Black and white discrimination
Yellin’ “You can’t understand me!”
’N all that other jazz they hand me
In the papers and TV and
All that mass stupidity
That seems to grow more every day
Each time you hear some nitwit say
He wants to go and do you in
Because the color of your skin
Just don’t appeal to him
(No matter if it’s black or white)
Because he’s out for blood tonight.

Not the words of a rapper from 2006 - whether from Compton, Clapham or Clichy-sous-Bois - but those of Frank Zappa. He wrote Trouble Every Day after the riots in Watts ghetto, Los Angeles, in 1966. In New York in 1967, he had marines just returned from Vietnam sing Bob Dylan lyrics. Dylan songs like Masters of War or With God on Our Side describe today’s warmongering United States all too well; and Phil Ochs’ 1964 composition Talking Vietnam would surely resonate with troops currently taking part in Operation Enduring Freedom in Iraq: “Made sure those red apes had no place left to hide / Threw all the people in relocation camps / Under lock and key, made damn sure they’re free.”

Generations come and go, but the same causes produce the same reactions, and artists feel the same desire to protest. US songwriters have reacted widely to President George Bush’s pseudo-crusades: their songs include We Want Peace by Lenny Kravitz, In a World Gone Mad by the Beastie Boys, and the Beatles-esque Heard Somebody Say by Devendra Banhart.

The singer Rickie Lee Jones, talking about the notorious USA Patriot Act (1), said: “The climate is unhealthy. It reminds me of Germany in the 1930s. I’ve never been an activist, but now I want to get involved.” There are plenty of angry words and even channels through which to get them heard, although de facto censorship has been operating in mainstream opinion-forming media. Tom Morello, a guitarist who founded the campaign group Axis of Justice, said: “We’ve all got that image in our heads of that little Vietnamese girl in a deluge of napalm, but did we see anything like that during the bombing of Afghanistan? The average American doesn’t have access to that kind of information any more, because it only circulates on specialised networks.”

For example, internal memos circulating at MTV have ensured that protest music videos, such as the Michael Moore-directed Boom! by System of a Down or Outkast’s Bombs over Baghdad do not get played. However, the leading example of the fate of dissenters in mainstream US is still that of the Dixie Chicks. After the band’s singer, Natalie Maines, told a London crowd on the eve of the Iraq invasion in 2003 that her country group were “ashamed” of the US president, there was uproar. True, the Chicks gained a cult following among leftwingers, but their conservative core audience staged a mass boycott that became a commercial setback. Maines ultimately made a full apology: “My remark was disrespectful. I feel that whoever holds that office should be treated with the utmost respect . . . I love my country. I am a proud American.”

That is hardly comparable with the unapologetic radical spirit of the 1960s. Mike Ladd, an American rapper based in France who has released nine politically engaged albums in the past decade, said that the times were different: “Then, there was a real popular movement, an objective convergence between different movements: civil rights, Vietnam, decolonisation; middle class and poor people, blacks and whites, students and workers were all marching together. Nowadays there’s more poverty and more distractions, but there’s fewer spaces to get organised.”

It has become much harder for protest to avoid being commercialised. Anger or poverty, everything now is “product”. Just consider the multi-million dollar industry based on the Che Guevara image. Bob Marley’s image is even more of a global brand (remember it turned up, seemingly incongruous, on a US tank in Iraq). Do-gooders realised long ago that there was money to be made from good-doing, the most famous being Bob Geldof, whose modest musical achievement with the Boomtown Rats was just the springboard for his mega-stardom as a celebrity campaigner.

Last year he repeated his 1985 success with Live Aid with another series of planetary gigs, Live 8, timed to coincide with the G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland. Their ostensible aim was to call for African debt relief: so where were the African musicians? (2)

Another part of the Live 8 bonanza was a re-recording of Do They Know It’s Christmas, the song Geldof penned with Midge Ure in 1985. Back then, this woefully corny anthem was brightened by a single faintly controversial moment: U2’s Bono belting out the line “tonight thank God it’s them instead of you” in reference to the starving of Ethiopia. He did not give it the same sense of anger the second time around, perhaps warily protecting the status of global-crusader rockstar that he has achieved since then.

