Protest Songs Research Articles

An ‘ordinary man’s’ protest: self-immolation as a radical political message in Eastern Europe today and in the past

The article describes the tradition of self-immolation in Eastern Europe as a form of radical protest during periods of structural crisis. The authors describe cases of self-immolation (Ryszard Siwiec, Jan Palach, Evzen Plocek, Musa Mamut) which took place in the communist period, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. In the context of Eastern European tradition, they also describe the last case of self-immolation, when Piotr Szczęsny set himself on fire in Warsaw in October 2017 to protest against the authoritarian rule of the Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland. After this incident, Piotr Szczęsny and his memory have become an element of the ‘culture of protest’ in Poland. Quotes from his manifesto began to appear on walls and during anti-government demonstrations. Piotr Szczęsny has also become a protagonist of protest songs.

Reading Class Struggle and Promoting Class Consciousness through Bob Marley’s Protest Songs

Reading Class Struggle and Promoting Class Consciousness through Bob Marley’s Protest Songs

The Role of Folk Songs in Social Movements: A Case Study on the Separate Telangana State Formation in India

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Anti-Royalism in Thailand Since 2006: Ideological Shifts and Resistance

ABSTRACT Since the military coup d’état of 2006 and the downfall of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand has experienced chronic political turmoil. Crises of legitimacy expanded to engulf every political institution. This includes the monarchy, usually claimed to be the most “beloved” and “revered” of all institutions, and which has faced widespread anti-royalism since 2006. In this article, it is argued that this recent anti-royalism was neither a well-planned scheme or plot, as claimed by the country’s military junta, nor driven by Marxist or republican ideologies that featured in previous bouts of anti-monarchism. Rather, the new anti-royalism will be shown to have emerged from the royalist hegemony that has been deepened since the late 1970s. Moreover, anti-royalist ideas and expressions have shifted dynamically as society has become more polarised. Thailand’s political conflict is overwhelmingly characterised by contestations over meanings. In this context and in a highly repressive political and legal context, those who wished to challenge royal power used metaphorical ambiguity, jokes, vulgarity and parody on a daily basis. These arts of resistance were reproduced through popular channels which tended to escape state surveillance, for instance, protest songs, poetry, chats at gathering sites, formal and informal speeches, and symbols in both on and offline worlds.

Protest song Masters of War Boba Dylana – analiza luhmannowska

Artykuł interpretuje protest song Boba Dylana Masters of War z perspektywy teorii systemów.

Never a Wasted Hum: The Freedom Singing of Fannie Lou Hamer

This article analyzes the musicality of activist Fannie Lou Hamer's speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. By theorizing her convention testimony as a protest song, I explore how Hamer used sonic techniques such as repetition, voice merging, and vernacular speech not only to argue for greater black representation at the convention but also to dismantle gendered hierarchies of political leadership and center black women's lives inside a utopic vision of the civil rights movement.

Songs of Social Protest

Songs of Social Protest

ПЕСНИ СОЦИАЛЬНОГО ПРОТЕСТА КАЗАХСКИХ ШАКИРДОВ МЕДРЕСЕ НАЧАЛА ХХ ВЕКА (по материалам фонда Оренбургского жандармского управления начала ХХ в.)

ПЕСНИ СОЦИАЛЬНОГО ПРОТЕСТА КАЗАХСКИХ ШАКИРДОВ МЕДРЕСЕ НАЧАЛА ХХ ВЕКА (по материалам фонда Оренбургского жандармского управления начала ХХ в.)

