé’s nine-member ensemble recorded their parts remotely on their phones during the pandemic lockdown. It was originally written just after the United States invaded Puerto Rico in 1898, and the song mocked American plantation owners who didn’t understand Spanish.

For Lebron-Robles, singing bomba is extremely personal. It’s a part of a family tradition that dates back to the time of slavery. Nelie Lebron-Robels was actually trained as an opera singer, but has devoted her career to resurrecting Puerto Rican folkloric music. “My great-grandmother, Maria Leon, was born into slavery. She was a child when slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873,” Lebron-Robles tells me. “When my grandmother, Olimpia De Leon Cora, was a child, my great-grandmother would see the bomba dances in her community… and she’d associate it with negative things, like slavery and ignorance, things that were not looked on as positively in her time.” But one of the things that children do extremely well is to remember everything that they see and hear, especially music, and Nelie Lebron-Robles’ grandmother was no exception, and later passed these songs down to younger generations of her family. Eventually, public perception of bomba in Puerto Rico changed, and it became part of Black pride. “Over time, from the end of the ‘90s until now, bomba has transformed from something negative, an ignorant part of society into something to be proud of, part of our national identity. Up to that time, national identity was basically composed of our Spanish/Latin American and Taino cultural heritage. That third [African] part of our identity as a people was not looked upon as something that you should be proud of,” Lebon-Robles explains. “But it’s this other part of our identity that is important, they used to call it “ la tercera raiz, ” the third root, and I think from then on, Puerto Rico started to understand that we cannot be who we are if we don’t recognize and acknowledge our Blackness, our negritude, and so it has started to transform something, especially in the younger generation, to be something very proud of… Black, without it being insulting.”

Another group that Lebron-Robles performs with is Las Barrileras 8M. Their name, “Barrileras” means women who play barrel drums and 8M, the Eighth of March, refers to International Women’s Day. The group has been part of huge protests in Puerto Rico about the horrific rise in violence against women on the island. “Las Barrileras are female drummers, which is non-traditional,” she explains. “Because in traditional bomba, men play the drums and women sing and dance, as it was not seen as something a woman would do, because drumming it was not womanly… It had to do with the moral standards of the times. A proper girl would not open her legs, and usually in order to drum, you have to put the drum between your legs... For many years, a women would not play bomba drums, but now we wear pants, so we can do drumming and it is not seen as more masculine, women drumming has become something of a mainstream staple too.”

In September 2017, Hurricane Maria, a category five storm with 280 km/hour winds, caused mass destruction across the Caribbean. On September 20th, it made landfall on the island of Puerto Rico. The storm caused power outages that lasted for months, led to a lack of clean drinking water, limited phone service and damaged 90 percent of the island’s homes. The hurricane led to the death of 3,057. The total includes those who died from winds and flooding as well as a damaged infrastructure that prevented the sick and injured from receiving medical care in the immediate aftermath of the storm. On this program, we’ll hear from Paracumbé’s Lebon-Robles about living through the terrifying hurricane, and how artists immediately sprung into action, helping those in need and performing concerts around the island to provide healing. One such group was the four-time Grammy-nominated ensemble, Plena Libre, which did a series of shows for Puerto Ricans who lost their homes and all their belongings in the storm, and suddenly felt like refugees in their own country. Their bassist and founder, Gary Nuñez , remembers: “These are people who have lost everything, their houses, furniture, everything. So the whole sad cloud was everywhere the refugees are. It took us a while to get the joy going. We need joy, we need music… It becomes a way of lifting your spirit. This is just a moment, and we’ll be able to overcome.” Tragically, three years later, the island hasn’t fully recovered, as approximately 2,000 still have no roofs on their homes, and are protected from the elements only by blue tarps.

A text-message scandal in 2019 about the slow recovery efforts caused massive protests across Puerto Rico. Paracumbé’s Nelie Lebron-Robles elaborates, “There was this private chat between the governor and his posse. They spoke in very demeaning way against women… and they would speak about how good it was that people had died because it meant more money from the U.S. government.” Over a million took to the streets, including Ricky Martin and Lin Manuel Miranda, leading to the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosello, but those protests had their origins back in 2017 with marches for women’s rights.