Respectability and free publicity

For U2, Geldof and all those who participated in charity recordings, political engagement has paid off. It brings respectability and free publicity. You can now buy the melodies of protest songs as ring tones for a mobile phone, so that the powerful message of We Shall Overcome by folk legend Pete Seeger is reduced to meaning no more than “you have an incoming call”. Woody Guthrie must be turning in his grave.

Hiphop began in the late 70s as the fiercest edge of contestation, but today much of it is synonymous with conspicuous consumption. In the world of bling, a stance of dissent is mostly a pose. Every record release and tour offers the consumer a plethora of tie-in products. Gangsta rapper 50 Cent has lent his name, built on his image as a hard man of the ghetto, to a range of Reebok trainers. There is still genuine radicalism within hiphop, but its exponents rarely hit the big time. “We are very much in the minority,” said Hamé of the French rap group La Rumeur. “You can’t hear us on the radio.” There is no place for them on the airwaves of Skyrock, France’s main broadcaster of commercially processed hiphop.

Who is likely to hear words such as these, from French rapper Rocé’s sharp tongue? “France has memory problems, it knows Malcolm X, but not Frantz Fanon (3), not the FLN (4), knows ‘black’ but not ‘noir’, loves cowboy and Indian stories, but doesn’t want to know about cowboys and Algerians” (5). The energy and originality of the musical backdrop to this suggests that everything is still possible. For Hamé, it is essential that music should express the idea of action: “Form and content cannot be separated. Otherwise I’d write books or pamphlets. That’s why the truest way of being political is to articulate your message of emancipation through codes that incarnate emancipation. The gentrification of all culture is not inevitable, even though I feel like we’ve all got bar codes tattooed on our bums.”

Forty years after Vietnam and the civil rights movement brought protest songs to prominence, what are they now for? Producer Jean Rochard believes that their purpose is to “go beyond simply describing a situation as though powerless in the face of a cruel world and become an active participant in what is going on” (6). Woody Guthrie wrote on his guitar in the 1930s: “This machine kills fascists”. When Fela Kuti was a real counterweight to Nigerian state power in the 1970s, he declared that “music is the weapon of the future”.

A good song can incite people to drop out or desert: good examples are Phil Ochs’s I Ain’t Marching Anymore, or Boris Vian’s wonderful Le Déserteur (the deserter) written in 1954 (7), or many punk and grunge refrains. Or it can motivate people to act: the classic example is Back of the Bus, written by Carver Neblett and sung by Harry Belafonte in 1964: “If you miss me from the cotton fields / And you can’t find me nowhere / Come on down to the courthouse / I’ll be voting right there.”

In the US today, music continues to carry a similar message, and there are movements called Rock the Vote and Rock Against Bush. A website, punkvoter.com, created by a veteran of the US punk scene, Fat Mike, gets 500,000 hits a month. But protest songs can and do backfire. Even discounting the inevitable commercialisation and attendant insincerity, the existence of the protest song as a genre suggests a certain cultural imperialism. It is an American form, inseparable in the public imagination from a certain image of the US in the 1960s. Yves Delmas and Charles Gancel wrote a recent French book on protest songs (8): “In a peculiar paradox, a whole generation adopted this music as the soundtrack to its revolts and thereby quietly helped the dominant empire of their era strengthen its cultural hegemony.” Moreover, the codes that protest songs use are generally US codes, which rely heavily on ideas of freedom, glory and individualism that can easily be made to fit with a Republican worldview.

Bruce Springsteen wrote Born in the USA as an anti-war song, but President Ronald Reagan’s advisers were not misinterpreting it when they suggested Reagan mention the singer at a rally during his 1984 campaign: the booming mood of the song perfectly encapsulates Reagan-era US jingoism.

‘I’d become my enemy’

Dylan realised the danger of straight and self-righteous protest when he retreated from the New York folk scene that had lionised him. Delmas and Gancel wrote: “We wanted him to be a missionary for our causes; he wanted to be a rocker.” In the 1964 song My Back Pages, Dylan elliptically explained why he had to quit the protest scene, regretting the way he had waded into it “fearing not I’d become my enemy in the instant that I preach”.