The Last Ballad by Wiley Cash

Reviewed by: The Last Ballad by Wiley Cash Jessica Cory (bio) Wiley Cash. The Last Ballad. New York, N.Y.: William Morrow, 2017. 384 pages. Hardcover. $26.99. Wiley Cash’s third novel The Last Ballad is a suspenseful tale based on a historical event. The novel follows protagonist Ella May Wiggins and a wide cast of narrators, including a northern porter, a wealthy mill owner’s wife, a demoted yet trigger-happy police officer, and an alcoholic monk, through the circumstances leading up to and surrounding the 1929 Loray Mill strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, a small city nestled in the Appalachian foothills and Cash’s hometown. The novel is based on actual events, though unlike some historical fiction, it is not at all dry nor does it spend excessive [End Page 116] time regurgitating monotonous details. Instead, Cash embellishes the lives of Ella May and the other characters, adding layers to their experiences that, even if speculative, seem entirely believable. He flourishes the main historical event with minor plots mostly centered on romantic entanglements, including sordid affairs and tales of good love gone bad. The variety of narrators, their lives, and their perspectives of the circumstances surrounding the mill strike weave together so eloquently that the reader begins to wonder if Cash himself is a descendent of textile workers. He reveals in the afterword that he is, to no surprise. The novel centers around Ella May, who decides to join the National Textile Workers Union, referred to as “Communists” and “Bolshevists” in the newspaper ads taken out by the Council of Concerned Citizens of Gaston County, reasoning that workers should not have to choose between their children’s lives and a twelve-hour shift. Earning nine dollars a week for seventy-two hours’ worth of work, Ella May struggles to care for her four children as a single mother and is pained by already losing one infant son to whooping cough, when she was faced with the choice of working her shift or losing her job at American Mill No. 2, the only integrated mill in the area. After walking away from her position at the mill to join the union, Ella May begins to write and perform protest songs including “Two Little Strikers,” “All Around the Jailhouse,” and most notably “The Mill Mother’s Lament” whose lyrics are haunting. (Cash notes in the afterword that Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger later performed Ella May’s songs, giving voice to an incredibly talented and strong woman that few people ever learn about. Cash confesses that despite numerous connections between his location and family to Ella May’s circumstances, he knew nothing of her tale until he attended graduate school.) [End Page 117] After a violent clash between the union strikers and law enforcement in the Loray tent colony, which left Chief of Police Aderholt dead and several unionizers arrested, Ella May is suddenly thrust into the role of union organizer. Because of her strong belief in racial equality, she ostracizes many potential strikers, but her commitment is strong and she focuses her energy on an integrated union, telling her fellow believers in the labor movement “I’m proud to be with me friends.” Cash’s understanding of the resistance to integration, even in a national organization, is clearly well-researched. Unlike some works of Southern historically-based fiction, he refuses to paint folks with a broad brush. Rather than showing how the entirety of the 1920s South is averse to civil rights, he portrays racism on a more personal level rather than on a systemic front, despite the fact that Jim Crow was certainly alive and well. Cash also wants to show how the tide was changing in the South and how there were those who believed in integration, as represented in Ella May, Sophia, and Kate. To add to the reader’s understanding of the Loray Mill strike and the National Textile Workers Union, Cash intersperses copies of newspaper articles relating to the events. Many of these are calls to action funded by the Council of Concerned Citizens of Gaston County, however others are printed by the union or are general headline news reports. One of the...

We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moverán: Biography of a Song of Struggle by David Spener

<i>We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moverán: Biography of a Song of Struggle</i> by David Spener

From Social Media Space to Sound Space: Protest Songs during Occupy Nigeria Fuel Subsidy Removal

ABSTRACTProtests result from unpleasant situations and the need for change in the social and economic conditions of the people. Music is often employed during protests. Several articles have been conducted on the Occupy Nigeria protest of 2012. However, little has been said about the musical sound space that mobilised the masses to embark on protest marches in Nigeria. This article focuses on sound space as employed during the Occupy Nigeria protest of 2012. It analyses the movements of people from the social media space to a musical space, as witnessed during the protests in Gani Fawehinmi Freedom Park, Ojota Lagos. It further analyses the content of the music of selected musicians, whose music was played, or who personally performed during the protest. Both primary and secondary data were used. The data included interviews with protesters and some musicians in Lagos state, Nigeria. Secondary sources included books, periodicals, journals, the use of YouTube videos of the protesting masses, as well as information sourced from the net. Based on Deprivations-Frustrations-Aggressions and critical discourse analysis (CDA) theories, the findings show that the organised protest started on the media space and was sustained through the sound space at the Gani Fawehinmi Freedom Park. The article further argues that the music space was not a jamboree, but a revolutionary movement against the government of the day in Nigeria.

Manifesto for the New, Political Pop Song

Abstract In order to address the political melancholia and negativity that beset the left, a new type of political pop song must be devised. This manifesto proposes a form of dance-pop that is conceived as a new sort of therapy, designed to combat the atomized, individualized way in which suffering is encountered under neoliberal capitalism. The description of political melancholy and neoliberal subjectivity is drawn from the work of Wendy Brown, Lauren Berlant, Nina Power and Alenka Zupančič. The new, political pop song will have five key characteristics: it will be tragic; it will be affirmative, rather than a song of protest; it will be anthemic and upbeat; it will be in a lyric mode but it will be about collective experiences; and it will spread online virally, via new media.

