ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Plugged-in Protest w/ Jeremy Gilbert

Episode Date: January 21, 2024

Music has the uncanny power to stir up big feelings, which makes it an obvious vehicle for political statements of hope, anger, despair, or how to cast your vote. In this Microdose episode to accompany ACFM’s recent Trip on Protest, Jem takes us through 60 years of plugged-in protest music – no strumming folkies or […]

This is Acid Man Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the Weird Left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert. I'm here on my own today. I hope that won't be too disappointing. This is one of our microdose episodes where we like to focus in on a specific theme that we've covered in a recent main episode, what we like to call the trips. And our most recent trip was on the subject of protest, and we thought we couldn't let go the chance to talk about protest music in a little bit more detail. music after all is all about the expression of feelings sentiments vibes what we like to call in the trade affect and because of its incredible power to affect us physically and emotionally music is an obvious vehicle for the expression of any kind of feeling including the mixture of feelings of hope

anger joy fear and longing which all come together to make the experience and the emotional repertoire of all the things we might call protest. Now, I tried to do this in the way that we did one of our previous microdose episodes on the history of folk music with a fairly exhaustive historical look at different ideas and manifestations of protest in music and music culture, going back historically up to the present. And I realised it was going to take like four hours. And while we would love to put together a whole little mini-series on the subject, we don't really have the capacity to do that right now. So instead, this is going to be pretty arbitrary.

It is basically going to be me picking out 15 tracks from 1969 up until 2023, that all have some sort of protest or explicitly political theme, arguably, and talking about them. Now, the thing we're really not going to cover there is the sort of, of protest music tradition, meaning basically folk music with political lyrics, because we did talk about that quite a lot, or rather I did, on the Microdose episode on folk music from a couple of years ago. The history of what we might call protest music in some general sense is very old. You can trace it back really to lyrics we still have in historical documents from the early 16th century. If you're interested in learning a little bit about that history, I would

recommend having a look at a couple of academic archive websites that are very easy for anyone, academic, non-academic, to have a look at and browse. Really fascinating stuff. One of them belongs to a research project based at the University of East Anglia called Our Subversive Voice, and that is an archive of the lyrics of English protest songs going back centuries. And the other is the University of California at Santa Barbara's English broadside ballads archive. A broadside ballad is an old term for all intents and purposes, a protest song. And that also features lots of recordings of people singing these songs. So really interesting stuff. Have a look at that if you want to learn a bit more about the

early history of this idea. Before I get into the meat of the episode, let me remind you that you can get even weirder and even leftier by subscribe. to our newsletter. We have an email newsletter. It only goes out about once a month, once a month, has lots of extra stuff in it. Bonus content and updates from the ACFM crew. Just go to Novara.commedia slash ACFM newsletter. Conversely, if you want more music and less chat, you can follow the ever-expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify. And our specialist music microdose episodes actually get their own playlists. So all the tracks on that folk music microdose are in a dedicated Spotify playlist, the ACFM folk music playlist and the

tracks that I'm going to play today. If you want to hear them all in full, you want to play along while you're listening to the podcast and listen to the full tracks. Then you can probably do that on the Spotify playlist, which we will put together for this episode. At the same time, do you keep in mind that if you like the show, which is quite a lot of work, we don't get that much pay for it, then please leave us a five-star review on whatever platform you listen on. And keep in mind that, you know, we're not actually asking for your opinion of the show. We're asking you to help us duke the stats, to work within the rules of the algorithm game to get them before they get us. Come on, it's easy to do on any platform you're listening to

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one pound a month by going to navara.comedia slash support. Now, okay, let's get on with the show. What's the first track I'm going to play? I'm going to play Marlina Shaw. woman of the ghetto from 1969. Let's hear a bit of it. Now how do you legislate brother, listen to me. How do you

legislate, brother, when you're free one man and try to chain up the other? Tell me, tell me, legislator. How does your heart feel? Okay, Marlina Shaw's a jazz and soul singer. And this is from, I think, her first LP.

And it really is a remarkable record that absolutely stands up today. The production on it is fantastic. The lyrics are extraordinary. We will be talking quite a lot about lyrics today, which is ironic because in my academic career, somebody who's written about theorized music, I have been one of the people always championing the idea that really the politics of music resides in its sounds more than its words. But it's interesting to think about lyrics sometimes.

So a lot of what we will be thinking about today is lyrics, although I'm trying to select tracks, which all I think have some really interesting sonic qualities. And this one definitely does really extraordinary piece of music. And the lyric is phenomenal. a song directly addressing itself too, as the lyric puts it, legislators appealing for some consideration of the status and condition of poor people in the ghettos, especially women and children. Absolutely an expression of what we might today call an intersectional politics long before. That term was coined really and a fantastic dance floor record that still absolutely came. hills every time I play it or anyone else does, I think. Really fantastic. I really don't know.

