Protest songs blowin’ in the wind again
Pop music is once more getting mad — it’s about time
This week, Manchester indie band The 1975 released the opening track (also The 1975) from its forthcoming album, and it features a speech from Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg.
It’s the most terrifying spoken-word sample used in a pop song since Frankie Goes to Hollywood appropriated actor Patrick Allen’s voice for their 1984 hit, Two Tribes, about nuclear war.
That song came at the fagend of a golden period for protest songs in the pop mainstream; 35 years on, we may be at the start of a similar pop resurgence.
This week, the Mercury Prize shortlist featured the rappers Dave, who won an Ivor Novello award for a song attacking Theresa May, and slowthai, who rails against Brexit. In America, bubblegum pop queen Katy Perry has
collaborated with Skip Marley (grandson of Bob) on anticonformity hit Chained to the Rhythm.
Protest songs have always been with us, of course.
The earliest British example known to scholars is a couplet that seems to have been a popular chant during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381: “When Adam delved and Eve span/ Who was then the gentleman?”
Every man who had fought in World War I would have known the words to I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier.
In America, masterworks such as Billie Holiday’s diatribe against the lynching of African-Americans, Strange Fruit (“Black bodies swingin’ in the southern breeze/ Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees”), and Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land showed that protest songs could be hits.
In the 60s Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie’s most successful disciple, caught and exacerbated a new antiauthoritarian mood as America became bogged down in scandals and wars. The Times They Are A-Changin’ is thrillingly transgressive or intolerably bossy depending on your viewpoint, as Dylan ticks off America’s “mothers and fathers”.
By 1970 every musician seemed to be protesting about something, their themes ranging from the political, the pacifist to the environmental. Older performers attempted to establish their artistic maturity with protest songs (see John Lennon).
The great Billy Bragg continues gallantly to voice dissent through music, but I expect he would admit it is dispiriting nobody younger has usurped his crown as Britain’s foremost protest singer in 35 years.
So if mainstream pop is becoming more political, it’s a welcome development.