Protest in 2006 is a global phenomenon that has many sources besides the US model. Artists such as Klod Kiavué from Guadeloupe, who plays traditional Gwo Ka drum music, realise the importance of drawing their own roots into their activism, to “tell a story that diverges from official themes”. Brazil’s Tom Zé, who has produced an opera about sexual and social segregation in São Paulo, said protest does not always have to be prescriptive or self-righteous: “There are two ways of doing a politically engaged song: the first is to provoke questions, the second is to dish out slogans, and that kind of music doesn’t respect people. It’s all answers and it kills thinking; it’s pasteurised music, it ends up working like a sedative, trapping humanity in a dream. I’m trying to awaken people’s consciences.”

To do that, you do not necessarily need words, as the great jazzmen have proved. Charles Mingus’s Fable of Faubus, in the 1950s, was a powerful attack on racist Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who had sent out the National Guard to prevent black children entering a high school. The lyrics are barely audible, apparently because Columbia Record had objected to them, but they were hardly necessary anyway. John Coltrane savaged Southern US racism with Alabama, his response to the bombing of a Baptist church in the state in 1963. He didn’t use a single word.

Currently, the Detroit collective Underground Resistance campaigns for the black cause with electronic beats. Canada’s Deadbeat produced a techno onslaught called Abu Ghraib, as angry as any polemic could ever be. The British duo Coldcut is a highly politicised act producing mainly instrumental electronic music. Using their label Ninja Tune, they claim to be “adopting new strategies to get around the walls put up by the industry”. In France, the saxophonist Julien Lourau put out twin albums, Fire and Forget, referring to a formula developed by British artillery forces: “You fire and then you go for tea. There’s a bit of irony in putting these two words together. It has another meaning that can be applied to our era: a barrage of propaganda to justify the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, followed by forgetting. The world moves on very quickly.”

Matthew Herbert, who is British, proves that protest songs are not the only style of musical dissidence. For over a decade he has produced “sound products” that deny commercial gloss by sampling the sound of Coca-Cola cans being crushed or the squawking of battery chickens. He said: “The important thing is not the result in itself, but the creative process.” In February 2003, when the Matthew Herbert Big Band released an album, Goodbye Swingtime, he wrote on his website (9): “At a time of war, it is a difficult task to know where to place music. Contemporary music, like much western culture, is again at a crossroads. Does it describe, critique and contribute to the urgent political questions of the day, or provide an alternative, prescribing different rules and espousing its own values?”

Herbert, who is fiercely independent, feels he has nothing in common with stars who strike campaigning poses, but is more akin to internet “hacktivists”. “Via random poetic content, spread through emails and viruses, they infest the corporate-ruled world. That’s where today’s subversion is to be found.”

You might also find it in Uzeste, a village near Bordeaux in southwestern France, birthplace of the jazz musician Bernard Lubat. He began Uzeste Musical there nearly 30 years ago and the village now hosts festivals, concerts and musical workshops all year round, with a utopian spirit, which have remained outside any kind of commercial circuit. Lubat said: “I don’t like sermons. They force a message on people. To protest, you have to do it with sound, and on stage: that’s where art can still get across. Protesting is about grating people’s ears, refusing to play along nicely. Today the industry is such a painful presence in our minds. Everything has to be in tune with commerce so it can be sold.” His response is simple: he refuses to enter the system, get hooked on productivity and growth, and has only put out three records in his own name in 20 years.

Jean Rochard takes a different approach, hoping to feed the beast of commercialisation until it chokes. He said: “The system can certainly gobble everything up but it cannot digest everything. There are sometimes things that make it sick; demonstrate its marauding madness and let us watch it eat itself. Even the wiliest of capitalists will always be tempted to invest in the rope that ends up hanging him.”

The clairvoyant Frank Zappa said something similar in 1969: “The idea of throwing everything out and starting over is dumb. The best way to act, what I would like to see happen, what I’m trying to do, is to use the system against itself, so that it purges itself and ends up working properly.”