Is Protest Music Dead?

Ever since John Lennon and Yoko Ono led a raucous crowd of flower-toting,peasant-bloused hippies in a pot-hazy chorus of "Give Peace a Chance,"it seems to have been a pop axiom: When the United States goes to war, themusicians begin calling for peace.

Opposing war hasn't always been a popular position, but it has created somegreat music. During the Vietnam era, songs like Edwin Starr's War, JimiHendrix's cover of All Along the Watchtower, Funkadelic's Maggot Brainand Wars of Armageddon, Jimmy Cliff's Vietnam, Country Joe and theFish's Fixing to Die Rag, Creedence Clearwater Revival's Bad MoonRising and Have You Ever Seen the Rain?and Marvin Gaye's What'sGoing On turned defiance into a raging, soaring, brave and melancholicgestures of community.

Even our allegedly apathetic post-Lennonist generation has extended thetradition. When Bush Senior sent troops to Kuwait in 1991, rappers Ice Cube andParis trained their verbal guns on the White House in I Wanna Kill Samand Bush Killa, while Bad Religion and Noam Chomsky split a 7-inch into ano-war-for-oil seminar. Antiwar music has become a time-honored balance to"bomb 'em all and let God sort 'em out" fervor. So why, since Sept.11, have we heard so little new music protesting Bush Junior's war on evil?

Artists who were once outspoken peaceniks seem to have lost their certainty,or even switched their position. For years, U2 led crowds in chants of "Nomore war!" during their concerts. But during their surrealistic Super Bowlhalf-time performance this past January, they offered deep ambivalence--a starkdisplay of the names of Sept. 11 victims set to Beautiful Day.

Neil Young's Ohio memorialized Kent State University's murderedantiwar protesters of 1970; his Cortez the Killer condemned imperialism.Now we find him on his post-Sept. 11 cut, Let's Roll, singing,"Let's roll for freedom; let's roll for love, going after Satan on thewings of a dove."

Young wrote the song to honor the heroes of Flight 93, who subdued theirhijackers and paid the ultimate price. But if you believe Let's Roll--withits Bush-reduced ideas of "evil" and "Satan"--is a cry forpeace, you've probably already cleaned out your bomb shelter and reviewed yourduck-and-cover manual.

As Leslie Nuchow, a Brooklyn-based folk singer who has been touring thecountry, says, "Speaking on or singing anything that's critical of thiscountry at this time is more difficult than it was a year ago."

We've seen dozens of acts quietly bury their edgier songs. We've seen radioplaylists rewritten so as not to "offend listeners." And we've seenRepublican officials and the entertainment industry--long divided over"traditional values" issues such as violent content and parentaladvisory stickering -- bury the hatchet. White House Senior Adviser Karl Rovehas been meeting regularly with entertainment industry officials to discuss howthey can help the war on terrorism.

The result? Not unlike the network news, there's been what a media wonk mightcall a narrowing of content choice. Think eagle- and flag-adorned anthologies ofpatriotic music, prefab benefit shows screaming CONSUMER EVENT, Alan Jackson's WhereWere You (When the World Stopped Turning) and Paul McCartney's Freedom.Perhaps this may all be good for the record business, no small thing for anindustry that found itself shrinking by 3 percent -- about $300 million inrevenues -- last year. But it's hardly the stuff of great art.

A Twisted Sense of God

Where are the alternative voices? Let's start with hip-hop, the most sociallyimportant music of our time and, until recently, the most successful. Hip-hop'ssales led the plunge last year--by 20 percent, according to Def Jam founder andrap industry leader Russell Simmons.

And so did its vision. While Congress debated the Patriot Act and air strikesleft Afghan cities in ruins and untold innocents dead, Jay-Z and Nas declaredtheir own dirty little war for the pockets (if not exactly the minds) of theyounger generation.

Jay-Z's dis of Nas, The Takeover, was based on a sample from theDoors' Five to One, an anti-Vietnam War song released during 1968's longhot summer whose title supposedly alluded to a demographic menace: five times asmany people under the age of 21 as over.

Here's Jim Morrison's original:

The old get old
And the young get stronger
May take a week
And it may take longer
They got the guns
But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah
We're taking over!

Here's J-Hova's slice: "Gonna win, yeah!" Released on Sept. 11, hisalbum, The Blueprint, sold 465,000 copies.

Nas came back with Stillmatic, an album seemingly conceived from a marketingblueprint. Over a decade ago, Nas debuted during the height of hip-hop's socialconsciousness. To appease these aging fans, he included songs on Stillmatic likethe decidedly non-flag-waving My Country and Rule, which bravelyask Bush Junior and the secret bunker crew to "call a truce, world peace,stop acting like savages". But kids love that shit-talking, so there's Ether,dissing "Gay-Z and Cock-a-Fella Records." Guess which of these songsgets the most rewinds?

