Television
Some of the great US protest songs defined their eras, and they are now the subject of a documentary series.
In the great scheme of things, New Zealand protest songs are small beer compared with the likes of We Shall Overcome or This Land Is Your Land.
Nevertheless, they say something about the times we lived in, from students in the 1930s singing songs about the Spanish Civil War to Herbs’ French Letter, which spent 11 weeks on the charts in 1982.
Others include John Hanlon’s Damn the Dam, Herbs’ Nuclear Waste, Tim Finn’s Parihaka, Moana and the Moahunters’ A.E.I.O.U., and There Is No Depression in New Zealand by Blam Blam Blam. Ska band the Newmatics skanked to the Riot Squad in 1981 and a supergroup assembled in 1985 to sing the anti-Springbok tour song Don’t Go.
In the US, Nina Simone was “devastated and angry” when she sang Why? (The King of Love is Dead) following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. “It was as though a Mack truck had been driven through our hearts,” says her brother, Sam Waymon, in the first episode of new documentary series Soundtracks: Songs That Defined History (Prime, Friday, 8.30pm).
Four years earlier, Simone’s anger at the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, had been crystallised in her anguished cri de coeur Mississippi Goddam.
The eight-part CNN series spans American history from the civil rights era to Lady Gaga and the LGBT experience. There is a brief detour in the late 1980s to look at the music that accompanied the opening of the Iron Curtain and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In the first episode, civil rights protesters march to We Shall Overcome, a version of an old spiritual; Peter, Paul and Mary sing If I Had a Hammer; and Aretha Franklin sings People Get Ready. As the movement became more militant, the soundtrack changed to
James Brown’s Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud.
Fast-forward to 1981, and Stevie Wonder has mounted a campaign for a national holiday in Martin Luther King’s name – his song Happy Birthday helps make it a reality.
They’re songs that define not only their eras, but also people’s lives: in 1989, Public Enemy rap Fight the Power; in 2008, Barack Obama quotes Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come in his electionnight speech. In 2015, Kendrick Lamar’s Alright, caught the mood of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Other episodes cover September 11, the Vietnam War, Hurricane Katrina, the Space Race and the Battle of the Sexes.