Protest Music and People Movements: The Tradition Continues

[KoKo]

(Interesting Read about the People and Music of Protest Movements)

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/05/26

Protest Music and People Movements: The Tradition Continues
by Peter Dreier and Dick Flacks

-----snip----

In the early sixties, a new generation of folk troubadours emerged, determined to link their music and the struggles for social justice. In the streets, folk clubs and campuses of major cities, singer-songwriters wrote "topical" songs about specific events, songs about the mood of alienation and anger in the country, and new protest anthems. Some performed at fundraisers and political rallies. Dylan, Joan Baez, Odetta and Peter Paul and Mary performed at the 1963 March on Washington, serving as a cultural bridge between the Southern movement and the emerging student movement on northern campuses.

Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello Dylan was unwilling to cast himself in the role of political minstrel, but some of his generation of folk music-oriented singer-songwriters, particularly Phil Ochs, Buffy Sainte Marie, Tom Paxton, Len Chandler and Joan Baez, more consistently maintained movement commitment.

Baez joined Martin Luther King on his 1965 march in Alabama, from Selma to Montgomery. She later joined Cesar Chavez during his twenty-four-day fast to draw attention to the farmworkers' union struggle, and she participated in a Christmas vigil outside San Quentin State Prison, California, to oppose capital punishment. In 1964, as the campus New Left was burgeoning, she sang at a Free Speech Movement rally in Sproul Plaza, leading hundreds of students to occupy the administration building at the University of California, Berkeley.

As the war in Vietnam escalated, Baez encouraged young men to resist the draft. In 1967 she was twice arrested for blocking military induction centers. She boldly performed the classic labor song, "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night," at the 1969 Woodstock festival, making the song and the Joe Hill legend available to young people decades after Hill's 1915 execution and after the song's creation by Earl Robinson in 1936. During the 1980s Baez spoke out against South Africa's apartheid system and featured Peter Gabriel's song about antiapartheid activist Steven Biko at her concerts. In 1987 she traveled to Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to sing peace songs with Jews and Arabs. She has devoted much of her performance career as a bridge between American audiences and freedom struggles in many parts of the world.

The second wave of feminism and the emerging environmental movements inspired performers, too. Leslie Gore's "You Don't Own Me" (1964) and Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman" (1971) were commercial pop hits with feminist themes, while a wave of "womyn's music" took root, led by Holly Near, Meg Christian and others, popularized via concerts, festivals and records. An outstanding catalog of feminist and gay rights music spanning decades can be accessed at Lady Slipper Music.

CONTINUED AT:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/05/26

Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program, at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (2012, Nation Books). Other books include: Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City. He writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and American Prospect.

Dick Flacks is research professor of sociology at University of California Santa Barbara. His books include: Making History: The American Left and the American Mind; Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grows Up; Youth and Social Change. His research and teaching centers on issues of political participation, commitment and protest. His weekly radio program, "Culture of Protest," has been on Santa Barbara radio for 25 years.

[ancianita]

1. Thank you. Chumbawamba is a good pro-labor band that came out in the 90's.

Pontius Pilate came to our town
Up to the dockyards to see the picket line
We asked him to help but he just turned around
He's the leader of the union now
Leader of the union, all of our questions he ignored
He washed his hands and he dreamt of his reward
A seat in the House Of Lords

One by one the ships come sailing in
One by one the ships go sailing out

We live for words and die for words, principles we can't afford
When all our Brothers turn to Lords, whose side are you on?
You tell the world your hands are tied, history three times denied
A sea of changes three miles wide, whose side are you on?

One by one the ships come sailing in
One by one the ships go sailing out

This conspiracy of shame, murder by some other name
Play up and play the game, whose side are you on?
If any ask us why we died, we tell them that our leaders lied
Sold us out down the riverside, whose side are you on?

One by one the ships come sailing in
One by one the ships go sailing out (repeat)...

They also had anarchist tendencies. I hope they're still around.

[ancianita]

2. +1

[Zorra]

3. Thanks, KoKo. I'm really surprised the author made no mention of riot grrrl bands.

But then again, the music not mama's kumbaya.

During the early 1990s the Seattle/Olympia Washington area had a sophisticated do it yourself infrastructure.[5] Young women involved in underground music scenes took advantage of this to articulate their feminist thoughts and desires through creating punk-rock fanzines and forming garage bands. The political model of collage-based, photocopied handbills and booklets was already used by the punk movement as a way to activate underground music, leftist politics and alternative (to mainstream) sub-cultures. There was a discomfort among many women in the punk movement who felt that they had no space for organizing, because of the misogyny in the punk culture. Many women found that while they identified with a larger, music-oriented subculture, they often had little to no voice in their local scenes, so they took it upon themselves to represent their own interests by making their own fanzines, music and art.

In 1991, in what many believe[who?] to be an unorganized collective response to the Christian Coalition's Right to Life attack on legal abortion and the Senate Judiciary Hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—in which Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment and was mocked by the media—young feminist voices were heard through multiple protests, actions, and events (L7's Rock for Choice) that would later become part of a larger organized consciousness. This consciousness coalesced in late 1991 under the movement known as "riot grrrl".

Uses and meanings of the term "riot grrrl" developed slowly over time, but its etymological origins can be traced to the actual Mount Pleasant race riots in spring 1991. Writing in Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capital, Mark Andersen reports that early Bratmobile member Jen Smith (later of Rastro! and The Quails), reacted to the violence by prophetically writing in a letter to Allison Wolfe: "This summer's going to be a girl riot." Other reports say she wrote, "We need to start a girl riot." Soon afterwards, Wolfe and Molly Neuman collaborated with Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail to create a new zine and called it Riot Grrrl, combining the "riot" with an oft-used phrase that first appeared in Vail's fanzine Jigsaw "Revolution Grrrl Style Now".[7] Riot grrrls took a growling double or triple r, placing it in the word girl, as a way to take back the derogatory use of the term

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_grrrl

I'd like to dedicate this song to Elliot Rodger ~

[KoKo]

4. Kick for a Respite from the Angst we all feel...