Jan 18: Protest songs - an introduction

Music has been used as a method of protest for decades... including the early songs of Woody Guthrie and others. Protests - whether against genocide or other issues are very much current news.

I will be mentioning some famous 'protest' singers and songs,  including the Scottish musician Dick Gaughan - another person who I have seen numerous times in folk clubs and pubs around South Yorkshire.

It's also worth mentioning the protests of musicians when politicians whose policies they don't agree with use their music. Or where the music is inappropriate to the protest but the protestors don't realise e.g. using Queen's music for anti-immigration protests...

I'm going to include a couple of my favourites here to start the process. 

There's a few rude words if that sort of thing bothers you in your music.

The first is quite a modern example, and comes from the 2020 album 'Blue Hearts' by Bob Mould - who I shall be featuring several times on this blog.

It is called 'American Crisis'.

In an interview he describes the genesis of the song, which came out around the time of the death of George Floyd.

There's a new album, and the song that we're talking about is called "American Crisis," and the genesis of the song is a little over two years ago. I was writing material for a previous album called Sunshine Rock, and it was supposed to be sort of a happy record, and "American Crisis" was supposed to be the second-to-last song on that album, right before "Western Sunset."

I thought it was a little heavy at the time. I didn't think it fit with the sort of uplifting motif of being in Berlin and everything that that record was, so you know, I tabled those words and music, and when Jon Wurster and Jason Narducy and my engineer Beau Sorenson, the four of us got together in early February in Chicago to make what is this album coming up, and this song, "American Crisis," like I said, it's been around for a while. It really inspired the way that I've been looking at things the past nine months.

I think it was probably in late summer of last year, when I was in Berlin, I just started playing a lot of guitar and thinking about that song, and thinking about things that we three in the band had talked about, wouldn't it be great to make like a real raw, sort of punk-rock record because, you know, at the end of the day, that's how I tell stories. So I had "American Crisis" and I started writing around that song.

But in doing so, in September of last year, I started reflecting back and the way things were in late 1983, who was I then? You know, I was this 22-year-old kid in Minnesota, and I was in this punk-rock band called Hüsker Dü, and we traveled around the country spreading our message to people.

Things back then were tough. I was a closeted, gay young man. I was sort of living in this new world for a couple years with this gay cancer called "grid" and then called AIDS, and you know, sort of having a hard time figuring out my sexuality and if there was a community for me to fit into and if I felt comfortable in that community, alongside a lot of televangelists and people on the right, you know, sort of the Reagan backers at the time, telling me I'm less than, telling me this is God's punishment for who I am and how I live.

All of that kind of feeling marginalized, of feeling less than, I was feeling that coming back during this current administration. It seems as if this person was chosen to be the spokesperson for a pretty far branch of evangelism.

That's what got the ball rolling, was all of those things. I don't know if any of that makes sense, but that's sort of where all the strings led, and then I sort of had this, you know, pond that became an ocean of ideas.

With "American Crisis," it's crazy because those words fell out two years ago, and they just fell out on the page and I looked at them and I'm like, "I'm not touching these." These are the words, just the way they are, and to jump up to today as we're talking and things are happening in real time, it's not something I'd wanted to see, I certainly don't take any joy in having foreseen the country going in this direction. I wish that this was not happening, but here we are.

The other was recorded by Aimee Mann back in 2017 when Donald Trump was starting his first stint as President. It's just as relevant now - in fact even more so. 

It is yet another classic Aimee Mann lyric and performance. Aimee Mann will also feature a lot in the year ahead.

Take a listen to 'Can't you tell?'

As always, what are the protest songs which spring to mind for you? Which are the most powerful? 

Please add them to the Google Form below and I'll come back to this and share some of them in a future post.