33 Revolutions Per Minute by Dorian Lynskey: review
by Helen Brown, telegraph.co.uk
March 8th 2011
Exhilarated by his father’s new record, Lynskey found himself tuning in to the
news and politics, the stuff Holly Johnson was singing about. He wrote a few
protest songs before beginning a career in journalism. Years later, he found
himself wondering where the genre had gone – and this book is an attempt to
answer that question.
Lynskey uses his clever title, 33 Revolutions Per Minute, to give him a
structure. He picks 33 songs – from Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit in 1939 to
Green Day’s American Idiot in 2004 – to guide him through the social movements
that have united the people in song.
There are studies of artists as diverse as Woody Guthrie who “learned socialism
on the Highways of America” and Afrobeat’s Fela Kuti, “who spoke like Huey
Newton, lived like Hugh Hefner and ruled his private kingdom like an autocratic
village chief ”. Each chapter includes a biography of the artist in question
with some crisp socio-political context.
Lynskey acknowledges that there are good reasons why the protest song is
regarded with suspicion: “while detractors dismiss all examples as didactic,
crass or plain boring, enthusiasts are prone to acting as if virtuous intent
suspends the usual standards of musical quality”.
We tend to chaff at the preaching of multimillionaire rock stars asking for our
hard-earned cash as they whoosh around the world staging massive light shows
and squirrelling their funds away in tax havens. But Lynskey is compassionate.
He’s less keen on nailing the hypocrisies than on exploring the passion that
drove the songs. He includes a moving account of a hysterical Nina Simone after
the racist bombing of a black church in Alabama which killed four children. “I
suddenly realised what it was to be black in America in 1963,” she said.
Her husband came home to find her trying to fit pieces of scrap metal into an
ad hoc pistol and convinced her to sit down at the piano instead. She wrote the
explosive Mississippi Goddam in an hour.
While strong on the way the American civil rights movement harnessed music to
its advantage, Lynskey gives less space to the ways in which feminists have
used music. They may not have been part of an organised movement, but female
singer-songwriters have had a powerful impact on gender politics.
Lynskey worries that he’s written a “eulogy” for the protest song, but I think
it’s still out there. So, Beyoncé and Mariah Carey have been singing for the
Gaddafis, but as Lynskey himself points out, Obama is “the first protest song
president” who came to power quoting Marvin Gaye, his speeches remixed by
Will.i.am.
Lily Allen had a hit in 2009 that challenged both the media’s manipulation of
the female body image and our consumer society. In The Fear she stuck two
fingers up at a culture which is more “about film stars and less about mothers/
It’s all about fast cars and cussing each other/ But it doesn’t matter cos I’m
packing plastic/ And that’s what makes my life so f---ing fantastic”. All I am
saying, Dorian, is give 21st-century protest a chance.
33 Revolutions Per Minute by Dorian Lynskey: review
864PP, Faber & Faber, £17.99 t £15.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515
Available from Telegraph Bookshop
Original Page:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8362431/33-Revolutions-Per-Minute-by-Dorian-Lynskey-review.html
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