I spent many a long evening in smoke-filled rooms in the 70s with fellow lefties (no-one else). It was very comforting and felt fortifying talking revolutionary stuff with co-believers, but getting the message out was a whole nother thing. With singing there's a lot more listening and a lot less arguing, and a few good words in a song can cut through better than all that polemicising in the sweaty upstairs rooms of dodgy pubs after work. I'm definitely for protest songs! Even Vin's anti-abortion jobs, though that does make me want to avoid him. The best songs don't beat you round the head with polemic but deliver their messages more subtly. Would you call Woody's songs about the privations of ordinary people "protest songs?" They make you think. Songs regaling me about how bad Thatcher or the RUC were, etc., engender in me, paradoxically, an odd sort of resistance to the singer. I want ideas, not lessons!