By Dave Shiflett Protest music isn’t what it used to be. “Steal From Walmart” and even the hundreds of anti-war songs that blossomed in the blood of the Iraq wars don’t approach the societal resonance of “We Shall Overcome” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” as U.K. music critic Dorian Lynskey confirms, and mourns, in “33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day,” (ecco/HarperCollins; 656 pages; $19.99). “I began this book intending to write a history of a still vital form of music,” Linskey writes in his epilogue . “I finished it wondering if I had instead composed a eulogy.” As eulogies go this is a lively and sprawling one, beginning with a chapter on “Strange Fruit,” written in 1939, and ending with largely ignored attacks on George W. Bush’s military policy. “Strange Fruit,” a darkly powerful meditation on lynching, was anything but ignored. It put 24-year-old Billie Holiday on the map and remains vibrant today, thanks in part thanks to the ministrations of arranger Danny Mendelsohn, who initially dismissed it as “something or other alleged to be music.” While protest songs up to that point were “propaganda,” Lynskey writes, this one “proved they could be art.”’ Most protest songs, to be sure, are far less vocally demanding, including Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” written in a New York flophouse in 1940 and borrowing part of its melody from the Carter family’s “Little Darling Pal of Mine.” In a similar sharing spirit “We Shall Overcome” commandeered an 18th century melody and boasts four lyricists, including Pete Seeger, whose rendition found an instant fan in Dr. Martin Luther King. “There’s something about that song that haunts you,” King said, though it did have its critics, not all of them named Bubba. “If you’re going to get yourself a .45 and start singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ I’m with you,” Malcolm X told a Harlem rally in 1964. Lynskey writes passionately and often admiringly but doesn’t stint on the criticism, giving ample praise to Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” but adding that fellow folkie Tom Paxton dismissed “Blowing in the Wind” as “a grocery list song where one line has absolutely no relevance to the next line.” Lynskey also reminds us that Dylan was a master of sometimes clunky contrariness: a few weeks after JFK’s assassination he claimed a strange kinship with Lee Harvey Oswald: “I saw some of myself in him,” he told a New York audience, which rewarded him with a bouquet of cat-calls. Sing-along fans will appreciate Lynskey’s inclusion of Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag,” perhaps most famous for the Fish Cheer that preceded it at Woodstock, which helped launch the F-bomb’s glorious ascendancy. In this case the criticism comes from McDonald himself. “What’s almost unfathomable is the smallness of it,” he says. “It was just another song.” Yet we still remember that Rag, unlike the hundreds (if not thousands) of songs inspired by the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, known in some quarters as the Haliburton Expansion Initiative. Lynskey suggests one explanation: “The nature of the antiwar movement changed dramatically in February 1966,” he writes, “when the Selective Service System extended conscription to the campuses.” In that era singing anti-war songs might be considered an act of self preservation; today, the absence of a draft drains such warbling of urgency and audience. The book ranges far beyond the sixties and includes songs celebrating gay and black pride, protesting apartheid and hunger, and denouncing various meanies including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. There are also amusing non-musical asides, including a fond remembrance of punkster Jello Biafra’s run for mayor of San Francisco, where he took a respectable 4 percent of the vote, though that placed him behind Diane Feinstein and Sister Boom-Boom. (page 316) . Biafra would later say punk was “a close-minded, self-centered social club” and “a meaningless fad.” The theme of smugness and encroaching irrelevance weaves through the book, with Lynskey reminding early on that many protest songs are short on chord changes and long on sanctimony, with fans to match. He characterizes the attitude as: “We understand. We are not like them. We are all on the same side.” He gives a terrific example of another problem: the profundity-groping musician, in this case Steve Earle, who insisted that American Taliban John Walker Lindh was something of a post- adolescent everyman: “I became acutely aware that what happened to him could have happened to my son, and your son, and anyone’s son,” (Page 509) weirdly suggesting a widespread youthful desire to join an ultra-religious warrior group that doesn’t allow you to drink beer, listen to popular music, and stones you to death for unsanctioned sex. Thankfully, we get a more sober and context-setting observation from the voice of reason himself, Keith Richards: “You don’t shoulder any responsibility when you pick up a guitar or sing a song, because it’s not a position of responsibility.” Is protest music dead? The better question, Lynskey writes, is “Is anybody listening?” Not to protest music, it seems, which interrupts the pursuit of unencumbered entertainment. “It is not just that people have lost faith in any performer to help bring about change, it is that they resent anyone who attempts to do so,” he concludes. Perhaps the only way to bring protest music back home is to re-institute the draft.
