January 17, 2018
A bit of fire represented by sunlit shrubbery all photographed yesterday might counterbalance Monday’s water and Tuesday’s ashes, I thought. Well, the colors of fire.
For the written bit I’ll focus on the fury, however. More specifically, the fury we find in current music that is reacting to the age of Trump. The link below is a thoughtful and comprehensive take on contemporary protest music, describing musicians we all know, and also several many of us might not be familiar with.
The article is an interview with the U.K. music critic Dorian Lynskey who wrote a book, 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs in 2011 and now talks about the boom in music explicitly protesting against the current state of affairs. He claims that Trump elicited more protest music than previous political figures because he is so detested and so much the focus of what is going on. Only wars have been able to generate more protest music than despicable public figures.
Lynskey points out that protest music had already seen an upswing around the evolution of the Black Lives Matter movement and the increasing polarization that people were willing to risk, in the entertainment business, under Trump. An example is Eminem’s freestyle—if you’re a fan of Trump and you’re a fan of me, I’m drawing a line, which side are you on? People are willing to lose parts of the audience (unless they are country music singers who stay silent. And of course there is Ted Nugent…) Many of the ideas expressed in current protest music are not just dealing with the ugliness of Trump and his minions, but about the ideas of America. The songs tackle how we are going backwards due to greed and hunger for power, how so many feel powerless and in mourning.
Here is Lynskey’s take on what the music actually accomplishes – a take I very much liked.
Protest songs make people feel not alone. If we were looking at a situation where no artists were doing songs about Trump and nobody was talking about opposition to him, you would notice the absence. It would be painful. On a macro scale—a global or online scale—it serves the purpose it served in civil-rights demonstrations, where you’d be walking along singing freedom songs. This is where I think preaching to the converted is underrated. It’s fine to cement beliefs to inspire people to act on them.
There are also cases where they can turn somebody on to a particular fact or a certain way of looking. I learned a huge amount from Public Enemy as a white, suburban, English teenager. A large part of the reason many people know about Kent State as they do is because the [Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young] song “Ohio” brings it to people who are not necessarily researching the Nixon era.
Among the many examples the author gives for music clips, one of my favorite musicians is Kendrik Lamar. Many of my readers might not be familiar with that style of music but it is worth some exploration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLZRYQMLDW4&feature=player_embedded
Same is true for a Tribe called Quest. Stretch yourself and leave the comfort zone, listen to the words – even if the use of 4 letter ones remind you of the one they’re directed against.