African-American and Mexican-American protest songs in the 20thcentury: Some examples

African-American and Mexican-American protest songs in the 20^thcentury: Some examples

The Revolution Will not Be Televised: Protest Music after Fukushima. By Noriko Manabe.

Protest music has rarely enjoyed a good press. Even in the 1960s, when it was widely perceived to be enjoying its heyday, its leading representative, Bob Dylan, was quick to distance himself from the genre. Protest music came to be seen as worthy and a bit dull. It was polemical rather than poetical, and in an early version of today’s online echo chambers, was deemed to be preaching to the converted. Audiences were expected to agree with the song and the singer, rather than be moved by them. Despite these poor early reviews, the protest song still features in media coverage, but this time as part of a narrative of decline and neglect. Every year, or so it seems, stories will appear in the press asking after the fate of the protest song. Set against the backdrop of austerity and political dissent, journalists and other commentators will ask: ‘Where have all the protest songs gone?’

Fighting for justice and freedom through music: The case of Thomas Mapfumo, Hosiah Chipanga and Leonard Zhakata, ca. 1988–2015

The pervasive contention in scholarship on contemporary Zimbabwe is that the quintessence of the post-independence Zimbabwean experience consists in unchecked political dictatorship and unprecedented economic regression. This contention derives from the fact that with the advent of independence in 1980, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) regime that replaced the Rhodesia Front (RF) in the corridors of power embarked on a campaign to achieve political hegemony through the entrenchment of patronage, violence and corruption. However, this is not all that there is to the post-independence Zimbabwean narrative. As this article makes clear, the post-independence Zimbabwean experience also speaks to a pro-democracy struggle in which the authors of the Zimbabwean debacle are confronted on various platforms, particularly the protest songs of musicians such as Thomas Mapfumo, Hosiah Chipanga and Leonard Zhakata. Since the late 1980s, these musicians have been relentless in their criticism of the ZANU-PF establishment, its strong-arm tactics and self-image as the indispensable guardian of Zimbabwean interests. This article maintains that through euphemism, ridicule and overt criticism, Mapfumo, Chipanga and Zhakata forge an aesthetic of resistance that exposes and contests the institutionalisation of patronage, violence and corruption in post-independence Zimbabwe.

Radicalism &amp; Music: An Introduction to the Music Cultures of al-Qa’ida, Racist Skinheads, Christian-Affiliated Radicals, and Eco-Animal Rights Militants by Jonathan R. Pieslak

RADICALISM AND CAPITALISM Radicalism & Music: An Introduction to the Music Cultures of al-Qa'ida, Racist Skinheads, Radicals, and Eco-Animal Rights Militants. By Jonathan R. Pieslak. (Music/Culture.) Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015. [viii, 338 p. ISBN 9780819575838 (hardcover), $85; ISBN 9780819575845 (paperback), $27.95; ISBN 9780819575852 (e-book), $21.99.] Illustrations, appendix, endnotes, bibliography, index.Readers like me who enjoyed Jonathan Pieslak's first book Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (Blooming - ton: Indiana University Press, 2009) will be pleased to see he has written another book probing the use of music in communities that we may not consider musical. For Radicalism & Music, Pieslak has chosen to examine four communities and their music, case studies of which make up the first four chapters of the book: (1) al-Qa'ida and jihad-themed anashid; (2) racist skinheads, especially the Hammerskin Nation, and white-supremacist-themed punk, Oi!, hardcore, metal, and softer styles; (3) a group Pieslak calls Christian-Affiliated Radicals that includes the Westboro Baptist Church and their pop song parodies as well as the children's music of Christian fundamentalist groups; and (4) environmental and animal-rights militants, folk-protest songs, and the more recent straight-edge hardcore styles. In the final chapter, Understanding Music's Roles in Radical Culture, and in a closing section that follows, Pieslak reflects on the similarities among his case studies and considers music's ability to shape individuals and communities.Part of the book's appeal is in the opportunity it affords to glance inside communities that we may find repulsive but also fascinating. Each case study opens with a narrated scene that describes a musical moment from the community under discussion: a young Muslim man radicalized by al- Qa'ida committing murder after listening to Islamist anashid; Hammerskins enjoying fellowship at a St. Paddy's Day concert and barbecue; members of the Westboro Baptist Church protesting a Veterans Day celebration with song parodies mocking the filthy morals of America; and a leftwing bookstore hosting a concert featuring protest songs with radical environmentalist themes. He follows each vignette with a historical account of the movement and the use of music within it, and then explores specific examples of genres, styles, bands, artists, labels and fans within the scene. Pieslak's accounts of these subcultures draw on an impressive quantity and variety of primary and secondary sources, including firsthand accounts of community events, interviews, and letters from people involved or formerly involved in them; some of the letters were written from prison, where their authors are doing time for extremist activities.The central thesis of the book is convincing: music is typically a key, defining element in the life of radical communities that does a range of helpful cultural work within them, including drawing in new recruits, building community among members, expressing identity, disseminating beliefs, motivating members to action, and even, in the case of white-supremacist groups, raising money for their cause. An important insight the book offers is that new recruits are not typically drawn into radicalism because of extremist ideas, but because of the relationships they forge, either in person or online, with members. And music often facilitates those initial relationships, for example, as a subject of shared interest online, or through shared experience at a concert. Another chilling similarity among several radicals who engage in violent and criminal activity is the use of music before, during, or after to embolden them in their exploits.The fact that music may play an important role in spurring on members of radical communities to act in disturbing ways for their cause is a central issue that I wish had been treated with more nuance. …

