In 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day, Dorian Lynskey takes on the popular protest song from the 1930s to the 2000s. These are not, apart from 'We Shall Overcome', the songs that people get together and sing at protest rallies; instead, each chapter uses a specific song by a specific recording artist to highlight the way particular types of music have interacted with particular types of politics in different eras. So, think Motown and civil rights, or arena rock and famine in Africa, or post-punk and the IMF/World Bank. The artists featured are predominantly British and American (with a three-chapter section dedicated to Chile, Nigeria, and Jamaica). They're also predominantly men (Billie Holiday, Zilphia Horton and Nina Simone feature in the first section (1936-1964), and after that the Plastic Ono Band and Huggy Bear are the only groups with women contributors). If you're so inclined, I did make a playlist on YouTube featuring those 33 songs, making this the only review on this blog so far with a multimedia component.
Lynskey is both thorough and insightful when it comes to the tension between the music and the politcs. Although he doesn't feature her in a chapter, the book starts with a quote from Joan Baez: "There are two approaches to music. One is, 'Man, I'm a musician and I got nothin' to do with politics. Just let me do my own thing.' And the other is that music's going to save the world... I think that music's somewhere in between." Which is why 'Street Fighting Man' sounds like a protest song when it really isn't, and 'Born in the USA' sounds like a jingoistic anthem when it actually is a protest song.
He's also cognizant of how the relative wealth and privilege of the rockstar lifestyle is difficult to reconcile with revolutionary politics, how hard it is to enact real change, and how easy it is to become disillusioned with the real process of politics (as opposed to sloganeering). Many a protest singer has given it up in favor of making 'real' music, making real money, or getting stoned/drunk. And I think he makes it very clear the gulf between making a protest record and maybe being heckled or blacklisted in the US, and making a protest record and being tortured to death by reactionaries, as Victor Jara was in Chile.
Frustrated as I am (if you hadn't picked up on it) that he did not include more women artists, I did find Lynskey pretty perceptive when it comes to Riot Grrrl: "As soon as it became fair game for journalists, it collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. And though Riot Grrl was an imperfect movement which deserved close scrutiny, there was still something alarming about the viciousness and intensity of the backlash, and what it meant for any future bands who might want to make a political statement." And, quoting Steven Wells: "[Huggy Bear] have had their ideology combed over, examined, misinterpreted, rewritten and kicked to death a hundred times. Talk about breaking a butterfly on a wheel. If the Clash or Dylan or Bob bloody Marley had suffered such intense scrutiny they would have all failed the examination."
I thought 33 Revolutions was a good, fairly detailed history of political music in the 20th century, and it might even make a good jumping off point for the political history of the time period for someone who's less inclined to history and more inclined to rock. Lynskey did the research, and had a lot of access to the artists -- many of whom come off as total pricks, as you may expect, excepting Billy Bragg, who always sounds like he might be the nicest person ever -- and the result is readable and revealing.
Comments