fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Not Your Parents’ Protest Music

A new generation won’t “shut up and sing.”

At the Jan. 27 antiwar demonstration on the National Mall, aging boomers decked themselves in tie-dye and painted peace signs on their faces. Once again they were standing up against an unpopular president and an unpopular war. All that was needed to get the nostalgia up to maximum levels was some protest music, and the organizers obliged. From the dais, a young woman mustered her best let’s-get-this-party-started introduction: “You don’t have a protest until you hear from the Raging Grannies! Whoo!” A few old white women shuffled onto the stage, and without a backup band, without rhythm, and without mercy, began their aural assault. It consisted mostly of unfunny jokes about Bush set to the tune of “99 Bottles of Beer.” The wannabe hippies laughed politely—these were old ladies, after all—but most just waited for it to end.


The Vietnam-era got Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Beatles, and Woodstock. The ’60s swirled with socially conscious folk festivals and rock ’n’ roll rebellion. Young people cared enough about politics to shut down their campuses and riot at the ’68 Democratic Convention.


Nearly 40 years later, there is a new war to oppose. But where is the soundtrack for today’s opposition? “For years,” wrote Slate contributor Jody Rosen, “critics have complained about American pop music’s indifference to politics. In the 1990s, apathy seemed pervasive: Grunge rockers turned protest music inward, lashing out at those domestic oppressors, Mom and Dad; hip-hop’s erstwhile black nationalist firebrands started rapping about their jewelry.” Is the current generation just failing to live up to their parent’s legacy? Were the boomers true idealists? Is Generation X entirely self-absorbed and materialistic?


Robert Christgau, the rock critic who wrote for the Village Voice for over 30 years, isn’t persuaded. He has some unfortunate news for summer-of-love nostalgists: “I don’t think there was a lot of protest music in the ’60s and we have plenty now.” Christgau even argues that if you look for it, modern protest music is far superior and much more pointed than almost anything in the ’60s. Bob Dylan’s “‘Masters of War’ is a general song,” the dean of rock critics notes. “‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ is pretty ambiguous.” But Neil Young, given a new lease by college stations across the country, is quite specific in his goals. In a swirling sing-along, “Let’s Impeach the President” Young cries, “ “Let’s impeach the president for lying / And leading our country into war / Abusing all the power that we gave him / And shipping all our money out the door.”


And protest music isn’t just for aging rockers looking to be relevant again. The multi-platinum pop artist Pink has released “Dear Mr. President,” a plaintive song that takes direct shots at Bush, not only for the war, but also his opposition to gay marriage. On hip-hop stations, Jay-Z bashes Bush and the media for their treatment of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The gangsta rapper wonders how “The same idiots that can’t get water into a major American city in less than three days are trying to win a war.” “There was nothing like this [in the ’60s],” Christgau says.


This isn’t to say that ’60s music didn’t influence its listeners. In his 2003 book, How the Left Lost Teen Spirit, Danny Goldberg explains the power music held over his mind: “The carefully detailed political position papers that radical groups labored over so strenuously paled in comparison to the visceral power of songs that made manifest shared political beliefs, songs like Dylan’s ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game,’ about the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth,’ which described the ominous police presence at a protest march in Hollywood.” Protest music makes protest attractive. After all, most people aren’t converted to a new faith by reading its theologians; they are attracted to the hymns, the rites, and the miracles.


But Goldberg, a longtime music executive, doesn’t hold any illusions either: “The mythology about the ’60s is not completely accurate. … That’s something antiwar hippies and boomers need to acknowledge.” As many pundits remind us, the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq are many—intractable conflicts led by unpopular presidents, shifting rationales for war, administrations scrambling for political cover while soldiers were dying. Goldberg thinks the differences are also important in explaining youth attitudes and protest music. In Vietnam, he says, “You had nearly 20 times the amount of deaths, there was also a draft … so the number of young people affected both literally and potentially was so much larger.”


Despite these crucial differences, Goldberg says, “I’m very impressed with what’s happened in the past four years. … This generation of artists has been more vocal at an earlier time.” He points to Green Day as exemplars of the phenomenon. The pop-punk band’s 2004 platinum album “American Idiot” took the form of a rock opera, and while the words “Iraq” and “Bush” make no appearance in the lyric sheets or liner notes, the album is clearly the artists’ take on post-9/11 America. In the boot-stomping single “Holiday,” singer Billy Joe Armstrong parodies what he thinks he is hearing out of Congress: “Sieg Heil to the president Gasman / Bombs away is your punishment / Pulverize the Eiffel towers / Who criticize your government … and kill all the fags that don’t agree.” Although that part of the song was often edited out for mainstream radio, Green Day still got its message out. In the video for “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” a young couple promises never to leave each other, but as the song progresses, the girl confronts her boyfriend, asking, “How can you do this to me?” The next scenes reveal that he has enlisted in the Marine Corps and is being sent to war. The girlfriend cries as scenes of war play out to the end of the song. The album sold over six million copies and netted the group several Grammys.


Punk rockers, known for putting politics in their music, came together in 2004 for “Rock Against Bush” a two-CD set of songs lambasting the president. Organized by Fat Mike (Michael Burkett) of the band NOFX, it took its cues from the Rock Against Reagan campaign of the early 1980s. Fat Mike organized live concerts and encouraged punk music fans to register to vote at punkvoter.com.


