Art before Politics: The New Generation of Protest Songs

December 26, 2007

Came across a 2004 Salon article in which some guy (Thomas Bartlett) complains about the lack of new era protest songs. His take is that despite widespread anti-Bush, anti-war sentiments, musicians have essentially dropped the ball when comes to giving a voice to the movement:

“Protest songs, I think it’s fair to say, are out of vogue, despite the perhaps unprecedented number of politically motivated concerts, tours and recordings over the last year. The desire to get George W. Bush out of office has mobilized musicians and artists like nothing else since, possibly, Vietnam . . . And yet, despite all this political involvement, few high-profile musicians are writing explicitly political songs. There have been flurries of excitement and press coverage each time a famous musician releases a protest song, precisely because it remains so unusual.”

Bartlett is correct that the model of the 60’s protest anthem is largely extinct. But his article goes further to suggest that “explicitly political songs,” of the sort that populated the 1960’s anti-war movement are artistically superior to the implicit variety. That’s where he’s wrong.

Those of us on the left now are far more informed than our predecessors. Explicitly political songs tend to sound redundant and terrible. Take the lyrics of the Xiu Xiu song that Bartlett holds up as the best specimen of the new protest genre: “Did you know you were going to shoot off the top of a four-year-old girl’s head, And look across her car-seat down into her skull, And see into her throat, And did you know that her dad would say to you ‘Please, sir, can I take her body home?’ Oh wait, you totally did know that that would happen, Cuz you’re a jock who was too stupid and too greedy and too unmotivated to do anything else but still be the biggest, and still do what other people tell you to do. You did it to still be a winner. You shot your grenade launcher into people’s windows and into the doors of people’s houses, but you wanted to shoot it into someone, just to watch them blow up.”

Painful. And wrong. The best new protest music, in contrast, tends to be allegorical, abstract, or just plain original. By avoiding pontification or oversimplification, these songs keep their artistic integrity, and thereby make a more powerful point. Some of the best examples:

TV on the Radio: Province
Arcade Fire: Neon Bible
Decemberists: Sons & Daughters
Radiohead: Idioteque
Bright Eyes: Old Soul Song (for a New World Order)
Flaming Lips: Fight Test
The Evens: You Won’t Feel a Thing (members of PAC505 were at this show)
Ozomatli: Ya Viene el Sol
The Books: That Right ain’t Shit
Liz Durrett: They Say It
Wolf Parade: Modern World

Protest songs are alive and well—hardly “out of vogue” as Bartlett suggests. The best ones are more subtle, and in the end better than their ancestors.

The problem is that the same character traits that draw the new left toward more sophisticated protest songs (cynicism, overstimulation, insularity) may be what have thus far prevented us from taking unified action. Back in the day, being on the left was simple and tangible: listen to (or sing) some protest song, smoke a J, go out and fuck shit up. Today’s left? We read a liberal expose on our laptop, grumble, maybe send a link.

Not a great model for getting things done, but at least we got a nuanced soundtrack.