In the fall of 2011, a group of protesters began occupying Zuccotti Park in New York City, setting off what became known worldwide as the Occupy movement.
While the 99 per cent had a gift for creating memorable political slogans, it was continuously criticized for lacking a clear-cut message, such as the 1960s polemics that railed against the Vietnam War and fought for civil rights.
Whether or not there was a clear message is still up for debate, but one aspect from the '60s that was surely missing included the popular music that is now synonymous with that era. Where was the modern-day “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “A Change is Gonna Come,” those zeitgeist-tapping songs that packed both a political punch and a great hook?
According to Dorian Lynskey, author of 33 Revolutions Per Minute, which looks at 33 politically charged songs that changed the world from Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” to Green Day’s “American Idiot,” they don’t exist.
“You see a series of arches that rise and fall throughout history,” he says of musical protest movements around the world. “From '63 to '70 is your white American rock, big protest phase, and by the '70s you’ve got more black artists that have really taken the banner from rock. Then you’ve got that energy in Jamaica, with reggae becoming indiscernible from protest music, and finally Britain, which had failed to find its voice 'til then, but found it in a big way with punk. Then throughout the '80s you had that Live Aid era, with these underlying political messages in a ton of major, major acts.”
But from the '90s on, Lynskey says, everything slowly became less political and “converged in this downward trajectory.”
Today, Lynskey says most major artists stay away from being overtly political (Bruce Springsteen is the exception), and even when they are as direct as, say, Lady Gaga on the pro-gay, pro-transgender anthem “Born This Way,” audiences, for the most part, are immune to the message.
But that’s not to say protest songs don’t exist, they just don’t “knot into a narrative as they have done in the past,” says Lynskey, which makes them harder to identify unless you’re really looking.
When you look at Canadian musicians in 2012, for example, they seem particularly engaged, taking inspiration from events such as Occupy, the G20 in Toronto and the student uprising in Quebec. It seems as if the protest song is enjoying a surge, from entire albums with a political message to even just a couple of political tracks slipped in on an otherwise unassuming album. In a way, the Canadian protest song has become ubiquitous — we just don’t always realize it.
“A good protest song isn’t that overt. It’s almost too much,” says Nathan Lawr, frontman for the Afrobeat-inspired band Minotaurs, whose sophomore album New Believers comes out in January. “A good work of art engages politics with a little more nuance and allows people to come to it without an agenda.”
For Lawr, who is launching Canadian Artists for Civil Liberties on Dec. 1, he hopes his band’s instrumentation will be a “Trojan horse” for the more politically charged lyrics, such as on lead single “Open the Doors,” featuring Sarah Harmer.
“I want them to come through the groove and discover the lyrics afterwards,” he says.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Melissa McClelland of Whitehorse, who, with husband Luke Doucet, included several political songs on their album The Fate of the World Depends on this Kiss, such as “Devil’s Got a Gun” and “Wisconsin.”
“We live in this age of so-called reality TV, yet we’re so easily blinded by what’s going on,” McClelland says. “These days with Occupy and the Arab Spring, it just seems like people are starting to finally wake up, so it’s good to subtly tap into that.”
Another example is Metric, who reined in their usually political lyrics on their breakout album, 2009’s Fantasies, but returned to their grassroots on this year’s Synthetica, including the lead single, “Youth Without Youth,” which contrasts images of youth with student unrest.
And while the album may be rooted politically, it's veiled in a way that the message only becomes apparent after repeated close listens.
But not all artists are so subtle. Jason Collett, not normally known as an overly political singer-songwriter, released the incendiary Reckon this year, an album full of political music written during the launch of Occupy Wall Street. While the strength of the music keeps the songs from coming off as pedantic, there’s no mistaking the message in “I Want to Rob a Bank” or “When the War Came Home," where Collett sings, "All that tough talk fight for our freedom/ Never did stand to reason/ The war left us broke/ When the war came home."
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, who are well known as a political band, chose 2012 to release their first record in 10 years, 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!. The liner notes include the proclamations “f--k le plan nord” and “f--k la loi 78,” referring to a Quebec economic action plan and a bill to prevent student protests, respectively. The 20-minute song “Mladic" includes a recording of pots and pans being banged during the Montreal student protests.
Singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright, who released the sentimental Come Home to Mama in October, also recorded a touching cover of “No Woman, No Cry” for Folk the Banks, a compilation album from London-based label Occupation Records.
But there is always the fear that being so overt can alienate your audience, something former Wailin’ Jennys singer Annabelle Chvostek had to consider while recording her most recent solo album, Rise. She wrote a song called “Do You Think You’re Right?” in response to a controversial 2006 documentary Jesus Camp, but almost didn’t include it.
“It felt heavy and is a pretty serious critique of right-wing fundamentalists in the States and Canada,” she says, adding that a talk with legendary Canadian folk rocker Bruce Cockburn convinced her otherwise.
“He told me a story about how he almost didn’t include ‘If I had a Rocket Launcher’ on Stealing Fire,” she says. “He was scared to include it because it was so angry and militant, and now it’s one of his best-known songs, so he told me to make sure that if I wasn’t going to put it on, it wasn’t because I was scared."
If 2012 is any indication, it sounds like advice many Canadian musicians already heed.
Related:
Grant Lawrence's Protest Songs Podcast w/ Sarah Harmer, Corb Lund and more
Classical protest music, from Verdi to Pussy Riot
We speak with Peaches about Pussy Riot's sentencing
Protest version of Ariane Moffatt's 'Jeudi, 17 Mai' goes viral
Music and politics: 'La Marseillaise'
Canadian Artists for Civil Liberties official site