This weekend marks the final installment in our Movies and Shakers summer series. If you’ve missed any of the previous articles, you can catch up with them here, looking at the topics of:

So to finish off, we thought we’d do something different and take a look at some classic political or protest songs and videos that went along with them, or have been added later and which have often made their own visually arresting statement.

Again, as always, everyone will have their own favorites and this is only a small selection in no particular order; a mere toe in the water of an endless ocean of brilliant songs. Let us know your own favorites.

It was pretty much impossible to avoid Donald Glover’s remarkable and jaw-dropping video for This is America when it was released earlier in the summer. As the Washington Post observed, “the video is emblematic of its time – blatantly political in a way that appeals to social media and its love of dissectable visuals.” It became an overnight phenomenon and even prompted a somewhat chilling response by an Iraqi rapper.

As political commentary it’s in the line of succession to, if a far cry from, a song like Keep Your Eyes on The Prize, in turn descended from an African-American spiritual and which became – along with We Shall Overcome – one of the musical  standard bearers for the civil rights movement.

And that line of musical succession leads through tracks like Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam (1964), to Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1970) or even to Public Enemy’s Fight The Power (1989).

Interestingly, a piece this week by Deena Zaru for ABC News argues that the reason more new hip-hop protest songs don’t reference the current president is that he is “irrelevant to the movement.”

“Political dissent, which is often energized and, in some cases, driven by the anti-Trump movement, has become so powerful and so all-encompassing that it has transcended Trump, and music released since he became president reflects an evolution in the conversation..”

With the anti-war movement of the 1960s, however, Richard Nixon was a very distinct figurehead for the protests at what was happening in Vietnam, and US government policies, even if he was rarely specifically mentioned in lyrics. One of the most timeless songs of the era was War, originally recorded by The Temptations, but which became a hit for Edwin Starr.

Perhaps the song that gives Nixon the most prominent position as a target for popular anger and dissent is Ohio, written by Neil Young in the aftermath of the shootings of four anti-war protesters at Kent State University in May 1970.

In their live shows, CSNY would often couple Ohio with a Stephen Stills song, Find the Cost of Freedom, which tries to put war, and events in Vietnam in particular, in an historical perspective; (something Neil Young has been doing ever since as a solo artist) similar to how Robbie Robertson of The Band wrote about the experience of the American Civil War in The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

Of course, The Band’s longtime collaborator – one Robert Allen Zimmerman – was simply one of the greatest-ever writers of protest songs, from “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Masters of War” or the often-covered “Chimes of Freedom” and many others, including this social commentary, from 1965, with a by-now iconic film clip (you couldn’t really call them videos yet…)

John Lennon’s “Give Peace A Chance” (1969) became one of the most memorable anthems of the anti-war movement, and sits alongside his calls for global harmony in “Imagine” (1971) and “Happy Xmas, War is Over” (1972), with their multitudinous cover versions.

Bob Marley’s Get Up Stand Up” (1975) is a universal call for resistance and an end to poverty, and is the last song Marley ever performed live, on 23 September 1980.

 

Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” (in numbers too big to ignore..) became an anthem of the growing womens’ liberation movement of the early 1970s; building on how Aretha Franklin had taken a 1965 Otis Redding track and made it her own two years later – with a few lyrical changes – in doing so challenging the traditional family structure and creating one of the greatest songs ever recorded.

 

Patti Smith’s People Have The Power, released in 1988, is a widely-covered, and at its heart optimistic protest song that holds out hope of a brighter future, regardless of the situation currently being endured.

Smith’s song became a rallying cry at MoveOn.org’s Vote for Change concerts ahead of the 2004 US presidential election. One of the artists on that tour was Bruce Springsteen, who had been out stumping for John Kerry during his unsuccessful campaign. Springsteen’s 2007 album Magic – including the powerful Last To Die, a song based on Kerry’s Vietnam war testimony – was a collective lament for a nation that had lost its way, yet was on the verge of redemption with the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

One of its most poignant tracks was Long Walk Home, including the couplet: “The flag flyin’ over the courthouse, means certain things are set in stone; Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.”

