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👩🏼Where are all the protest songs?!
👩🏿Public Enemy's "Hazy Shade of Criminal" covered everything happening now.
👩🏼No, I mean recent protest songs!
👩🏿Dave's most recent album is the most streamed rap album this century.
👩🏼No, I mean protesting the people doing ICE!
👩🏿Um... It's the same people.
👩🏼No!
@mekkaokereke
Ooh, thanks for this, I just saw the new single because of it! ❤️
@mekkaokereke
This video is epic!
There is one kind of protest song that I have not found: the kind that a large group can easily chant with little to no coordination ahead of time.
The main example I can think of is Bella Ciao in Italy like this: https://youtu.be/iDRiZouXOS8?si=gCda-RtQvnoRWN-t
I might not have been looking in the right places but none of the protest songs I've heard seem made for that since they are not descended as directly from working songs
👩🏼Look. What I'm looking for is songs like the protest songs that Black people make, protesting the same evil people that Black people protest, and protesting the evil things that happen to Black people... but without the Black people! I want songs that protest when that happens to other people!
👩🏿 😑
@mekkaokereke
It's be so much easier if they just asked for a white girl with an acoustic guitar and her eyes closed singing how awful it all is, as that appears to be what they want.
@mekkaokereke Not sure if this is what you're looking for but over on this side of the Atlantic we've got Kneecap, singing partly in our native Irish language, about the British prime minister's support for the genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli government.
Idk if this is #protestmusic but I’ll leave it here. It is about #Latinos voting for the 🍊
@mekkaokereke
I think of Labour by Paris Paloma which gets everyone singing along. Her focus is feminism, anti patriarchy, anti capitalist.
https://youtu.be/H_sSuViPBHs
And this one about the Patriarchy and capitalism
https://youtu.be/5NfyIpE4zaw
There was Hinds Hall by Macklemore during Gaza Protest crackdowns.
@mekkaokereke Midnight Oil's album "Diesel and Dust" is worth a listen if you're not already familiar with it. Some of their references are a bit oblique at times but "The Dead Heart" in particular is a huge affirmation of Indigenous rights and an eff-you to colonisation. What they're protesting isn't the same situation as the Black experience in the USA, but the Aussies can't really talk until they get their own house in order. (And the same goes for anywhere else still colonised e.g. Canada and NZ).
Paul Kelly's "Bicentennial" starts off a quiet folk song but quickly turns into an indictment of the "Indigenous deaths in custody" scandal that was around Australia at the time. ... If you can get past the name of his backing band, that is (it was a Lou Reed reference but fell flat once they started touring overseas, so they changed their name to the Messengers).
Black music is, let's face it, the best music. Period. But we still have Bruce Springsteen and, for the LBTQ+ crowd, there's Lady Gaga.
Thing is, we white people really have not had too much to complain about for the last few centuries… We did write a lot of protest songs about nuclear war in the 80s though. Frankie Goes to Hollywood did a great cover on "War" (by Edwin Starr, a black man). See, it gets recursive real quick this.
@mekkaokereke I had this discussion a while back after a radio show (on my local non-profit station) in which the host lamented that political protest songs just weren't popular anymore.
…shortly after Beyoncé's "In Formation" Super Bowl performance.
When I pinged the (white boomer male) host on Twitter mentioning that & other examples of hugely successful political songs (coincidentally by black artists), he replied that those weren't the style of music he played on his show.
@mekkaokereke So, his complaint was: there's no commercially successful protest music that appeals to white boomers. And he couldn't figure out why. 🤷🏻♀️
And now Bruce Springsteen has a boomer-friendly political protest song, but minus uncomfortable context, talking about violent law enforcement in Minneapolis without going back 6 short years.
Even (the much more satisfying) Billy Bragg tune treats ICE raids as an isolated phenomenon — while explicitly citing the "First they came for…" poem. 🤦🏻♀️
@AmeliaBR @mekkaokereke Creedence Clearwater Revival is from nearby El Cerrito, I had the same barber as the "Fogerty boys". I would think that CCR is quite popular with white boomers and they have some excellent protest songs. Fortunate Son, for example.. https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror/115682272835232008
@codinghorror I'm rather fond of Jackson Browne's For America.
https://youtu.be/UZqrjMmpr1c
@codinghorror Yes, songs like those were the DJ's baseline reference for a time when protest music was popular. The complaint was that "no one" makes music like that any more, about modern political issues, or that the ones who do aren't commercially successful. (While ignoring those who were doing so in more modern musical styles.)
@AmeliaBR @mekkaokereke ah I see. I think the vietnam war scooping up young adults -- and the passing of the last meaningful constitutional amendment, 26: "Voting at the Age of Eighteen." And there won't ever be any more..
@mekkaokereke 💯 It's gotta be out there, right? I assume I'm just not in the know. Music is powerful and people need community right now
@mekkaokereke
Ugh. Sorry you needed to deal with that. But thank you for sharing those new-to-me songs.
