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Does anyone else find it interesting that despite going through a momentous era of nation wide protests through BLM, Covid lockdown protests, etc. there’s been very little in the way of protest music produced by the culture? This may just be the function of my being mid 30s and being out of touch, but unlike the 1960s-70s which produced some amazing protest music (bob dylan, Nina Simone, Beatles, etc) there’s been…nothing of any note these days. Feels like a cultural wasteland tbh
Is this the youth being a much smaller generation now? Is music too corporate now? Or are the youth simply more conformist and love authority?
Topher's The Patriot released in December 2020 and stirred up some controversy after the rapper performed it on January 6, 2021 at a Veterans for Trump rally and it was pulled from Spotify.
I don't know, maybe these sorts of things have to come from counterculture rather than the dominant culture. That doesn't seem like a very satisfying explanation, but it pattern matches from what I can see.
For another example of this: I think that "Amazonia" and "The Chant" by Gojira are both great protest songs at a musical and lyrical level. The problem is that, in the abstract, opposing the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the Chinese occupation of Tibet is a mainstream opinion. You have to be careful how you express these opinions in the concrete, e.g. it's not mainstream to blame Brazilians or say China Flu, but in the abstract these are establishment opinions. It's like Nixon saying "I, too, want peace!" in 1972-1973.
Such abstract mainstream assent takes the wind out of the sails of protest music, which itself tends to be abstract and cautious, though not always. Rage Against the Machine managed to resist this, but only barely, and post-2008, their "Bring down the system, man!" is very mainstream - just as long as it doesn't actually mean nationalising Amazon/Microsoft/Google or closing Wall Street, because the Democrat (or Tea Party) policies are enough for Change We Can Believe In, and bring down the system as we know it.
It's hard to imagine now, but late 1960s protest music was controversial, was risky, and did make many people suspicious about your character. How many parents still get worried if their kids play Rage Against the Machine or Public Enemy? Only insofar as some parents will worry their kids using naughty words or what could be construed as antisemitic rhetoric ("crucifixion ain't no fiction") or gun violence (one of the very few remaining respectable reasons in liberal reasons to be worried about 90s rap, or Wheatus).
I'd draw a difference between Gojira and RATM, both bands whose musical stylings I quite like, incidentally. With Gojira, I've never got the feeling that political subjects are the primary thing; lyrically it's a part of a greater spiritual/ethical theme, but even beyond that, the actual music seems to come first. With RATM, politics always comes first (and it's worth remembering that RATM's political views in the 90s really went as extreme as they could; they praised Sendero Luminoso, and even within commie spheres that's really the one thing that's guaranteed to get people to go "whoah, that's going way too far, comrade."
Yes, that's a good distinction between the two. I suppose I would classify Public Enemy as closer to RATM, though I haven't listened to a large proportion of the former's songs.
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