I mean, why this record should be less well known than any other record from the 1960s. Well, we know why, because it's done by a black woman and not by a white guy from Surbiton. But that's not a good situation. It's one that we should seek constantly to overcome. So, fantastic. Of course, all that raises some interesting questions about what we even mean by protein. in music and as we said on the show there's a very unstable distinction to be drawn between protest politics and revolutionary politics or subversive politics and when we're talking about protest music well it's really it's very interesting to think about whether protest music even really exists as a distinctive category at all in the whole

field of post-1960s popular music because on the one hand well on the one hand there was this very specific genre of what people call protest music, which is basically folk music with explicitly political lyrics. And that still exists today. You get people like the British singer Grace Petrie still doing that kind of work very eloquently. On the other hand, it's worth reflecting that in a certain sense, the dominant theme of popular music from the early to mid-60s onwards, at least for several decades, the two dominant themes, really are romantic love, on the one hand, or other forms of youthful complaint about the condition of society. Whether it's Bob Dylan in his late 60s songs, no longer being

explicitly political, but still moaning and moaning about the general sort of shallowness and awfulness of people in contemporary society, whether it's Mick Jagger whining about how he can't get any satisfaction in 1965, whether it's the smitherto. Whether it's the smitherto, myths, you know, with their kind of pained elegies to the passing of whatever it is that they are actually mourning the passing of in the early 80s. I don't think they were at all clear themselves what it was, although one might have some suggestions to make. Whether you can also think of all that as basically different kinds of protest music, I think, is worth reflecting on. And I think maybe you can make that case. And I think you can make a case that really

that is the case up until sometime in the 90s at which point within rock and pop the lack of faith young people have in the whole idea of democratic politics or a shared culture means that a lot of that energy goes out of the music whereas in certain strands of music particularly hip-hop and other kinds of rap the idea of music as a vehicle for political expression retained a degree of strength and potency. But I think it's very hard to generalise about all these things. And I'm not going to try to give a kind of coherent historical account or a coherent theory of protest and music. I am here running just going to play some interesting records, all English language

records and records that have sort of political themes, explicitly political themes, whether or not we can really call them protest records or not. So what will be the next one I'm going to play? Well, the next track I want us to hear is one that very much, actually, very much derives from that tradition of protest music, capital P, capital M, people strumming guitars, singing songs of social protest. But it's a cover of one of those songs. There's a whole musical industry, really, a whole genre, if you like, of Bob Dylan cover versions. And this is one of the most unusual and one of the most extraordinary, I think. This is Iggy and the Stooges doing their cover of The Ballad of Hollis Brown in 1973.

The ballad of Hollis Brown is one of Dylan's darkest protest songs. It is a song telling the story of a very poor family, and I think the story is that the guy shoots himself and his family because they're basically starving. So it is a description of a condition of abject oppression and poverty which must be understood as a protest against the conditions producing it. This particular track, Iggy and the Stooges, arguably the key proto-punk band, originating from Detroit at just the same time,

the Black Sabbath were also developing a kind of heavy rock out of the experience of living in post-industrial Birmingham. The Stooges on this track, they really anticipate in many ways what would become key sonic features of goth rock in the early 80s, this kind of picking, arpeggiated guitar sound, this very dark sound and this very dark lyric overall. Of course, all that is offset by this very jaunty sort of organ playing, which sounds more like Jonathan Richmond and the modern lovers,

producing overall a very haunting, very interesting effect and a really extraordinary piece of music. From the following year, 1974, this is one of my absolute favorite explicitly political reggae tunes. A lot of reggae can be heard as sort of protest music, but it is also quite clearly music which is intended to inspire its audience to engage in some form of collective social struggle. Whether reggae music is usually actually protesting in the sense of pointing to an injustice

which the listener can be expected to agree as an injustice and which some figure of authority might be expected to do something about, or whether it is more like a kind of revolutionary music, appealing to its listeners to work together to overthrow the existing order. I mean, that is all debatable. But this is an interesting example of a reggae song, classic reggae tune, which has a very explicit, specific socio-political theme, but really loses none of its power or humor in the process.

And of course this is an incredibly contemporary theme, even though this record is from 1974. This is a record I've been playing a lot when DJing recently for fairly obvious reasons. This is Max Romeo Rent Crisis. That's the only time me and him a friend But that friendship only lasts for three weeks Last three weeks time they rent you again Say a song about the excessive rent and the depredations of landlords From 1974, Kingston, Jamaica

are absolutely relevant in the London of 2023 And in almost every town and city now in the developed world a fantastic little anthem. I love that. Okay, well, if we're going to talk about protest music or political music of any kind in the 1970s, or we can't avoid, of course, talking about punk rock. Of course, the actual politics of punk

is always very complicated, quite ambivalent, often contradictory. Punk always had a highly reactionary dimension to it with its idea of going back to some imagined primitive form of rock and roll, moving away from the avant-gardeism of bands like Pink Floyd and the other progressive rock at. On the other hand, it always had also an incredibly democratic dimension, and it opened up a whole field of musical possibilities during the so-called post-punk era. Punk really, I think, was a sort of what Raymond Williams would call a structure of feeling, a pattern of emotional and effective responses to the world

which could take on quite different specific political forms and connotations. I think it's always worth reflecting that, for example, the Sex Pistols song, Anarchy in the UK, the great punk anthem. If you actually listen to the lyrics, the lyrics are not, as is often assumed, an evocation of anarchist politics. The lyrics are mocking political extremism, sees it basically. They're mocking groups like the Angry Brigade, basically. And the same album

that that song appears on, never mind the bollocks here, the sex pistols, includes an anti-abortion anthem called Bodies. On the other hand, on songs like God Save the Queen, the pistols gave voice to the sense of anger, which was growing amongst young people as it became apparent that the terms of the post-war settlement were being torn up by those with the power to do so and the future which had been offered to the boomers was not

going to be offered to anyone else. So, punk can go in all kinds of different directions but I think one of the greatest, I would say maybe the greatest, British, and maybe I'm not sure of British is even the right term, actually, explicitly political punk rock

anthem, to my mind, is this record by a band from Belfast in Northern Ireland it's a stiff little fingers alternative Ulster from 1978 let's hear a bit of that There's nothing far

ice in Belfast the pounds on Mad to Petit of case it's a chatting and bagger and then you walk back to the set we ain't got nothing but they don't really care and don't even know you know they're just want money

we can take and I'll leave it what we did Fantastic lyrics of you're going to lie to the monster. Fantastic lyrics on that record. They say they're a part of you. That's not true, you know. They say they've got control of you. That's a lie, you know, etc.

