Songwriting and Activism: A Young Singer's Efforts to Write Himself into the Traditions of an Activist Group

Abstract

This article examines how music functions as a vehicle by which people may place themselves in social movements. Centering questions of culture, the article describes how an environmentalist group based in the northeastern USA used music to: (1) assert a collective identity; (2) project a past, present and future; and (3) forge relationships among group members and between group members and the general public. Against this background, the article considers how a young activist used music to take on and adapt a movement identity and position himself within the movement's traditions and social relations. In a discourse analysis of a song this young activist composed and performed at the group's summer music festival, the article shows how he adapted a range of cultural resources to reimagine and place himself within the group's relations of time and social space.