Protest songs struggle to be heard
belfasttelegraph.co.uk | Mar 23rd 2011 In May
1970 Neil Young was relaxing on the porch of his road manager's house in
Pescadero, California, when he was handed a copy of Life magazine.
It contained a vivid account of the deaths of four students at the hands of
the Ohio National Guard during an anti-war protest earlier that month. On
finishing the article, Young picked up a guitar and wrote Ohio, a song that
condemned the killings and evoked the outrage that followed.
He then took the next plane to Los Angeles where he and his band, Crosby,
Nash, Stills and Young, recorded the song and, with the help of Atlantic
Records boss Ahmet Ertegun, rushed it into production. Within a matter of
days it had hit the shops wrapped in a sleeve that reprinted the section of
the Bill of Rights on freedom of assembly.
Reading about Ohio in Dorian Lynskey's history of protest music, one wonders
how today's pop musicians might react to such an event. Would they be
galvanised into action or would apathy or fear of public opinion prevent
them from raising their heads above the parapet?
Given the dearth of classic protest anthems in the last decade, you might
assume the latter, though Lynskey presents a different viewpoint. The
current problem isn't the shortage of protest songs but that the existing
ones have failed to snowball into a movement. With terrible acuity he notes:
"The right question is not, 'Where have all the protest songs gone?' but 'Is
anybody listening'?''
33 Revolutions Per Minute is a scrupulously researched, elegantly written
and highly absorbing account of the intersection of politics and music built
around 33 key songs, and the events that yielded them.
Spanning 70 years, it takes us from the excoriating poetry of Billie
Holiday's Strange Fruit and Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land via the
crusading compositions of Bob Dylan, Edwin Starr, Fela Kuti, The Clash and
U2. Coming in at nearly 800 pages, it is a monster of a book - its daunting
length perhaps a result of the author's determination to adhere to its own
clever title.
Lynskey concludes, however, with a heavy heart, that where the job of
Sixties singers was to spearhead a revolution, the brief for today's
musicians seems to reduce to a single task: to entertain.
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e-heard-15122130.html
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