Really, and a call to arms to the audience to build the kind of world that they want to see in the face of prejudice, bigotry, oppression, the state forces and capital. capitalism. That really inspiring stuff. Musically, a kind of genius, actually. The use of open chords and that famous opening few bars of that record is still just

really inspiring and slightly haunting as well. Truly remarkable piece of music. I still love that record. It's one of the few pure punk rock records I still think is quite danceable. The next record I thought we would play is one which was a big chart hit at the time. It will be familiar to many people, but it has a definite contemporary resonance today for fairly obvious reasons. And also it's a little bit been in the news, or at least the music industry news, in recent years. This is Elvis Costello in The Attractions from 1979, Oliver Zon.

me. Don't start the talking. I could talk on night. My mind was sleepwalking while I'm putting the world to write. Call Korea's information. Have you got yourself an occupation? All of us all is you to stay. All of us are underway and I would rather be there.

Now this song Oliver's Army, I mean, it's often quite obscure to people what it's about, even though you can definitely get a sense just from the tone of the lyrics and the passion in the melody, you get a sense of what it's about. Well, it's specifically a reflection on the growth of the kind of mercenary, private, security. straight military industry, which Costello was already reading about at that time in 1979. Of course, that has now become a key feature of global military affairs. So it was a very prescient thing to be thinking about even then. The phrase Oliver's army, according to Elvis Costello, is actually a reference to Oliver Cromwell

and the fact that within, in Ireland, and Elvis Custello, I think his parents are from Ireland, In Ireland, to this day, Oliver Cromwell, one of the leaders of the English Revolution against the monarchy in the 1640s and 1650s, is remembered as this sort of hate figure because the Protestant army led by Cromwell did terrible damage to people in sort of subjugating Ireland and imposing a much more severe colonial regime on it than had been in place already. in the 1640s, 1650s. So the idea of the colonial army are coming and really wrecking people's lives is bound up with the figure of Oliver Cromwell in the Irish historical imaginary. And it's this idea which the song is about.

But the song is also about the way in which poor working class English people guys are themselves thoroughly exploited by the deployment in these very very. various post-colonial, or just neo-colonial, neo-imperialist arenas. The song refers to boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the time being deployed in Palestine and in Johannesburg. The song's been newsworthy recently because it does contain a line that contains the

N-word. I'm not going to say on the show, so I don't want to offend anyone. That led to some people criticizing Elvis Costello. the grounds that no person or at least no white person should ever say that word in any artistic context to the point where i believe he has now withdrawn the song from his any of his life sets going forward i would have to say i do think i think that's kind of a shame because the use of the n word in the song is fantastically powerful that the actual line the notorious line is all it takes is one itchy trigger one more widow one dead white end word and yeah the point

being made there is the fact that the class position of the soldiers who are losing their lives in these mercenary neo-imperialist conflicts makes them effectively, you know, puts them effectively in the same position as black people in a way that ought to, you know, it ought to provoke solidarity. Maybe it would if they have the opportunity to express it. So it's a very powerful line, very powerful image. Extraordinary piece of music. And also, notable, of course, for the fact that this very somber lyric is offset by this incredibly upbeat sort of disco-abber-influenced backing track, you know, music and the tune and the use of the pianos in particular make a sort of dance floor pop tune.

Really extraordinary piece of music and a really interesting synthesis of different elements that sadly retains a great deal of relevance today, decades on. after it was first released. As does the next record I'm going to talk about. Another British political record from a couple of years later, four years later, in 1983. So I'm going to play a Pink Floyd track. Now, Pink Floyd are a fascinating British musical institution

and no element of their story is more fascinating than that of the story of their lead singer for most of their career as a band, although he's been a solo artist for decades now. Roger Waters. Roger Waters is the guy who wrote most of the songs up until the mid-70s, and then from 77 to 83,

he wrote all of the songs to the point where the rest of the band were getting sort of fed up with being the backing band for what seemed to have become a sort of Roger Walter's solo project. So from 77 to 83, Waters' rights basically several, albums worth of material and then as a solo artist he carries on doing so into the 80s and afterwards and typically these records contain they typically they are concept albums in other words they have a linked theme and sometimes an actual story linking the songs together and they deal with these very complex political social themes in some ways the most extraordinary

example from our contemporary vantage point is Waters' solo album from the mid-80s Radio K-A-O-S which I'm not saying is like a fantastic record musically. I mean it does what it does which is a very distinctive kind of white rock with a heavy emphasis on the lyrics but what it does with that form

is it tells this story about a kid in a wheelchair who hears radio waves in his head who can act as a kind of radio and TV receiver. And the whole song dramatises the emergence of a world in which human subjectivity is being remade by the globalisation of network communications. And this is before the internet. This is before social media.