I wonder just how long the Boss thinks that walk might be today?

One of Springsteen’s frequent collaborators has been guitarist Tom Morello, founder of Rage Against The Machine, whose “Testify” was pretty much the only commentary on the 2000 election you needed. (Also check out Morello’s work as The Nightwatchman).

Another Springsteen performance worth pointing to here is his post-Hurricane Katrina re-working of the depression-era classic How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live? Also previously recorded by Ry Cooder in the 1970s, Springsteen’s version at the New Orleans JazzFest a year after the hurricane uses new lyrics to attack the government’s response to the disaster.

Steve Earle’s Christmas in Washington bemoans a politics of forgotten communities and ‘more of the same’ and invokes perhaps the most famous of all protest singers, the man whose guitar “killed fascists,” Woody Guthrie.

Pete Seeger, meanwhile, talks here about “Woody’s love song to America”, the timeless classic “This Land Is Your Land” originally written in 1940 as “a satirical response to ‘God Bless America'” and covered countless times since.

Guthrie’s popularity and influence was global, of course; and as well as Bob Dylan and Steve Earle, his devotees included Billy Bragg and Andy Irvine. Bragg collaborated with Wilco to produce new music for Guthrie lyrics on the Mermaid Avenue album in 1998, while Irvine credits Guthrie for his decision to become the brilliant multi-instrumentalist he did. Glen Hansard, meanwhile, updated Guthrie’s “Vigilante Man” quite wonderfully on his most recent tour.

 

 

Bragg himself recorded “Between The Wars” one of the greatest British anti-war, pro-organized labour anthems in 1985, inspired by the miners’ strike.

 

Canadian songwriter, guitarist and activist Bruce Cockburn produces a heartwrenching cry for the people of Guatemala in “If I Had A Rocket Launcher” (1984) while longtime peace and anti-nuclear campaigner Jackson Browne’s “Lives In The Balance” album (1986) has two standout political tracks – “For America” and the title cut, which references US covert wars in Central America.

 

 

As a protest singer, Joan Baez has few equals in a career spanning half a century. But if you haven’t heard it, one track from her most recent album is simply remarkable – a version of a song written by Zoe Mulford called The President Sang Amazing Grace, about the 2015 mass shooting at a black church in Charleston.

Another track that packs considerable political relevance today (and has been performed live recently by the aforementioned Billy Bragg) is “Why We Build The Wall” by Anais Mitchell, from her recent theatrical show and album “Hadestown”.

 

Finally, there has to be a sort of homecoming and it’s impossible to do a list of “political” songs without reference to Bono and the lads.

It’s also the case that if we were to look at the role of music in Irish politics, we’d be here all night, so I’ll just refer you to a couple of interesting articles: this one by Kate Boudoin lists “Ten Songs That Prove Irish Music Is The Original Protest Music”; as well as this one by Tony Clayton-Lea in the Irish Times on the enduring Power of the Protest Song. Check out also the great Steve Stockman’s timeless work on the spiritual nature of U2’s music, as well as this recent academic article about Christy Moore and the Irish Protest Ballad.

So lets end with two of Ireland’s greatest songwriters, and songs not of protest, but of reconciliation, regret and sadness. Moore collaborated with Bono and the Edge to write “North and South of The River” while Paul Brady’s “The Island” reflects on the pain of conflict. Both tracks are, much like ourselves: beautiful, fragile and – perhaps – hopeful that we’ll learn from what we’ve been through.

 

Obviously we’ve only given you a quick spin through our record collection and scratched the surface on such a subject; and there will be many, many great songs that must be rolling around in your head about now. Let us know your own favorites?

Thanks for watching, and listening.

 

 

 

 

 

 


Also published on Medium.