“Throughout the time there have been many groups that have protested injustices on the island,” explains Lebron-Robles. “But I think the most important movement in the last five years or so is Colectiva Feminista en Construccion (Women’s Collective Under Construction) . It was founded in 2017, calling for women from all walks of life to come together to work together for women’s rights and fight injustices against women and other minorities’ rights. About 2,000 women came to this call, as a result, they started protesting against the governor, Ricardo Rosello, who didn’t respond to their demands. So they started protesting in front of his house in Old San Juan, and this protest got bigger and bigger. As a result, a group of women musicians or pleneras was founded called Plena Combativa (combative plena). They wrote lyrics that denounced what injustices were being done against all groups in society… that eventually led to the outing of Ricardo Rosello as our governor in the summer of 2019.”

These recent protest songs are part of the plena’s long history as a newspaper. “Plena has very different manifestations,” explains Hector Tito Matos, one of the leading exponents of the genre. “You have to understand that plena practitioners are the same as any other profession. There are conservative pleneros, centrist pleneros, lefty pleneros—you have to understand that I’m personally inclined for the pro-independence of Puerto Rico, so some of the stuff you’re going to listen to is going to be different from other pleneros who might sing differently on other topics. But in the case of Black Lives Matter, in the case of Donald Trump, or singing about Hurricane Maria or the taking out of governor Rosello in the summer of 2019, in those movements, there was total unity, I saw practitioners of stuff I saw my entire life who normally don’t coincide with my political ideas, but they were right on my side marching.”

Despite all of these traumas, singer Nelie Lebron-Robles remains optimistic, and expresses those feelings the song, “Sueño, Sueño” (Dreams, Dreams). “Sueño, Sueño" does not necessarily speak about dreams that we want to fulfill, but basically going to sleep, and waking up. It refers to what happens when dawn comes and little birdies sing, and people are waking up. The townsfolk are waking up. If you want to give it a double meaning, it refers to Puerto Ricans waking up after this horrible dream we’ve been living over the past 120 years of colonialism, and hopefully all these things we’ve been learning about being resilient. We know more what resilience is than any other country in the world. We’ve been under attack from nature and bad governments and so many things since 2017, and from before, but 2017 made us more aware. Here we are. One nation with a very distinct Latin American identity, very proud of who we are. We’ve discovered we can do anything that we propose ourselves to do.”

Dan Rosenberg is a journalist and music producer based in Toronto, Canada. In recent years, he has produced Yiddish Glory’s The Lost Songs of World War II , numerous compilations for the Rough Guide to World Music series, as well as radio reports for Afropop Worldwide, Café International and Toronto’s ClassicalFM .

• Dan Rosenberg
• Las Barrileras 8M
• Hector Tito Matos
• Plena Libre
• United States
• Puerto Rico

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An Essay I Wrote For English About The Protest Song 'War Pigs'

(This was an essay I wrote earlier this year for an English assignment, where we had to analyze protest songs and prove their purpose and relation to the protest, focusing on the techniques used to do this. I'm rather proud of it, and got a rather high grade for it (92%), but I figured I'd post it here and see if you like it. Thank you.)

'WAR PIGS’ - THE BIG SATAN

Wars have always been a part of human nature and life, and since their inception there have been protests against them, and there have been no other protest types more widely received or acclaimed as music; people singing out against the injustice of the world. And there have been few songs that have resonated throughout the world as the seven minute anti-war epic, ‘War Pigs’ from the British black metal band ‘Black Sabbath’. In six verses, main lyricist and bassist Geezer Butler, calls attention to not just the Vietnam War, but war as a whole, and those who make it and profit from it, with emotion language and symbolism, unwavering attacks against the generals and politicians, and a call to those listening and fighting to see this black ritual for what it is. The video, while unofficial, emphasises these ideas, creating scenes with emotion clear in the faces of the characters, and the music of the song, simple and powerful, creates a sound now synonymous with Vietnam, with machine gun drums and droning guitars. All of these elements amalgamate to create a final product, a calling to not just action but realisation that, if war is to be called anything, quote Geezer Butler, “war is the big Satan”.