It's really sort of extraordinary. And similarly, the album, which the song I'm about to play appears on, is a really incredible sort of musical essay on British politics and culture at the time when it comes out in 1983. The album is Pink Floyd, The Final Cut, subtitled A Requiem for the Post-War Dream. And the theme of the album is precisely the sense that the consequences of Thatcherism are the ending of the post-war dream of a stable, secure society characterised by relatively social equality, relative peace and security for most people, of a kind which most human beings through most of human civilisation have not really known. It is a really extraordinary

theme and the record does manage to evoke it quite well. And it's very ahead of its time. I mean, really, a few leading edge political commentators around this time on the left, as Waters is, had really grasped the consequences, the historic consequences of the end of the post-war settlement. People like Stuart Hall and Eric Hobsbom, but lots of people still hadn't. People like Tony Ben definitely hadn't got the message that it was over, basically.

Whereas Waters, as anguished as he is, by that recognition, realizes that and, you know, things about it. What's also kind of extraordinary is, painful, like they come out of the London counterculture of the late 60s. And within that current, really, the attitude of most singers and lyricists to the post-war British culture was just utterly condescending. You can think about the kinks, you know, and Ray Davis's endless songs about how awful

people in the suburbs were and how much, implicitly, how much cooler he is than them. You can think indeed about Mick Jagger whining about how we can't get no satisfaction, despite being, I think, about 25 in 1965, which is like the single luckiest age to have been in the whole of human history forever. And it's interesting to note that a theme of popular musical protest throughout that period and up until the late 70s, really, a persistent theme is just people complaining about being bored, about life being boring. From the stooges to the adverts, and there are many other examples, there are a lot of. Lots of songs where people are basically complaining that life under late-Fordidist capitalism is too boring. The whole point of this record is to really reflect on the fact that, well, what might seem boring to a privileged young people growing up in the 60s and 70s was actually, you know, a sense of security which many generations of working people had struggled for up until World War II and which the people who fought World War II, saw themselves as having thought for and was really something to be mourned if it was going not

something the passing of which should be celebrated i think maybe the most moving a song giving voice to that sentiment on the album is this one this is the gunner's dream goodbye max goodbye more after the service When you're walking slowly to the car And the silver in her hair shines in the cold November air You hear the tolling bell And touch the silk in your lapel As the teardrops rise to meet the comfort of the band

So on The Gunner's Dream, Waters imagines I mean, the scene, the song, I think, does deserve, the lyric deserves quite careful parsing. So a gunner, somebody on a fighter plane, evacuates, you know, ejects from a plane during the war. And as they eject, they dream, they imagine, they think about what kind of a society they hope they're going to live in after the war. And the scene then shifts to what seems to be a Remembrance Day service, a service, a service. remembering fallen soldiers on Remembrance Day, which is still something that happens every November in the UK. And there is this reference to the fact that the Gunner's Dream,

the dream is of a world in which people have a place to live, enough to eat, somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street, somewhere where everybody has recourse to the law, and no one kills the children anymore. Very sort of moving stuff, very politically perceptive, and fairly typical of waters. Of course, Roger Waters, he is this fascinating figure. He's hugely popular, more so, I think, in places like Spain and Brazil and the States and in Britain.

But he's still really, he still packs out stadiums in Britain as well when he has this very devoted following for very understandable reasons. Because if you're a certain kind of person, especially, but not exclusively, a certain kind of white man who really sees white rock as your organic cultural form, then he's the guy who. who has used white rock as a cultural form to really give voice to highly sophisticated, anti-capitalist democratic critiques of contemporary capitalism and its political, cultural and social forms. Waters is also an incredibly wealthy guy.

The Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon was for many, many years, the best-standing record in the world at a time when that meant you had sold a lot of records. Both as a touring band, and as you know through selling albums Pink Floyd have made huge amounts of money he hasn't been a member of Pink Floyd for decades

but he owns the publishing rights on most of the songs so both as a solo artist and as a former member of Pink Floyd the guy has made millions to millions to millions in recent years he's had a bit of public attention because the political cause in the past few years with which he's the most obviously associated

is Palestine's solidarity and he was one of the public figures just a year ago who was subject to a wave of attacks by pro-Israelis, pro-Israel, commentators and lobbyists. Of course, one wonders whether anybody's going to be pilloried for supporting the Palestinian cause to the same extent after what's happened in Gaza over to the past few months. But it's extraordinary, given all that,

that he doesn't have any sort of presence at all in British public life. And to the best of my knowledge, none of his hundreds of millions of dollars have ever been donated to leftist or radical causes, at least in Britain. I think he gives a lot of money to causes in Palestine. But I mean, this is a real problem for the left in Britain that it's just not normal to have to function the way in which we do. In countries like even the United States, it's just normal that you've got at least a handful of like really, really rich people who support the radical left. I mean, I've said this before, but projects like Navarra Media and the world transformed, if they were happening in the States or in most European countries, like some rich left-wing millionaire would have given them like a big chunk of money by now at some point.

And this just doesn't happen in this country. And it doesn't happen because even the people you would expect to be our rich left-wing people, like waters just don't seem to be interested in actually supporting anything. So Roger, if you're out there, come on, man. Put your hand in your pocket. Give Navarra some money. Yeah, Waters himself has done a great work of kind of public political education for his audience through his albums over the years.

But come on, some of us are struggling out here, man. Anyway, moving on from that, I'm going to play a record. from the following year from 1984. Can we call this a protest record? I think we certainly can. It was certainly understood as such at the time when it was released, although it was also much more than a protest record.

It was a song about liberation, self-imantipation, but also about the things from which certain people have to try to emancipate themselves. This is Bronsky Beat, Small Town Boy. Run away, run away, run away, run away. Run away. legendary British synth duo, one of the exponents from the golden age of British synth pop, the singer, the National Treasure Jimmy Somerville, Scottish, gay, leftist icon. The other group he formed was called the Communards, which I've always thought is one of the greatest left wing names for a band.