The mobilising of the German 1848 protest song tradition in the context of international twentieth-century folk revivals

AbstractThe rediscovery of democratic traditions of folk song in Germany after the Second World War was not just the counter-reaction of singers and academics to the misuse of German folk song by the Nazis. Such a shift to a more ‘progressive’ interpretation and promotion of folk tradition at that time was not distinct to Germany and had already taken place in other parts of the Western world. After firstly examining the relationship between folk song and national ideologies in the nineteenth century, this article will focus on the democratic ideological basis on which the 1848 revolutionary song tradition was reconstructed after the Third Reich. It will look at how the New Social Movements of West Germany and the folk scene of the GDR functioned in providing channels of transmission for this, and how in this process a collective cultural memory was created whereby lost songs – such as those of the 1848 Revolution – could be awakened from extinction. These processes will be illustrated by textual and musical adaptations of key 1848 songs such as ‘Badisches Wiegenlied’ (Baden Lullaby), ‘Das Blutgericht’ (The Blood Court) and ‘Trotz alledem’ (For all that) within the context of the West German folk movement and its counterpart in the GDR.

A Canção do Senhor na terra dividida: a música engajada dos protestantes brasileiros sob repressão militar e religiosa

Resumo Este artigo examina uma seleção de cânticos protestantes socialmente engajados produzidos nos anos 1970, período em que a polarização cultural-ideológica entre "alienados" e "engajados" existente no circuito da música popular brasileira repercutiu na esfera da música cristã brasileira. O objetivo é averiguar os componentes de nacionalismo musical e engajamento social desses cânticos protestantes e também analisar como essas canções expressavam uma idealização do futuro, "o dia que virá" prognosticado tanto pelas canções de protesto seculares como também pelos cânticos protestantes.

'COME DOWN, O LORD!' MUSIC, PROTEST AND RELIGION IN ZIMBABWE

Electronically recorded Christian music, popularly known as gospel music, has attracted a lot of followers in countries like Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Commentators from the scholarly and journalistic fraternities have approached gospel music as a distinctive genre, one totally removed from secular or profane popular music. This article questions such a rigid dichotomy by analysing the Zimbabwean music scene from the colonial period, and between 1980 and 2000. It probes the relationship between music performance and the social context. The disillusionment with the postcolonial black government receives attention in the examination of the protest song. Gospel music as an avenue of protest is highlighted; while the various categories of performing artists who have derived benefits from gospel music are discussed. The article concludes with a call to scholars in Religious Studies to extend the frontiers by paying attention to developments in popular culture.

Decolonizing Creole on the Mauritius islands: Creative practices in Mauritian Creole

Many Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands have a common history of French and British colonization, where a Creole language developed from the contact of different colonial and African/ Indian languages. In the process, African languages died, making place for a language which retained close lexical links to the colonizer’s tongue. This paper presents the case of Mauritian Creole, a language that emerged out of a colonial context and which is now the mother tongue of 70% of Mauritians, across different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. It pinpoints the residual colonial ideologies in the language and looks at some creative practices, focusing on its oral and scribal aspects, to formulate a ‘decolonial aesthetics’ (Mignolo, 2009). In stressing the séga angazé (protest songs) and poetry in Mauritian Creole in the history of resistance to colonization, it argues that the language is, potentially, a carrier of decolonial knowledges.