When popular music adopts a political position is this supportive to a cause or to a particular artist’s personal wealth and public image?
Popular music has served as a voice of the people and for the people for many years. Songs have moulded and reflected political ideologies, opinions and decisions for decades. Music made by one voice can be echoed by many and when adopting a political stand against or for something this can also be echoed in the masses. Artists over the years have put their necks and careers on the line to be bold and valiant with their opinions on how the world should turn and be governed. But do these views and outlooks actually change anything? Do they create awareness? Are the artists sincere and genuine about their concern? Or are they just to boost their public status and reputation; a money making scheme to sell records and to reach the top of the charts? These are all the questions one can ask themselves about the sincerity of the musician.
During the 20th and the 21st century there have been a lot of social and economic changes. People began to view the world in a different light; they began to see the workings of their planet and began to understand that it was their land as much as the next persons. Due to these ever changing visions and ideals, people began to protest and challenge changes, rules, laws and orders made by heads of state and government. The public lashed out in demonstrations and opposition parties. During these whirlwind spectacles of opposition towards war, sexism, racism and monarchic society the musicians and the singers set their and the public’s voice to music.
The way in which audiences are encouraged to react in various politicised domains is often fuelled by sentiments conveyed in music.
Negus (2009, 194)
In this essay I will discuss how these protest and politically positioned songs supported the political cause they were for or against and that they were not only for the success and fame of the artist.
Racism in North America has been a central theme in political culture for the change in views and law in the 20th century. ‘Strange Fruit’ by Billie Holiday eerily reflects the poignant and anguished pain felt by the African-Americans towards the cruel racism in the Southern states of the USA.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
This song was recorded first in 1939 this was a time when political protest was not usually expressed in musical form. The simple, sparse yet effective poetry depicts lynching in all of its brutality. The three short verses are “all the more powerful for their understated and ironic language.” With “the juxtaposition of a beautiful landscape with the scene of lynching, the smell of magnolias with that of burning flesh” as “strange fruit” produced by racial oppression invokes essence of racist reaction. “Racism in America stands indicted and exposed by these lines, with no need at all for a more didactic or agitational message.”
This song was clearly a cry for change within America at that time. The central metaphor of ‘Strange Fruit’ in the poem written by Abel Meeropol, allowed a dangerous taboo to be discussed in a severely right winged society where African Americans were regarded as second citizens in the US.
One of the first politically voiced musicians who influenced the likes of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen in their American folk social ballads was Woodie Guthrie. According to Ian K Smith Guthrie was “a musician with an unrivalled empathy for the working class”. Guthrie's guitars were adorned with the words "This machine kills fascists", and he sung with a knowing Everyman style greatly to the American people who believed in left wing political views at the time, that Dylan would channel to international acclaim. The song "This Land is your Land" was constructed in the folk tradition the words written by Guthrie to a traditional melody with a political message, creating a sing-along that embodies Guthrie's socialist views and outlook.
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me
These words echo the cries of society in the United States of America during the 1940’s a time of great depression and war. This song was recorded in 1944 by Guthrie in New York while he was on shore leave from the merchant marines. Just before this during the 1930’s and 1940’s Irving Berlin’s song ‘God Bless America’ was popular amongst the people of the U.S and served as a song of hope and prayer. Guthrie wrote ‘This Land is Your Land’ as a satirical response to ‘God Bless America’ , infact he originally named the song ‘God Blessed America For Me’ but later changed the name. This song appealed to people in the USA that supported left wing political leadership and still today is used at demonstrations rallies and around campfires. A lot of Americans still relate to this song as poverty reins and still there is a blind eye given by government at the destitution within the U.S. People say it is the ‘real’ national anthem of America.
Another very topical and controversial political subject in the 20th century and still is the issue of Gay and LGBT rights movements. During the late 70’s ; the age and era of punk music the song ‘Glad To Be Gay’ was released by The Tom Robinson Band. This punk rock/new wave song was highly critical of the views on gay rights and equality in Britain at the time. This song became the theme song to the 1979 Gay Pride Parade in London. Though homosexuality had been decriminalised in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, the lyrics reflect the pain, torment and condemnation of homosexuality in Britain in the 1970’s. They verses give situations a satire on how some things are accepted while being gay is being viewed as just as disgusting as these other offensive things.
Pictures of naked young women are fun
In Titbits and Playboy, page three of The Sun
There's no nudes in xxx News our one magazine
But they still find excuses to call it obscene
Read how disgusting we are in the press
Telegraphs, people and Sunday Express
Molesters of children, corruptors of youth
It's there in the paper, it must be the truth
This song was banned from BBC’s radio stations.
“I had a nervous breakdown when I was 16, largely due to the stress of growing up gay, which was illegal back then”
-Tom Robinson
This is clearly where the inspiration for writing this song came from. Tom Robinson speaks about the effect ‘Glad To Be Gay’ had on the British public and how the changes that were wished for in his song came true and are now a reality in The Guardian newspaper.
I'm now married with kids, but Glad to Be Gay was about anyone who didn't conform, from lesbians to transgenders, a way of recognising that most of us have complex sexualities. I never imagined that, 35 years later, it would be called the gay national anthem, or that we'd have openly gay pop stars and a Tory prime minister campaigning for gay marriage
Political protest songs have a clear effect on society songs that begin with a single vocal line can be learned and sung by thousands, by the masses. It is completely wonderful the clear influences and impressions a poem and a melodic line can play in mass culture. Music touches the souls it creates a voice for the everyday man, awareness without hurting anybody or intimidating people, a beautiful simple yet effective way to portray and create awareness of problems that could go un-noticed or purposely ignored.

"A protest song is a song that's so specific that you cannot mistake it for shit"
-Phil Ochs
Bibliography
Negus, Keith. Popular Music in Theory: An introduction. (Cambridge: Polity, 2001) www.newstatesman.com www.woodyguthrie.org www.npr.org www.wsws.org
Bennett, Andy. Cultures of Popular Music. (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008)