And Bronsky B, really, really important band. One thing to note about them is that at this time, say from 81 to 84, the British charts and to some extent also the American charts are full of these groups, many of whom originate socially to some extent in the London gay club scene. And even if they don't, and their music owes quite a lot to that scene. We're talking about soft sell, the Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, Culture Club. Even in the case of Culture Club, Boy George, although he was one. referred to as a gender bender and he was understood to be a queer figure in some sense.

The sort of public mythology about Boy George was that he was simply asexual. As for the rest of those figures, people like Neil Tennant, people like Mark Olman, today queer icons or, their sexuality was not talked about much. Figures like them, even like Morrissey, they were understood to be sort of transgressing some traditional masculine norms, but they were understood to be sort of transgressing some traditional masculine norms, but they weren't clearly recognised by their teenage audiences as gay, for the most part. This was not true of Jimmy Somerville and Bronsky Beat. Their first album was called Age of Consent with a very clear political message

because at that time, the age of consent for gay men was still five years older than that for straight people. And their album had on the cover the Pink Triangle, the Gay Liberation Sim. of the time. Now this song is, in some ways, quite sad, a poetic reflection on the experience of growing up as growing up gay in a small town, although those exact, that exact phrase is never used, but it's pretty clear what the meaning is.

Of course, it's a song, because it's not explicitly about being gay, and pretty much anyone who might have grown up lonely and frustrated in a small town can directly identify with, And the soaring sound of the chorus, although the lyrics remain quite sad, the soaring sound of the chorus clearly evokes that feeling of escape, which so many people, especially queer people in the 70s and 80s, were experiencing, well, let's say the 70s in particular, people were experiencing as they left conservative provincial areas and went to live in the more cosmopolitan cities. This is a classic narrative of gay self-imansipation at that time. The record itself is just tremendously important historically, along with Georgioma Roda's production on Donna Summers' I Feel Love. It's this record really, which is one of the key templates for all subsequent trance music.

Like trance in all of its forms, I think almost all owes some kind of a debt to this exact record. honestly, even though very few trans records have ever come close to the sole searing intensity and authenticity of this particular record, Small Town Boy. It's still, to this day, an absolute dance floor banger and I really think it might have a claim to be the greatest British pop record ever made, possibly. I do like making those sorts of claims, if only to provoke people. Small Town Boy, really extraordinary stuff. And I'm going to play another record from 1984.

The big list of records I made that I could have talked about on this show that would have taken four hours to go through all the way. The big list actually has more records from 1984 than any other year. And it is worth reflecting. The 1984, 85, 86, it does represent a sort of peak. 84, I think, is a sort of peak for global single sales, or at least single sales in States and America. It's the period when Michael Jackson's Thriller being released,

which I guess is 83, is this kind of huge public event. It is the period when pop music seems to occupy this status as a sort of shared culture, which is participated in by millions of people, especially young people. And so it's understandable that while pop music has this status as sort of the public sphere for lots of people, people who have some sort of political point to make

might try to make it in that. arena and people working in that arena might feel some sort of responsibility sometimes to make political points. Maybe no better example of that, a more explicit example of that, can be found than this, often forgotten these days, but absolutely fascinating record. This is Grandmaster Flash and many-mell Jesse. A stronger nation at any cost Let's talk about Jesse Even if it means that everything will soon be lost

Let's talk about Jesse You're starting on the bottom Now he's on the top He proved that he can make it so Don't ever stop We'll stay together and let the whole of sea I'm with the Jesse Jackson Come down in history

So ho Both There we go. Extraordinary record. And yes, in case you're wondering, that is a campaign song for Jesse Jackson's campaign to get the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1984. It's a record which definitely does include strong protest elements,

very direct critiques of Reagan and Reaganism and the consequences thereof, as well as, to some extent, it's militarism and nationalism. But the chorus, The chorus is vote, vote. Everybody get out and vote. Well, actually, I don't know if, is that the chorus, there are several choruses actually, the arrangement of the record, as is quite normal on these early hip-hop records, doesn't follow a standard AB chorus structure. It's very interesting. And it's really fascinating to think. Jesse Jackson was not, he did not become the Democratic nominee. Walter Mondale did. So this wasn't during the presidential campaign. So this must have been a record for the primary campaign to try to get Jesse Jackson the Democratic nominee. So you've got Grand Master Flash and Medimel, probably the most famous hip-pop artists of their moment, the first big stars of hip-hop ever, doing a record explicitly calling on people to go out and participate in a primary campaign.

It really makes you wonder, like, if hip-hop stars had done more to advocate for participation in the Democratic primaries in 2020, would Bernie have finally got the nomination? The answer is no, but it's still interesting to think about. It is interesting to reflect upon the place of the Jesse Jackson campaigns to get the Democratic nomination in American radical history. So in both 1984 and 1988, Jesse Jackson, a hero of the civil rights movement and a leader of black radicalism in the United States, tries to get the Democratic nomination for the presidential elections and is unsuccessful in both cases.

