People often argue that the youth today are apolitical, apathetic and all-round gobshites that don’t give a shit. Well, if they are, who can blame them.
To look at popular music now and popular music 40 or 50 years ago and you get a very different state of affairs. Rather than songs about being ‘in the club’ or ‘getting slizzard’, we have a generation of music categorised by resisting The System.
Take, for example, The Tom Robinson Band anthem Glad To Be Gay. Released in 1978, over ten years after the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts, it was a scathing attack on the police, media and society for refusing to accept gayness.
“So sit back and watch as they close all our clubs
Arrest us for meeting and raid all our pubs
Make sure your boyfriend’s at least 21
So only your friends and your brothers get done
Lie to your workmates, lie to your folks
Put down the queens and tell anti-queer jokes
Gay Lib’s ridiculous, join their laughter
‘The buggers are legal now, what more are they after?’”
I would struggle to recall a song in recent years with that level of venom. The closest we’ve got to defending gay rights is Lady Gaga, who in Born This Way states rather cryptically that it doesn’t matter if you love him, or capital H-I-M. She may also argue that a different lover is not a sin, but this is still an incredibly ambiguous line. Yes it’s obviously about being gay, but she doesn’t outrightly state that it’s okay to be gay until a revamp of a chorus towards the end.
In all fairness, why should she. This is 2011. When the openly-gay Robinson wrote Glad To be Gay in 1976, things were very, very different. Homophobia was still rife, and it was still illegal to have gay sex with an under-21, five years more than it is for straights. As Robinson states in the second verse, tabloid papers demonised homosexuality a damn sight more than Jan Moir did over Stephen Gateley. Homophobia in Britain today is the attitude of a minority, hence why it’s fine for Gaga to be subtle.
A key difference in this approach to gay liberation in protest songs is a cultural shift. No longer is there a need to right a wrong in society, instead Gaga preaches to her ‘little Monsters’ the importance of self-acceptance and embracing one’s identity as an outsider. This creation of a subculture by Gaga of freaks, gays and Monsters is a coping mechanism that still stands as strong as Robinson’s words.
It is due to this social change from yesteryear that the protest song has diminished. Compared to the racial and gender struggles that our parents fought against and sung about, we don’t have the same massive inequalities in society for people to protest about.
Er, actually, hang on a minute. I seem to be forgetting two vital issues within society, which maybe our forefathers would have written a more potent song or two about.
Iraq and Afghanistan. Two wars, both waged by Western superpowers in countries far away in an attempt to enforce their democratic system. Totally not similar to anything that’s happened before. At all.
To say that people cared more in generations past is to look back on the past is to only tell half the story. There is a reason for apathy, and it seems the reason is that youth culture forgot to give a shit.
In all fairness, resistance through music is only mainstream if record producers realise they’re going to make a profit. For instance, the signing of Jefferson Airplane to a major record label only happened because the music fatcats saw the popularity of the counter-culture in San Francisco and decided to cash in.
It is an unfortunate truth that any music with a political message is never picked up in the charts. Sure, Black Eyed Peas’s Where Is The Love? was a massive hit, but only stood against 9/11, and not about the wars in its aftermath. One could point to Boom! by System of a Down, with lyrics deeply criticising the US and UK’s involvement in Iraq as an outstanding example of telling the Man what for. In fact, the only outright musical statement against the Iraq war was made by George Michael in his video, both lyrically and extraordinarily visually, for Walk the Dog.
How could George Michael get away with this in the eyes of the nervous, money-hungry music monopolies? Because he is British. The prevalent patriotism following 9/11 in America made it incredibly difficult for musicians to criticise the Bush administration and the Iraq War. A country united by the destruction and grief caused by extremists meant that those who spoke against the wars would be demonised, or worse, lose money. Take, for example, the Dixie Chicks. Before 2003, they were one of America’s biggest bands. Whilst on stage at Shepherd’s Bush Empire in the weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq, they proclaimed that they were ashamed that George W Bush came from Texas. Not a song about it, just a statement on stage. Cue fans and radio stations boycotting their music, their releases flopping, and throw a few death threats in for good measure.
The ownership and capitalist interests of music corporations means that songs that attack the status quo are discouraged, as no mainstream label wants to fund a wrong’un. Instead, the protest song is doomed to live out the rest of its days as nothing more than a viral sensation. The notorious Andrew Lansley Rapagainst the Tory minister’s proposed health cuts is more about amount of YouTube hits than Hit 40 UK, and was even chanted at recent protests against the government. It’s witty, incredibly sharp and the amount of political jargon that is rapped out is quite extraordinary.
It may seem like the only option for musical resistance in the West may be through viral protests, but surely a better world would be one where protest songs didn’t exist. As Lady Gaga herself said in a YouTube video directed at President Obama, “my wish for the future is that I won’t have to write protest songs”. No problems, no protest. Here’s to hoping that protest songs die out peacefully, rather than lost to apathy and fearful music conglomerates.
0 Responses to “From ‘Glad To Be Gay’ to ‘Born This Way’: Why the protest song died.”