Protest Songs Research

• Protest songs are usually created when people get fed up with the status quo and sing about it. • They are usually written to be part of a movement for cultural or political change, and to stimulate that movement by drawing people together and inspiring them to take action or reflect. • The earliest protest songs can go as far back as the founding of America. • It is possible that the first protest song sung by American soldiers was Free America by Joseph Warren. • Yankee Doodle also finds its roots in this era. It originated as a song sung by British soldiers to mock the Americans. • When the Civil War ended, America became divided by class and race. Protest songs evolved with the music of the early 20th century. • Protest songs developed from the simple, easy-to-learn Civil War-era songs to more complex art at the same time as electrical music. • Billie Holiday’s 1939 song, Strange Fruit, is credited as being the first protest song to take an art form. • 1960s: significant time for artists, with the civil rights movement defining much of what was happening in the media. • A Change Is Gonna Come by Same Cooke was released during the 60s and is considered one of the most famous protest songs. Living as a black man in 60s America, Cooke was no stranger to racism and after being turned away from a whites-only motel in Louisiana, he felt compelled to write about the struggles of African Americans. • 1960s and 70s saw the rise of folk music, and a lot of artists used this acoustic form to share their political views. Bob Dylan is the most famous for folk music. He denied being a writer of protest songs, but produced many songs which were adopted as anthems by civil rights and Vietnam War protestors. • There were fewer protests songs in the 1980s and 90s. This might be because of the end of the Vietnam War giving way to a relatively calmer political climate. However, protest songs did not completely disappear, some notable tracks from these decades include: NWA’s Fuck Tha Police – focused on political brutality and the experiences of black men in the streets of LA, and Rage Against The Machine’s Testify – featured a music video which harshly criticised George W Bush, Al Gore and American politics as a whole. • In the 1990s there was a movement of young feminists associated with aggressive punk-rock music. While the movement was short-lived, it did deliver Bikini Kill’s Rebel Girl, which was later used in a viral Hilary Clinton video.