most commentators think he came closest to being successful in 1988, but the first campaign is in 1984. The phrase, rainbow coalition, which first starts to be used in the early 70s, acquires its widest circulation and popularity during this period. Jesse Jackson calls his campaign for the nomination in 84, a rainbow coalition. The idea of the rainbow coalition is that all these different social groups,

gay people, black people, young workers will be brought together in a broad coalition for a radical democratic, social democratic programme of reform to push back against Reaganism and restore and extend the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. In 1988, in particular, Jackson gets arguably pretty close to getting the nomination and I think he maybe could have won the presidency against the completely charismaless vice president George H.W. Bush, but instead the democratic establishment, which is consolidating around an increasingly neoliberal agenda, make sure that he doesn't get it. Instead, the nomination goes to the equally charismatic Michael Dukakis, who proceeds to lose. One of very few candidates from an opposition

party to have lost after a president that, you know, a party has had the presidency for two four terms already in recent decades. I would say a couple of things about the Jesse Jackson campaign and its place in our recollections of American radical history in the past few decades. One is that I thought a lot of the commentary coming out of the American millennial left, if you like, the Jacobins and the podcasts during the Bernie years. was just seemed to be completely ignoring the precedent of the Jesse Jackson campaigns. I mean, people kept going on about Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate in the early 20th century

who got something like 4%. And as far as I could tell, that's just because Debs called himself a socialist and Bernie called himself a socialist. The times being what they were, Jackson would not call himself explicitly a socialist. But his program was probably no less radical than that of Bernie Sanders, and the historic implications of being winning would have been no less significant, I think. And the campaign, I think, is also very significant because really the defeat, the suppression of his bid for the Democratic nomination in 1988, I think really does mark a sort of historical end point for almost a century of black radicalism in the United States. Rather, it represents a historic defeat, which is more or less equivalent in importance to the

defeat of the minors in Britain in 1984 to 85, that it's within a few years of that defeat, you've got the Clinton administration imposing draconian legislation on black populations to massively increase the prison population, for example. And you've also got, frankly, hip-hop music by the early 90s abandoning its political vocation in most instances for a more or less enthusiastic embrace of a certain version of neoliberal subjectivity in the idolisation of the idea of the gangster. And I think the Jesse Jackson campaign itself occupies an important place in that history. And it is really fascinating to know that during that first campaign in 84, the key stars of

hip-pop at the time made this record explicitly advocating and encouraging people. to go and vote for him in the democratic primaries, if only enough of them had done for him to have won. Okay, we'll come back to hip-pop and the early 90s in a moment, but I thought before that we would play the also historically fascinating record, Midnight Oil's Beds Are Burning from 1987. We should hear a bit of that, at least a bit of the chorus. So Midnight Oil is this Australian rock band and this record was released in 1987 and it is an appeal for Indigenous rights. The record is singing, you know, is saying that the Aboriginal people in Australia should be, you know, have their land rights restored and should have some kind of reparations paid to them for the century of mistreatment at the hands of the colonizers, really.

And the record became this international hit. It went to number one in places like Canada and South Africa, where its anti-colonial message had a certain resonance with large audiences. But it charted highly in the States, I think got to number six in the UK. I remember seeing it on sort of chart television and thinking, this was sort of extraordinary. I'm not sure that everybody buying the record understood what it was about. I remember being told, I might be misremembering this,

but I don't think 87 is. too early for this. I think I remember being told by a friend that they thought the record was about pollution and we wouldn't have used the phrase climate change at the time but interesting the chorus lyric how can we sleep when our beds are burning that would be a fantastic metaphor for people being apathetic about climate change but actually the record was about indigenous rights in Australia either way it's a very rousing chorus and it's a very example of soft rock as a political vehicle, which is something fairly typical of this moment, the post-band-aid moment in English language rock music. You've got people like John Cougan

Mellon-Camp producing what are clearly sort of protest records in a pretty soft rock idiom in the late 80s, in a way which is historically quite unusual. On the other hand, if you are looking for music, which becomes a vehicle for explicit, both political protest and the expression of radical revolutionary sentiments in the late 80s and early 90s, then the first place you are going to look is hip-hop. This was the so-called golden age of hip-hop. We could play many examples.

We played public enemy on the show. We could play early NWA. We could play Tribe Call Quest, play a rest of development. There's a lot to be said about the politics of hip-hop out of this time. and the reasons for the collapse really of the whole idea of hip-hop which had crystallised at the end of the 80s as a hyperarticulate experimental form

whose soundscapes revolved around sampling and whose lyrics revolved around explicit political and social themes. I don't really have time to get into all that now except to say, well, I mean a couple of things happened. One, there was a series of Supreme Court cases which basically made it economically impossible for people to make records in the way that groups like Public Enemy had done

using loads of loads of samples because the Supreme Court decided to take an incredibly punitive and restrictive attitude to sampling. So basically if you were going to use like one second of someone's music, you had to give them publishing royalties, which is just economically unviable.

And the other thing that happened was indeed the defeat of black radicalism, the defeat of the Jesse Jackson campaign. And then the fact that, that the 1992 uprisings against police violence in Los Angeles did not, as some people hoped, ultimately result in a revival of black radicalism. And then the Clinton presidency, which would have been completely impossible without mass support from black voters who mostly like Bill Clinton,

then resulted in a regime which saw the end of welfare, the implementation of workfare policies and the implementation of this incredible carceral regime, which saw so many young black men sent to prison. And this really did represent an absolute betrayal of black citizens by the Democratic Party establishment at that time. All of that produces a situation where really by the time Dr. Dre releases the chronic and in the years subsequently, the version of hip-hop, which becomes most appealing to most people, is one which is apolitical, even anti-political, which really aestheticizes the experience of a sort of post-political hopelessness and advocates for a sort of hyper-individualistic