People expect punk rockers to oppose the establishment—especially one claiming to be conservative. But it might surprise that some of the best and most explicit protest music comes from country and roots rock musicians. Christgau calls Todd Snider’s “You Got Away With It” “the most blistering anti-Bush song out there.” The song casts Bush as a reckless youth beating up hippies. Steve Earle has also put his progressive politics into his music: in a moving song entitled “Home to Houston,” he follows a truck driver who looks for good money driving in a convoy in Basra.


In 2006, James McMurtry, son of novelist Larry McMurtry, won American Music Awards for Song and Album of the Year with his protest music. The roots-rock singer-songwriter penned the working-class antiwar anthem “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore.” Its lyrics are covered in rust, sweat, and blood and evoke images of closed factories and working men reduced to stocking shirts at WalMart “just like the ones we made before / ’Cept this one came from Singapore.” Meanwhile, the rich men who sent their jobs away will “never know need… / Their kids won’t bleed in the damn little war.” Bernie Sanders, the progressive Vermont senator, chose “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore” as a campaign song in 2006. Merle Haggard expressed similar sentiments in his 2005 single, “America First.” The 70-year-old country-music legend sang, “Freedom is stuck in reverse / Let’s get out of Iraq and get back on the track / And let’s rebuild America first.”


Strangely, the musical act most identified with protest is the Dixie Chicks, whose identity was transformed by the war. While introducing an innocuous song about a soldier, lead singer Natalie Maines told a British audience, “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.” The group didn’t have a political song in its catalog at the time. Nevertheless, in the days of war fever, country- radio stations banned the traitorous Chicks. Morning news programs had particular fun broadcasting red-staters steamrolling collections of Chicks’ paraphernalia. In the end, the group marketed their comeback album to blue-staters and were rewarded with a Grammy. The new songs weren’t even all that political but instead drew thematically from the ordeal the group faced in the press and with their fans.


One reason punk and country have been the primary genres in protest music is their styles’ capacity to convey conviction and sincerity. For pop musicians wanting to express dissent in their music, there is an immovable obstacle in their audience: an attitude of ironic detachment. As Jody Rosen noted, popular music in the ’90s had no political mission. And to the disappointment of many boomer rock critics, pop music didn’t want an agenda. The piano-driven trio Ben Folds Five celebrated and criticized this indifference memorably in their song “Battle of Who Could Care Less.” Set to harmonized minor-key doo-doohing, the life of a common slacker—watching “Rockford Files” reruns and calling a friend for some pot—sounded glorious in its mid-tempo monotony. That the song was meant to be emblematic of the era was obvious from the lyrics: “I’ve got this great idea,” Folds sang, “fine pewter portraits of General Apathy and Major Boredom singing ‘Whatever and Ever, Amen.’” It’s the ultimate Sept. 10 mentality.


Christgau thinks this disengagement from politics, from any sort of conviction at all, derives from “a sense of impotence or fatalism. … [The youth have] an understandable skepticism that the engines of government and economy can be derailed.”


A little cynicism may be justified. Commercialism has been gobbling up the substance of distortion-pedal-driven protest music. John Lennon’s song “Revolution” was flipped on its head when Michael Jackson sold the rights to the song to Nike in the ’80s. Fogerty’s classic “Fortunate Son” was scrubbed of its political lyrics when it was used to sell Wrangler Jeans. Lenny Kravitz, who, for a decade, self-consciously modeled his look and sound on ’60s psychedelia, covered The Guess Who’s blistering antiwar song, “American Woman.” This was the song Pat Nixon expressly asked that the originators not play when they visited the White House. But in the late ’90s the references to “war machines” weren’t an attack on U.S. missions in the Balkans; the antiwar metaphor had been chucked for the most literal interpretation possible. The music video featured Heather Graham writhing seductively on a white bus. This was the “conquest of cool” that Thomas Frank talked about in his journal The Baffler. Everything in youth culture can be stripped of its political content, stamped with a corporate label and a price tag, and sold back.


Increasingly, successful artists are articulating this enervation and, in so doing, combating it. In his recent top-20 hit “Waiting on the World to Change,” John Mayer sings, “They say we stand for nothing and / there’s no way we ever could / now we see everything that’s going wrong / with the world and those who lead it / we just feel like we don’t have the means / to rise above and beat it.” Christgau says of Mayer’s song that it “expresses concisely this fatalism in a completely sympathetic and even courageous way.” Over a relaxed groove, the chorus repeats, “We keep waiting, waiting for the world to change.” Mayer lets listeners fill in the obvious rejoinder: let’s stop waiting and do something.


With so much more artistic dissent against the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, why does it seem to add up to less of a movement than its Vietnam-era counterpart? Goldberg says that it’s because this kind of music was new in the ’60s, and so much more was happening in proximity to the antiwar movement. “You had the civil-rights movement, most importantly, but also the beginning of the feminist movement, the judicial decisions removing limitations on speech, and all this was wrapped around the largest generation in American history,” he says. For Goldberg, the ’60s counterculture and antiwar movement also had a unifying figure: “There is no John Lennon today. He was the most famous face of the most famous band ever… and fearless about being political. … It would be like the five biggest stars of ‘American Idol’ did an antiwar record.”


While today’s protest music may never find an avatar like Lennon, the songs are still shaping the attitudes and prejudices of millions of listeners. Blasting Green Day through the white earbuds of an iPod may not match the experience of going to Woodstock, but they weren’t registering voters at Woodstock, as Fat Mike did in 2004. The variety and quality of the music, from the progressive-minded rockers to the middle American nationalism of roots-rock auger well, not just for our future politics, but for our stereos as well. 

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here