James C McKinley Jr
Every successful movement has a soundtrack,? the songwriter Tom Morello told reporters after he had tried to fire up the crowd at the Occupy Wall Street Protest last week with a Woody Guthrie tune and one of his own labour songs.
Perhaps he is right, but the protesters in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan have yet to find an anthem. Nor is the rest of the country humming songs about hard times. So far, musicians living through the biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression have filled the airwaves with songs about dancing, not the worries of working people.
Where have all the protest songs gone? To be sure, a handful of songwriters are tackling the issue. Ry Cooder, the blues and rock guitarist known for his exploration of roots music, lambastes bankers and conservatives in his latest album, Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down. Similarly, Morello, who began his career as the guitarist and chief ideologue for the band Rage Against the Machine, makes an unapologetic call for leftist revolution in his new album, World Wide Rebel Songs.
Recently, Everlast, a Los Angeles songwriter who mixes rap and country blues, released an album, Songs of the Ungrateful Living, with the song I Get By, a brooding meditation on the problems of the working-class people facing unemployment and foreclosures in today?s economy. ?I voted for change, and it?s kind of strange/now it?s all I got in my pocket,? he sings on the track.
These recent releases add to a trickle of politically charged songs since the banking crisis precipitated the economic downturn. In 2009 Justin Sane of the punk band Anti-Flag wrote The Economy Is Suffering, Let it Die, a scathing indictment of the bank bailout. The following year the soul singer Aloe Blacc captured the heartbreak of unemployment in his single I Need a Dollar.
Yet none of these songs have been big hits, and none are likely to have the impact that a song like Bob Dylan?s Blowin? in the Wind had in the early 1960s. The scarcity of songs about the economic disaster stands in contrast to the flurry of pop songs in the mid-2000s blaming President George W Bush?s foreign policy for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Antiwar songs came not only from stalwarts like R.E.M. and Neil Young but also from younger performers like Green Day, Bright Eyes and Pink.
?What I have noticed is that the financial crisis has been a far more difficult topic for songwriters to wrestle with,? said Dorian Lynskey, the British critic and the author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute, a recently published history of protest music. ?What do you say about a financial crisis where the villains are obscure and the solutions are obscure. That?s a challenge.?
The lack of a coherent message on the left has been evident at the Wall Street protest. ?I have not heard a single song that sums up what we are trying to do here,? said Mart?an Hughes, a 24-year-old college student, after Morello?s performance. ?Nor have I heard a single message.?
The music at the protest has been all over the map, from 1960s folk to erudite rap to contemporary punk. Peter Yarrow, of the 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, said the music industry discouraged artistes from taking a political stand more than it did in the 1960s. ?The bean counters took over,? he said. ?The bottom line is music has been destroyed by the all-mighty dollar.?
?In the 1960s music was the social media of the day,? said Ralph F Young, a professor of history at Temple University. ?Today protestors have Facebook and Twitter to disseminate their message.?
