franciscovazbrasil: A History of Protest Songs, by Sean Wilentz

A History of Protest Songs, by Sean Wilentz

33 REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE

A History of Protest Songs, From Billie Holiday to Green Day

By Dorian Lynskey

Illustrated. 660 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. Paper, $19.99.

What is protest music? In April 1966, Bob Dylan arrived in Stockholm as part of his controversial “electric” world tour, and a local interviewer asked him why he was no longer writing and performing protest songs. Dylan, irritated and more than a little out of it, objected to the question’s premise and called one of his new rock ’n’ roll compositions the very height of protest music: “Very, very protesty. And, uh, one of the protestiest of all things I ever protested against in my protest years.”

Dylan made a habit of acting testy — or protesty — with journalists, and who was to say that the song he was talking about, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” wasn’t his protest against the left-wing folk purists who were hounding him for no longer writing songs like “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ”? Taken literally, being stoned — which, in Dylan’s song, everybody, and not just he, must get — is a biblical form of persecution that still exists today. Dylan was having sly fun with the reporter, but he was also reimagining what a protest song is and is not.

In “33 Revolutions Per Minute,” Dorian Lynskey works with a more traditional definition: a protest song, he writes, is a song that “addresses a political issue in a way which aligns itself with the underdog.” Specifically, Lynskey is concerned with the long tradition of radical songwriting and performance — mainly in folk music but also in jazz — that emerged forcefully in the United States out of the Communist-affiliated Popular Front left during the late 1930s and the 1940s. Artists sympathetic to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements revised the tradition in the 1950s and ’60s, and thereafter it splintered into a plethora of angry anthemic styles, ranging from the black power hip-hop of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” to the neo-punk of Green Day’s “American Idiot” to updates of ’60s protest rock like Neil Young’s ode to George W. Bush, “Let’s Impeach the President.” In 33 chapters, each one centered on a particular song (hence the book’s punning title), Lynskey explores the gamut of this protest tradition but then goes further, explicating the shifting historical context from the Great Depression until today, and bringing in dozens of other lesser-known artists and songs that did not make the cut for his chapter titles.

Bob Dylan

A British music critic and journalist, Lynskey ranges far as well as wide. Unlike most treatments of protest music, the book discusses songs and singers from outside the United States, including the Clash and U2, but also the legendary Chilean folk singer Victor Jara, the Jamaican reggae pioneers Max Romeo and the Upsetters, and the contemporary Sri Lankan singer and rapper M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam), among others. If, as the political left claims, Western and especially American imperialism is largely responsible for the world’s woes, the empire’s cultural styles have powerfully shaped anti-imperial protest songs — and, as in the case of reggae, the protests have shaped the empire’s music. These global dynamics produce some stirring musical hybrids, but they can also produce paradoxical characters like the Nigerian Fela Kuti, the Afrobeat singer-songwriter who, in standing up to a corrupt and murderous regime, Lynskey writes, “spoke like Huey Newton, lived like Hugh Hefner and ruled his private kingdom like an autocratic village chief.”

Although Fela’s case disarms conventional leftist pieties about the oppressed and their champions, Lynskey remains impressed by the “subversive subculture” that made Fela “a folk hero to beggars, prostitutes and the underclass.” And when he isn’t careful, Lynskey indulges in special pleading on behalf of bad if well-intentioned left-wing causes and movements. He is troubled, for example, by how the gifted and pioneering Almanac Singers of the early 1940s, a group that included Pete Seeger, performed and recorded songs that denounced the war against Nazism as a capitalist fraud so long as the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 was in effect — only to reverse themselves when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941 and the party line changed. Lynskey writes that the group’s peace songs became “a painful, even dangerous embarrassment.” But he then evasively denies that the Almanacs’ volte-face was “grossly opportunistic” and calls it “at least a sincere reaction to changing times” — as if opportunism and sincerity were the matters at issue, and not the essentially duplicitous character of Communist Party politics.

Elsewhere, though, Lynskey is more discriminating about left-wing movements. His description of the vicious insanity of the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society is an antidote to late-’60s radical nostalgia. And his judgments about the music can be sharp and convincing. He persuasively discusses Neil Young’s response to the Kent State killings in 1970, “Ohio,” performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, as a musical as well as a lyrical “masterpiece” of “fury, grief and topical precision.” He then just as persuasively describes John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band’s excursion into left-wing topical song two years later, “Some Time in New York City,” as the album “where the heyday of the 1960s protest song came to die.”