response to the social conditions people find themselves living under. But perhaps that's not to say there are not always people like, for example, Boutreilly's group The Coup, producing explicitly political rap and hip-hop throughout that time and into the 2000s. And we'll hear a bit of that and a bit. But one of the records which I think now stands out as marking the sort of end of that great period, about 86 to 92 really, a great period of rap radicalism is this. This is the disposable heroes of hypocrisy with their classic rap track television, The Drug of the Nation. out 150 channels 24 hours a day, you can flip through all of them, and still there's nothing worth watching. TV is a reason why less than 10% of our nation reads books daily, why most

people think Central America means Kansas. Socialism means un-American, and apartheid is a new headache remedy. Yeah, I've always wondered about that record. I mean, the record seems to be a kind of explicit, almost an explicit rewrite and re-recording of Gil Scott Herons, the revolution will not be televised. The themes very similar, but even the intonation and delivery are quite similar. Never been clear how deliberate that was. Michael Ferranti, the rapper on the key figure in the disposable heroes of hypocrisy, very interesting, San Francisco-based black, intellectual artist. I very recommend seeking out the work of his former group before that, group called The Beatniks. Really fascinating stuff. And this record, a very direct, I mean,

protest against and critique of television culture. It's worth wearing in mind one of the features, both of music culture and cultural more broadly at this particular moment in history, pre-internet, was that this is really the golden age of broadcast television as the dominant cultural medium. I remember I wrote an essay for a book about Michael Jackson that was edited by Mark Fisher

many years ago. I remember making the point in there that Michael Jackson became this sort of hyperreal, postmodern, unreal figure partly because he was the first global pop star to be so thoroughly

bound up with the medium of television and even television advertising and music videos. And music television at that time, I mean, not just music television generally, it was at the height of its global power as a medium. And of course, as a medium, it's a completely one-way medium. You need loads of money to make and broadcast TV. TV involves a signal being broadcast from a central point all around the world. And this is pre-internet. And really, internet culture is ultimately going to change all that. We're going to, we live now in

in a media ecology, which is very, very different because of the fact that everybody can make videos and distribute them, basically. But at the time, television did seem like this supercapitalism monolith and this critique of it seemed very powerful. Despite the fact that the American hip-hop in the mid-90s would come to be dominated by the figure of the gangster, the idea of rap as the natural vehicle for social,

protest and political commentary persisted both in America and elsewhere. And this next record I'm going to play is a great British example from 1995. This is a group I think we've played before on the show but we haven't played this record. This is the lead track from their first album. This is Jericho by the Asian Dub Foundation. Asian foundation The Asian Dub Foundation They came out of this Extraordinary musical project

They came out of this organisation called Community Music Which was a local authority funded A municipally funded music project for young people. I think it may have been a legacy project of Ken Livingston's

Greater London Council from the early 80s. Really, this incredible music that was a kind of synthesis of South Asian popular music like Bangra

with hip-hop, with dub and reggae, very self-consciously hybrid, very self-consciously radical with a fantastically rap style that owed more to dance or chatting

than American rapping. This is a great example, which definitely includes protest elements. It includes protesting against police brutality and violence, but also includes a strong assertion of a radical political identity. For the consciousness of the nation, this is the Asian Dub Foundation. You say you're multicultural? Well, we're anti-racist. A very hot topic at the time, as multiculturalism became a sort of official ideology of advancing cosmopolitan capitalism, the need to assert anti-racism as a specific political position distinct from multiculturalism was, as I say, a hot issue at the time.

This remains a really evocative expression of a kind of cosmopolitan intersectional radicalism, a really great record. And this is from 1995. This is only one example of the way which British music in the mid-90s was characterised by this extraordinarily cultural hybridity. You had tricky and massive attack and portis head doing this trip-pop thing coming out of Bristol. You had drum and bass and jungle coming out of London and Birmingham. This really was an extraordinary moment for this sort of radical cosmopolitanism in British music culture. And that is the reason why. Brit pop, which explicitly celebrated an idea of British musical identity wholly dependent on a lineage of white male guitar bands,

was a totally reactionary project. I'm sorry, if you don't understand that, then you don't understand what was going on in British political culture and culture, and more broadly in at the time in the 1990s. I know there's these cohorts of people a few years younger than me now, who were like kids at the time, and they thought Oasis were really, exciting because they sort of evoked some vague sense of working class community. Well, you can see where the politics of Oasis have ended up. Thank you. And anyone who really understood what was going on in broader British music culture at the time could have told you that was where it was going.

There is simply no excuse whatsoever for remembering Britpop as anything other than a totally reactionary project. Why? Because what was the other things that were happening in British music culture to which Britpop was reacting, it was stuff like this, the Asian Dubb Foundation. Still active to this day, absolutely fantastic artists. They ought to be much more widely recognized as national treasures, really. All right, moving towards the end of the 90s, I want to play a track by a band. Again, I think we might have played on the show recently, but not this track. This is La Tigre from their first album.

Now, La Tigra are a band fronted by Kathleen Hanna, who I think is the most interesting figure to have emerged from the short-lived Riot Girl scene of the early 90s. Riot Girl was very interesting for being an explicitly feminist alternative rock scene. It was less interesting for the actual music produced for the most part, and the extent to which a lot of that music was sonically dependent upon grunge. and there's a whole conversation to be had about the way in which punk evolves into kind of alternative rock

of the 1980s with people like the Smiths, REM, Husker Doe, then evolves into grunge and the way in which it really just loses any sense of a vocation which might involve

public political commentary and instead becomes a music which is about giving voice to a voice to a sense of angst, a sense of existential longing and loss, but without any explicit political content at all. Does that represent protest? Maybe it does represent protest, but protest at its most completely ineffectual. Riot Girl was a bit different. Riot Girl did have an explicit political agenda in its open and, as I say, very explicit feminism, and that was fantastic.

