Subject: No protest songs anymore?
From:
GUEST,Roger the skiffler
Date: 16 Mar 01 - 09:41 AM
According to today's London Times anyway (haven't they looked at the Mudcat Song Contests?)
Story follows:
I wish to register a complaint BY STUART MACONIE There's lots to moan about nowadays so where have all the protest singers gone? In case you haven't noticed, times are bad. And you don't need to be a sheep farmer or a rail commuter or a steel worker or Vanessa Feltz to be reaching grimly for the Prozac. Look out of the window, the country is on its knees. Vast tracts of the countryside are a no-go area, where a few ulcerous sheep and mentally unhinged cows wander aimlessly around behind electric fencing. To call our railways Third World is an insult to the rather good Third World railways. Even the weather has turned biblical, suggesting God has some unfathomable grudge against us. We spent the summer under water, wringing out our mops, knee-deep in bilge, while road hauliers choked the country to death. It's surely only a matter of time before the President of Burkina Faso or Uzbekistan offers us a programme of aid.
So why isn't some long-haired rabble rouser getting up with an acoustic guitar and moaning about it. Never mind where have all the flowers gone; where have all the protest singers gone? "Hate is as nutritious as cyanide," said the great Kurt Vonnegut, "but it is a great motivator." Time was when rage, defiance, even mild irritation, was the great turbine that drove rock music. Everyone was a protest singer because, frankly, contentment was for squares. The status quo was for, er, Status Quo. "What are you rebelling against? What have you got?" replied any self-respecting rocker.
Joan Baez was like a bear with a sore head. Lennon was livid. Bob Dylan was so angry he couldn't sing properly. Punk rock (along with flushing toilets and the victory over Fascism, this was possibly the UK's greatest single contribution to world culture) was entirely the work of really grumpy people.
Look at the Clash. If the Clash couldn't find something sensible to get hacked off about, they would seize on anything. When pushed they either railed against things nobody cared about, such as the abundance of American cop shows on telly (I'm So Bored with the USA), or raked up long- dead causes such as the Spanish Civil War. If they had not split up they would probably have written songs decrying child chimney sweeps or Jack the Ripper.
British political rock in the Eighties was confined to the Labour Party's bland Red Wedge tour, but by contrast even that makes today's pop stars look like people who never leave the house without The Little Book of Calm. David Gray makes the Dalai Lama look abrasive . . . how can anyone be so reasonable? Mariah Carey likes a good strop but only really loses it if she's asked to come down a flight of stairs for a photograph as she was recently ("Ms Carey doesn't do stairs," it was pointed out testily) or finds that her flunky hasn't scattered rose petals in the loo. Even Billy Bragg has moved to Dorset and grows lobelias. Protest has become the modus operandi of fat road hauliers, bloodthirsty toffs or dreadlocked gap-year students who march against globalisation in Nike trainers sewn by toddlers in candlelight. Pop stars seem to have given up on it.
Thank God for crosspatches like Paul Heaton of the Beautiful South. In the past, he's harrumphed in broadest Yorkshire about Barratt houses (Build), Page Three girls (36 D) and affectionate couples (We Are Each Other) — have you noticed you never see him and Bernard Ingham in the same room? — or the Manic Street Preachers whose new record is an hour-long Kevin the Teenager whinge and who, in their press shots, always look like men who have just locked their keys in the car.
If it weren't for them even the once fertile carping ground of white guitar rock would have degenerated into self-absorbed whining about girls. Coldplay's lyrics, for all their metaphysical air, boil down to "She won't phone me back and she's got all my Cure albums".
And don't say we need a good war. We've still got loads of them. OK, so nothing like Vietnam, which was so traumatic that even Paul Hardcastle came up with a hit single about how frightened he was of the draft, even though he lived in Essex and the war had ended a decade before.
The Falklands gave us Elvis Costello's Shipbuilding and Billy Bragg's Island of No Return. But the Kosovo conflict has produced nary a B-side. "We" attacked the Chinese Embassy and deliberately bombed civilian journalists at a TV station and how did pop music respond? With Livin' La Vida Loca. It's good but it's not right, as Roy Walker of Catchphrase would say. The bombing of Baghdad last month caused less of a scandal in pop than Craig David not winning any Brits.
But, hold hard. Maybe it's not that pop has lost its teeth but that the rest of the world has lost its marbles. Maybe pop musicians, unlike the mad people who ring radio phone-ins, have realised that we are adrift in a godless universe and there is really nothing we can do.
Not even the members of Atomic Kitten are so dim to think that the Government can stop it raining. Evidently Richard Littlejohn and Angry of Stourport think they can. Perhaps pop's new resigned, philosophical, thoughtful outlook is progress indeed And, who knows, maybe even now Westlife are planning a ballad called Don't Incinerate Our Woolly Chums or Let Ramblers Run Free. Perhaps Steps are working out a nimble dance routine for their new single Don't Build on the Flood Plain, Baby. Now, does anyone have a rhyme for "bungled privatisation"? Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.
RtS
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