In fact, many musicians are commenting on the war, they just aren't beingheard. On a new album for Fine Arts Militia called We Are Gathered Here ...,Public Enemy's Chuck D has set scathing spoken-word "lectures" torockish beats by Brian Hardgroove. Chuck takes apart the war-mobilization effortand condemns the arrogance of the president's foreign policy on A TwistedSense of God. But while the song will be available as an MP3 on his website,the album has found no distributor yet.

He says, "You got five corporations that control retail. You got fourwho are the record labels. Then you got three radio outlets who own all thestations. You got two television networks that will actually let us get some ofthis across. And you got one video outlet. I call it 5-4-3-2-1. Boom!"

When the World Ends

Message music is being pinched off by an increasingly monopolized mediaindustry suddenly eager to please the White House. At least two of the nation'slargest radio networks -- Clear Channel and Citadel Communications -- removedsongs from the air in the wake of the attacks. Songs like Drowning Pool's Bodiesand John Lennon's Imagine were confined to MP3 sites and mix tapes. Andwhile pressure to maintain "blacklists" has eased recently, thedetente between Capitol Hill, New York and Hollywood -- unseen since World WarII -- has tangible consequences.

Bay area artist Michael Franti and Spearhead were invited last November toplay The Late Late Show With Craig Kilborn. Franti obliged with a new song, BombDa World. Yet the song's chorus--"You can bomb the world to pieces, butyou can't bomb it into peace"--was apparently too much for the show'sproducers. Months later, and only after a Billboard magazine article exposed thestory, the clip finally aired.

"It's funny," Franti says. "In the past, I'd hear somefolksingers singing folksongs or Give Peace a Chance and think, God, thisis really corny. But then you realize, in a time of war, it's a really radicalmessage."

Little wonder that artists have quietly censored themselves. The Strokespulled a song called New York Cops from their album, and Dave Matthewsdecided not to release When the World Ends as a single. It's easier to doan industry-sponsored benefit or to simply shut up and go along, than to fightfor a message and find it pigeonholed.

As monopolies segment music into narrower and narrower genre markets to beexploited, protest music becomes the square peg. Perhaps the question isn't onlywhether protest music can survive the war but whether protest music can alsosurvive niche-marketing.

Take KRS-One's new album, Spiritually Minded. In part a reaction to the Sept.11 attacks, the album reconciles Christian spirituality with a radical notion ofdiversity -- putting together Bronx beats, Cantopop, biblical chapter and verse,and the words "peace" and "As-Salaam Alaikum" in the samesong.

"We live in a Christian nation," he says. "I can only give thepublic that which it can digest. So I put this album out. The door swings open.Christians are like, 'Yeah, wow, KRS! He finally came over.' Now I'm over. Nowlet's talk."

But if this is his most subtle effort yet to promote a message of peace andunity, it is still a record that needs to be marketed. So while Spiritual Mindedhas been a dud in the hip-hop world, it topped the less lucrative Gospel chartsearlier this year.

Even indie labels no longer provide an alternative, says Joel Schalit, theBay Area-based editor of Punk Planet and a member of dub-funk band Elders ofZion. Schalit's new book, Jerusalem Calling (Akashic Books), features a chapterthat indicts the indie-punk scene, a movement which began as a highly chargedreaction to Reaganism and major labels and ended up a calcifying, apolitical,"petit bourgeois" feeder-system for the same majors.

"I think our generation has started to move in the direction offormulating its own distinct progressive political positions, but in manyrespects, I think that the trauma that was Sept. 11 has thus far stopped themfrom doing anything new," he says. "There haven't been people rushingout to print 7-inch singles attacking American foreign policy like there wasduring the Gulf War."

He adds, "A lot of label owners, especially on the independent level,are very concerned that promoting ideology is not the same as promotingart."

If that sounds reasonable at first glance, consider the question that BayArea anti-prison activist and Freedom Fighter Music co-producer Ying-Sun Ho asksin reference to rap: "You don't think a song that talks about nothing buthow much your jewelry shines has a political content to it?"

Acts like Jay-Z are seen as artists with universal appeal, whileniche-marketing lumps together acts that have little in common. The subcategoryof "conscious rappers," for instance, has been used to sell Levi'sjeans and Gap clothing to college-educated, disposable-income-spending hip-hopfans. In this logic, it's not the rappers' message that brings the audiencetogether, it's what their audience wears that brings the rappers together.

