Songs of change from a new generation
Berklee student draws from family history for winning composition
Universal protest songs come out of personal stories. Lily Allen penned feminist anthem “Hard out Here” in response to the music industry’s absurd penchant for pitting female singers against one another. Bob Marley and Peter Tosh wrote “Get Up, Stand Up” after touring Haiti and seeing the country’s poverty.
For Berklee College of Music student Gayathri Karunakar Menon, her family history pushed her to write “Privilege to Dream.” As an Indian citizen whose parents have lived in Qatar for decades, Menon’s protest ballad meditates on the idea of home.
“I was raised in Qatar but I am still an Indian citizen because it is very hard to get citizenship in Qatar,” she said. “So about 80% of the population of Qatar are immigrants who aren’t citizens and don’t have equal rights. Then, I come to the U.S. as an international student, I don’t have the same rights here. The song is about my experiences as an immigrant back home and an immigrant here.”
A slow, simple ballad featuring Menon’s tender, wounded vocals over a hypnotic piano line, “Privilege to Dream” won the singersongwriter the top prize at Berklee’s 2020 Songs for Social Change Contest. Held annually for a decade, the contest attracted a global group of competitors this year hailing from Qatar, Australia, England, Hong Kong, India, Macedonia, Norway, Singapore and Spain, plus 16 U.S. states.
For Menon, a double major in contemporary writing and production and songwriting, “Privilege to Dream” represents a departure from her pop-leaning catalog of compositions. The melody and chords she had in her head for awhile but the lyrics poured out in one three-hour session.
“For the most part, I separate my politics from lyrics,” she said. “But this one I bared my soul. … And after I submitted it, I didn’t go back to it. I felt like I had closure with it. I didn’t really listen to it until I heard the contest results.”
She’s blunt and brave in her assessment of the world she sees, singing, “How do you call yourself the land of the free/When you make me hide my faith cause you disagree.”
Many of the lyrics detail her parents’ specific experiences. And yet whole verses could apply to the Black Lives Matter movement, the fight for rights of immigrants across Europe and America, the battle for the rights of indigenous people in dozens of countries.
“This is the power of music, this is what attracted me to music,” she said. “Once you write a song and you put it out, anyone has the power to interpret it the way that they want to, the power to make it their story.”
Menon says she’s going to spend some time getting back to writing pop and r&b. But in this climate, sadly, she may have to return to protest music sooner than she thinks.