But why the difference? That Young, until then the least politically minded member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, could write a political song as powerful as “Ohio” remains hard to fathom, although it does support the idea that, in art, simple outrage surpasses ideology. Lennon’s failure, though, shows that attempting to compose political music can defeat even a supremely gifted songwriter. What explains his failure? According to Lynskey, Lennon’s puzzling, half-baked politics, along with a more general political bewilderment after 1970, were at fault. Another, simpler explanation is that as Lennon became more of a doctrinaire “smash the state” radical, his writing turned into puerile propaganda, even though it pleased leftists like the British writer Tariq Ali (who, according to Lynskey, told Lennon that “Power to the People” would make “an ideal marching song”). Lennon reclaimed his art later, but only when he turned away from protest and, after terrible personal turmoil, wrote and recorded the mature songs of love and commitment that appeared shortly before his murder in 1980.

A perennial question about left-wing protest songs concerns this tension between art and politics: How much do the political agendas of the sort that dominates the music Lynskey examines undermine the music’s value? For many readers and listeners who came of age during the 1960s, the question long ago turned on the contrast between Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. The two were friends and rivals in the topical song movement of the early ’60s, but Ochs became the embodiment of the folk singer as dissenting provocateur, who refused to believe, in Lynskey’s words, “that politics and art were mutually exclusive.” Dylan squirmed at the smugness of the folkie left, shifted course and rejected what he called, in “My Back Pages,” the “lies that life is black and white.”

Lynskey is plainly more sympathetic to Ochs’s activism, and he calls Dylan’s turn away from traditional protest songs his “abdication.” The full significance of “protesty” music eludes him. And his treatment of Dylan’s and Ochs’s work does not do either of them justice. He makes a great deal, for example, out of Dylan’s snarling rant “Masters of War,” but passes quickly over Dylan’s lyrical masterpieces “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” whose subtlety and human concreteness make them all the more powerful both as political statements and as art. These songs surpassed Ochs’s preachier material. Yet Lynskey also says too little about how Ochs stamped his sense of humor on some of his best songs (like “Draft Dodger Rag”), which made him a better political satirist than Dylan. Nor does Lynskey’s analysis leave room for Ochs’s finest topical song, the poetic “Crucifixion,” about John F. Kennedy’s murder, as well as for some of Ochs’s most enduring compositions, including “Changes” and “Pleasures of the Harbor,” which are songs of weariness, sorrow and fate, not songs of dissent. Protest music cannot be understood isolated from the protest singer’s other songs, which holds just as true for U2 and Steve Earle as it does for Phil Ochs.

Lynskey writes well about how anger, even hysteria, once channeled, has produced such overpowering songs as Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.” He is at his best when he discusses artists who are not normally grouped with the protesters. A strong chapter on James Brown and “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” shows how the Godfather of Soul — who for a while would also be calling himself the Minister of New New Super Heavy Funk — got caught between his own political sympathies for Hubert Humphrey and the demands for race loyalty placed on him by the black power politics of the late ’60s. “Say It Loud” was the result, a tight funk megahit with mixed political messages that nevertheless threw off sparks when sung out, call-and-response style, by Brown and the audience at the Apollo — and that went on to become a catalyst for what Lynskey terms “a new wave of racial consciousness in pop.”

These quirky sections and others, along with the book’s comprehensive scope and the author’s crisp prose, are the major attractions of “33 Revolutions Per Minute.” That said, it is too bad Lynskey didn’t find a way to examine how protest music (and rock ’n’ roll generally) helped to undermine the Soviet empire, by far the most effective case of musical subversion since the 1960s.

The last 20 years have been hard ones for protest music, at least in the United States and other Western countries. The most explosive musical controversy to come out of the Iraq war so far began not with a song but with one of the apolitical Dixie Chicks speaking onstage in London about the group’s dislike of President Bush. Otherwise, antiwar demonstrators mainly cling to “Give Peace a Chance” — and Lynskey is worried that he may have written not simply a history of protest music but a eulogy. If he has, then his book will be part of a larger eulogy, not for dissent but for a particular left-wing political culture and its variants — a culture that, outside of some ’60s countercultural enclaves, seemed to run out of steam a long time ago.

Sean Wilentz teaches history at Princeton University. His most recent book, “Bob Dylan in America,” will appear in paperback this fall, and he is the historian in residence for the official Dylan Web site.