Part of the recent wave of "conscious rap" acts promoted by majorlabels, Dead Prez disdains the entire category. Positivity isn't politics,rapper M-1 argues. Hip-hop has not yet produced much antiwar music because a lotof "conscious rappers" were never clear about their politicalpositions in the first place, he believes, and Sept. 11 revealed their basiclack of depth.

"There's a lifestyle that goes with not being aligned with the politicsof U.S. imperialism. It's not just a one-day protest," he says, whileworking in Brooklyn on Walk Like a Warrior, the follow-up to Let's Get Free."We're in a new period. A lot of people are not seeing what has to be andare looking at it from just a red, white and blue angle."

Hard Rain Gonna Fall

But perhaps, in this connected world, we also possess acceleratedexpectations. History shows that radical ideas don't take hold overnight. WorldWar II's hit parade featured sentimental escapism like Bing Crosby's WhiteChristmas and sugary patriotism like the Andrews' Sisters Boogie WoogieBugle Boy.

During the '50s, a progressive folk movement emerged, but it wasn't until BobDylan, Phil Ochs and Joan Baez revived folk amid the early-'60s ferment ofstudent organizing that ideas of disarmament and racial justice began to takeroot.

As Craig Werner, professor of African American Studies at the University ofWisconsin-Madison and the author of A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race &the Soul of America (Plume, 1999), tells me, "The foundation of theanti-Vietnam War music was in the folk revival. It was almost as if there werean antiwar movement that was in place that was doing the groundwork. They'd beenwriting those kinds of songs for years when Vietnam came around."

Werner dates the emergence of anti-Vietnam War music to ex-folkie BarryMcGuire's 1966 hit Eve of Destruction, a song that faced widespreadcensorship. "I was growing up in Colorado Springs, which is a militarytown. The week that 'Eve of Destruction' came out, it broke onto the Top 20charts on the local station at No. 1. And then was never heard again."

That moment is not near in these early days of the war on evil. In the longrun, Nas' My Country and Rule, with their laser focus on cause andeffect, or Outkast's anti-recessionary global humanism on The Whole Worldmay prove to be more prophetic.

For now, confusion and flux and omnidirectional rage carry the day. Bay Arearapper Paris recently addressed the second Bush in What Would You Do, atrack on his upcoming Sonic Jihad album

"Now ask yourself who's the one with the most to gain
Before 911 motherfuckas couldn't stand his name
Now even niggas waiving flags like they lost they mind
Everybody got opinions but don't know the time."

Ghostface Killah seems to have captured the moment on Wu-Tang Clan's Rules.Addressing Osama bin Laden directly about the attacks on New York, he raps,

"No disrespect, that's where I rest my head
I understand you gotta rest yours, too."

But since bin Laden has brought the bombs--Nigga, my people's dead!--it'sofficially on: Mister Bush, sit down! We're in charge of the war.

Healing Force

Still, musicians must do what they do, and the story is not yet over. FolkieLeslie Nuchow believes in music's ability to transform the people who listen toit, and she doesn't waste a lot of time worrying about who will distribute it.Recently, she recorded the mesmerizing An Eye for an Eye (Will Leave theWhole World Blind). Accompanied only by piano, she elaborates on Gandhi'sfamous line mostly in a tortured whisper. It's only available through her website.

Nuchow -- who likes to point out that our national anthem "glorifieswar" but has agreed to sing for U.N. troops stationed in Kosovo later thisyear -- believes music is not merely a product, it's a process. After watchingthe Twin Towers collapse from her Brooklyn building, she spent that eveningagonizing over what to do next. "I kept on saying to myself, what could mypolitical action be?" Then she realized, "I'm a musician. Ri-i-i-ight.Let me do music!"

She went to demonstrations and gatherings, and handed out fliers invitingpeople to come and sing the next morning. About 50 people showed up. They walkedthrough the streets singing This Little Light of Mine, America theBeautiful and Dona Nobis Pacem (Give Us Peace).

"We walked as close to ground zero as we could get, and we sang for thefirefighters," she says. "We sang for the rescue workers and thefirefighters. We went up to the hospitals, and we sang for the doctors, and wesang for the volunteers. And then -- this was the hardest -- we went to sing forthe families who were trying to find out what happened to their lovedones."

Nuchow recalls that the music did exactly what it was supposed to do."People wept. Other people came and joined us," she says. "And tome, that's action. That's making a statement through music, using music as ahealing force."

And for now, perhaps, that's more than enough.

(Jeff Chang can be reached at: cantstopwontstop@mindspring.com)