What Happened to The Protest Anthem?
MUSE MAGAZINE
By Ben Dinsdale
32
A few weeks ago, my bandmates and I had our first encounter with a “real person” from the music industry. The manager had come to one of our shows and liked what he saw, so he decided to schedule a meeting with us and discuss where we were going and how we planned to get there. As you could imagine, he asked questions about how we practice, what our writing process was, and how we book gigs; typical questions to get a feel for a band. The conversation then pivoted towards our social media presence—or lack therefore—and when recommending ways that we could get more people engaged on our platforms, he asked us why we weren’t “political”. “Every band is political nowadays; you have to have something to say.” As someone who has always appreciated political music and protest songs, I was a little taken aback. We didn’t even talk about politics with each other, wouldn’t it seem kind of disingenuous if we were promoting a message just to have a message rather
than we actually believing in it? There is a long and storied history of music’s role with politics. Although their history goes back hundreds of years, the earliest protest songs as we know them go back to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”. The genre came to the forefront in the 1960s with the anti-war movement and the emergence of great musical poets like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Bob Marley, and Pete Seeger. Songs like “Ohio”, “What’s Going On?”, “The Times They are A Changing”, and “Born in the USA” advanced the art form in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Bands such as Rage Against the Machine, Green Day, and Public Enemy continued to rail against that power that be in the early 2000s, but in a much more aggressive way than their predecessors, and without the same poetry and class. It seemed for a while that protest music had lost its place, with the pop charts being filled with boybands and bland pop artists.