At the time it was written, between April and September of 1970 depending on sources, just a bit after the proper height of the Vietnam War in 1968, Britain had ended military conscription a decade early in 1960, but again, the Vietnam War was still burning. As such, Geezer Butler and many other men, young and old, were “dreading being called up” to fight, already creating a strong anti-war, or at least anti-conscription, sentiment brewing in the band and the nation at large, with protests in the street not just against the Vietnam War itself but of Britain’s possible involvement in it. There are conflicting accounts though from frontman Ozzy Osbourne which say that they "knew nothing about Vietnam. It's just an anti-war song,” which does still make sense, but could just be attributed to Osbourne’s excessive drug use and general lack of cohesion. Either way, the group reportedly wrote the song in Zurich after one of their jam sessions when they were still only playing to bars and small audiences, which was also the origin of the song’s main guitar riff. The original lyrics created for the song focused more on the satanic ritualisation of war, and as such it was denied by the record label, as was the original name of ‘Walpurgis’, the name of the highest and most important date on the satanic calendar. After changing the lyrics and the name to ‘War Pigs’, the band was allowed to include it on the second album ‘Paranoid’, which they also were trying to name ‘Walpurgis’ or ‘War Pigs’ originally, but were again denied for it’s satanic sound. And so it was released into a violent and disrupted Britain, and soon carried over to a warring America, giving those fighting and protesting in both camps an opportunity to see war in a new, more violent, more realistic light. And while the band hasn’t given too many other details as to the origin of the song, and some are contradictory to others, the time it was released only further bolstered its importance.

Throughout the song’s six verses, Butler and the band incorporate many different persuasive techniques in the lyrics, including emotive language, symbolism, and attack. The last of these, attack, is when a writer, or in this case lyricist or band, directly or even rhetorically strikes at an opponent’s argument and ideas, or just the opponent themself. This can be found in the first two lines of the song, comparing “generals gathered in their masses [to] witches at black masses”. The technique is further utilized in verse 3, most notably in lines 10 and 12, this time rhetorically asking “They only started the war/Why should they go out to fight?”. The lyrics evoke in the listener outrage, as they see what these so-called leaders are doing, and as so are in agreement with ‘Black Sabbath’. The next technique is emotive language, a technique used to evoke and provoke, as the name implies, emotion within the listener and reader, usually feelings of anger. Lines 1 and 2, and verse 2 also use emotive language, describing how “the war machine keeps turning”, “poisoning their brainwashed minds” and leaving “the bodies burning” in its wake, and again in almost all of verse 6, which is riddled with biblical imagery, all in an attempt to inspire a feeling of awe and anger in the listener; using strong and almost vulgar language to show the listeners ‘Black Sabbath’s opinion on war. Furthermore, the finna technique, symbolism, presents an object or person as another to show a message, is employed in lines 1 and 2 again, likening generals to witches, but verse 6 is where this technique comes into its full glory, with the biblical imagery in reference to war and death and powers of heaven and hell; The last line of the song shows “Satan laughing [and] spreading his wings”, maliciously rejoicing in his creation; The perfect war machine. On earth, the war pigs helm his campaign, killing and destroying, with greed and pride, in a massive satanic ritual; And then in death, he casts them into his fires and grins with glee at their punishment for their actions; Suffering for all; The perfect war machine. This is the image created by ‘Black Sabbath’, incredibly striking and maddening for readers and listeners. All of these techniques blend and unite to create a feeling of awesome anger in the audience towards the Vietnam War and war as a whole and those who drive it.