I think probably the most interesting of the Riot Girl bands were Kathleen Hannah's group bikini kill and then Kathleen Hanna formed this band later in the decade in the late 90s, Le Tigre. And La Tigra really, really compelling synthesis of sort of punk, some elements of pop,

some elements of proto punk garage sound and some elements of electronic dance music and synth pop all being put together in a really, really fun and exciting way. This record is one of the most memorable from their

first album. This is Latigra, My Metro Car. I think is just like the equivalent of an oyster card in London, although we didn't get until years later, it's just a card that lets you go around using the subway and the public transit network. And the record is partly just a kind of, you know, an enthusiastic celebration of life in New York, which I guess was probably easier for poor people in 1999 than it is now,

just as was the case in London. Although it didn't feel that way. I always feel I have to remind younger people. By 1999, like loads of my friends were already, moving out of London because they couldn't afford it anymore. And that really started at the end of the 80s, if you were poor enough. Anyway, it does also include the lines, these anti-Juliani shout and lines like Workfare doesn't work.

So clearly it is also a kind of protest record and an exuberant expression of political sentiment, as a lot of their records were, a fantastic stuff, fantastic band. motivated by I think similar feminist commitments the next record I want to play is from 2002 and this is miss dynamite it takes more certain and not me certain and not me the favorite person be i'd like to reach a match mentally A Miss Dynamite comes out of the garage and R&B scene in London in the early 2000s and she produced this first album which was full of these fantastically articulate songs like most of them like this one doing a kind of garage inflected R&B with very sophisticated lyrics and this song, is it a protest song?

well, I think it is, but it's not a protest song necessarily against government policy or what have you, but against the forms of culture which seem to have become normative within black youth culture at the time. The song is explicitly saying, as an intelligent young woman, I'm not interested in relationships with wannabe gangsters. It takes more to impress a girl like me. I like to be challenged mentally, she says. Really inspiring stuff at the time, one of several great records she made. the general understanding of what happened

to Ms. Dynamite's career is that she tried to become a hip-hop artist so that she could break America and was one of many people to try to do that out of Britain and didn't really succeed. I don't know whether that's a fair assessment or not. And it'll be interesting to see how that story continues in the next couple of years

given that I think Little Sims is probably, I would say probably the best British rapper that we've ever had, whether that will be enough to impress the Americans, do know. Certainly people like Stormsy have managed to sell records in America in the past few years. We'll see what happens with that. But Ms. Dynamite, I would say you could classify this as a protest record, even if not,

it is a work of social commentary, which is powerful and inspiring and a really interesting manifestation of feminist consciousness at a moment when public feminist consciousness in popular culture was quite hard to identify outside of very specific areas. But of course, you know, Latigra were doing it. And if you're looking at America, at this time, this is, you know, Missy Elliott was doing stuff, similar stuff. Now, the penultimate records I'm going to talk about today is also an explicitly feminist song. In fact, it is called feminist song. And this was a record that was just released last year, 2023.

This is feminist song by Gina Birch. I think this man, I think this is a woman, I'm a first solo, I think this is Gina Birch's first solo album that this comes from, that's released in 23. She's now her late 60s. Gina Birch, for those who do not know, was one of the members of the great British feminist post-punk band, The Raincoats. But we're not playing the Raincoats today. We are playing Gina Birch's solo record for a track from it, feminist song. This is a really interesting record album that Gina Birch made. I realised that when I was recording this, I kept saying record all the time, like somebody from the 1950s. It probably is because I buy so much actual vinyl.

Gina Birch's album I play my bass loud really interesting mixture of styles and production techniques bits of rock, bits of quite a lot of dub in its way an exemplary manifestation of post-punk stylings

in 2023 really worth listening to and really worth supporting. It's great that she's out there doing that still. Now the final record I wanted to play today though we've gone slightly out of chronological order because the final record I wanted to play is the one that I really wanted to close on.

This is a record from 2015 and this is a record by Boots Riley's group, The Coup. This comes out in 2015, two years after the start of the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests. Now, the coup have been making politically conscious and radical hitpots since the early 90s. So you can't say that really BLM has somehow provoked it or created it. Nonetheless, this is a great example, I think, of a record coming in the wake of the upsurge of radical energy that BLM has provoked and expressed. Now, I wanted to close on this record, partly because it's just a great tune, partly because of all the records I'm playing today, this is one that is really explicitly not a protest record. If we accept that protest sort of implies some sense that maybe the injustices being described and referred to, might be subject to some form of redress without radical revolutionary upheaval,

then this is not a protested record at all. This is a record, the lyrics of which explicitly evoke a revolutionary scene wherein the forces of authority are being confronted by revolutionary power. Let's, one of my favourite verses from this fantastic lyric is they got the TV, we got the truth. They own the judges, but we got the proof. We got hella people. They got helicopters. They got the bombs.

And we got the, we got the, we got the, we got the, we got the, we got the guillotine. The guillotine, the instrument by which the French revolutionaries executed their class enemies is evoked here as something which revolutionaries might use in the future. We got the guillotine. You better run. We got the guillotine. We got the guillotine. We got the guillotine. You better run.

That's the chorus. It is really a very fun and inspiring piece of music. And a good example of what music, which is definitely politically radical, but no longer has any time for protest, might sound like. This is, by the coup, the guillotine. We got the gear team, we got the gear team, you better run. We got the gear team, we got the gear team, we got the gear team, you better run. We got the gear team, we got the gear team, you better run, we got the gear team, we got the gear team, you better run.