When examining the music video for the song, though there isn’t any official video recorded or filmed by neither the band nor the record label, the closest one we have was created by Gabrielle Marie and released on YouTube in 2014, more than forty years after the song’s release, but like the song it contains many different persuasive and creative techniques and elements, including close-ups and facial expressions, mise en scene and positions and angles, and symbolism again. The first of these, close-ups and expressions, used to zoom in and highlight the emotions of the artists and characters, can first be seen at 1:10 and 1:20, first with the face of the War Pig, who displays a face of coldness and carelessness, gazing down on the Girl, who has an expression of hatred and sadness on her face, with dirt and tears in her eyes, signifying their power dynamic and who is the victim of who’s war in this scene, making the audience empathize with the Girl, while fearing and hating the War Pig. This technique is again utilized at 2:35 and 2:30, with the Girl and the Worker, who share a moment of genuine sincerity and kindness, making the audience again empathize with both. At 3:15 we again see the War Pig, and though we cannot see his face, we can still feel the cold, machine-like ruthlessness coming off of him. This is immediately followed by another close-up of the Worker, showing his panicking realization of what is going on around him. All of these shots work to not only make clear the emotions and power dynamics of the scenes, but also to get the audience to empathize with or hate the characters. The next technique utilized comes in the construction of everything else with the scene, or rather the shot, the mise en scene and angles. The most powerful use of this comes at 7:22, which sees the Girl standing outside of the War Pigs factory building. The way this shot is composed shows the Girl standing taller and larger against the soldiers along the bottom of the screen, putting her in a position of power as opposed to how she was shown through down-tilted camera angles previously, which showed her weakness and powerlessness. This shows the audience the newest change in power, showing a triumphant march onto the factory, and though it is hinted that the Girl is killed by the soldiers with her red cloth floating away and disappearing before the factory, it only makes her a martyr, delivering a message just as powerful. Which leads into the symbolism in the video, a technique that takes an object or colour or something and attributes a new meaning to it, and this can clearly be seen by the use of the Girl’s red cloth, utilized throughout the entire video. It first begins with the Girl taking the cloth off of presumably her mother’s corpse, at 0:57, and turns to look up at the War Pig with contempt, already hinting at the meaning of the red cloth. The Girl then runs away from the factory, at 1:45, to a bridge overlooking the workers, who she throws the red cloth down to, and is then picked up by the Worker, who will soon be realizing the war machine he is in, at 3:22. The most important final use of the red cloth is at the end, at 7:22 again, when the Girl lets it go before presumably being killed by the soldiers outside the factory, letting it float out into the night sky for someone else to find. If it hasn’t been made clear enough, the red cloth represents the truth. It’s first introduced as the Girl’s mother is killed, showing her the world she lives in and who runs it; The War Pig. She then gives it to the Worker, who soon after finally realizes and sees the war-focused industrial society he lives in. And again, at the end when the Girl releases the red cloth, the truth, out into the world. All of this serves to give the audience a visual means of understanding the song, of showing people what was is and who drives it. All in all, while the ‘Black Sabbath’ never made a music video of their own for their song, the use of emotion and expression, as well as composition and symbolism, wouldn’t be unwelcomed by the band.

One of the most iconic parts of ‘War Pigs’, and Vietnam protest songs as a whole, is the sound. The slow and powerful metal mixing with the hard rock riffs and speed, accomplished with Tony Iommi’s guitar, Bill Ward’s drums, and Ozzy Osbourne’s vocals, as well as other influences from producers, which all create the angry and inciteful sound of war. Firstly come Bill Ward’s drums, possibly the most iconic part of the song by far, which drive the tempo of the song, droning and melancholy, with the quiet hissing of the hi-hats intercut by the two pounding drum beats found in between lyrics in the first and last two verses, giving a finality and power to them, forcing the audience to stand in awe and shock, and with drum fills sounding like mortar bombs and rifle fire in the solos and verses 3 and 4, they must also stand in fear, as the drums grow louder through the song. Next comes Tony Iommi’s just as famous guitar, probably the loudest part, screeching and crunching, playing along with the drums in the double beats during verses 1, 2, 5, and 6, emphasising the feeling of war with solos sounding not unakin to an air-raid siren, which was indeed added to song at the beginning by producer Rodger Bain, immersing the audience into the song and the fear of war, again, with loud and sudden strikings of the guitar. And finally there are Ozzy Osbourne magnificently untamed vocals, rising with rage and anguish with every line during the first and last verses, again inspiring a feeling of awe in the audience, and during verses 3 and 4 crying out in a sarcastic tone to the politicians “hiding themselves away”, riling up the audience. ‘War Pigs’ has driven metal, black and thrash alike, for years, with a droning drum tempo and sudden guitar riffs, bolstering the lyrics while they did it.

While ‘Black Sabbath’ has dabbled in protests and war since this song, ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ and ‘Hand of Doom’ for instance, none have compared to the majesty of ‘War Pigs’. In just under 8 minutes, with 6 verses, and four bands members, ‘Black Sabbath’ crafts a deafening outcry against war and the satanic forces that run them. And for this reason it was so effective, with lyrics containing unyielding attacks and biblical imagery, with a music video showcasing beautiful imagery in expressions and composition to convey the power dynamics of war, and music so iconic that it has paved the way for all of metal today, and a calling all audiences to rise into furious rebellion, a rage-filled harmony, to show the listener and the reader and the watcher not just what the Vietnam War was, but what war as a whole is , just what war does , just who war is: “War is the big Satan”.

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