Really had a hard time figuring out where to start with this story and even which direction to take it. How this all got started was an email I got from someone about how enraged they were about Snoop Dog playing at an Inauguration Ball for Trump. I started thinking music and politics have always been a mix but then I started thinking about the Snoop Dog email and this wasn’t really about music and politics, this was just a payday for Snoop, not a political message.
For me when I think of the mix of music and politics I immediately think of the sixties and seventies with people like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, CSNY, Bob Marley, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger to name just a few who were at the forefront of these movements. At the time you had the Civil Rights Movement, The Anti-War Movement, The Women’s Liberation Movement, The Gay Rights Movement, The Environmental Movement, The American Indian Movement, The Student Movement and in its totality, we were the Counterculture Movement. For us it was an alternative approach to how we wanted to live our lives differently than the one our parents lived. We did this through how we expressed ourselves whether it was political protests, recreational drug use, communal living, casual sex, and of course our music choices.
During this time musicians and artists were the people that gave their voices to these new ideas and causes. It wouldn’t surprise me if Joan Baez had been arrested more times for protesting than Abbie Hoffman was. Ok, I know Abbie was arrested more times, I was trying to make a point that their involvement wasn’t for a paycheck. They put their asses on the line because they believed in what they were protesting and at times they paid for it.
This period of our history really stays with me. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr were both assassinated, the shootings at Kent State happened, bombings of ROTC offices on college campuses were a regular occurrence, the trial of the Chicago 7 was in full swing, you had Wounded Knee, you had riots, in short, a lot of shit was going on.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young put out one of the most powerful songs of the seventies when they wrote “Ohio” about the Kent State University shootings and how we can’t keep taking it.
“Tin soldiers and Nixon’s comin’
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drummin’
Four dead in Ohio
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are gunning us down
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her and
Found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?”
You have to remember, young people outside of Northeast Ohio might not have heard what was going on at Kent State University for a while after it happened. There was no internet, no cell phones and most young people (me included) didn’t watch Walter Cronkite on the news, a lot of people heard about it from the song “Ohio”. I knew about it because I lived close to Kent and my good friend, Dominic, who also writes on here was in Kent the night before at a bar and saw the National Guard coming into town and knew it was going to get bad. He was also there the day it happened.
The same could be said for Graham Nash’s song “Chicago”. I knew about the trail going on in Chicago for the “Chicago 7” but if you don’t remember it, this was a long trial and I didn’t read the newspapers every day and didn’t know about Bobby Seale being bound and gagged by the judge in the trail until I heard the song.
As Graham once said “I wrote the song in about 2 hours, it just pours out of you when your pissed off, you got to do something”.
This was how I first heard about it and I’m sure I’m not the only one. That’s the power of a song; it can be a rallying cry. It can tell us what is going on around the country and sometimes right under our noises. You were not going to get the news from our perspective on the nightly news or your local newspaper in those days.
This didn’t just start in the sixties. Woody Guthrie famously had the words “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” on his guitar in the forties. He knew the power of song could lift people up or it could get them to come together with a common idea. Did you know his song “This Land Is Your Land” was a protest song? It was written about the working class being left behind and held down by the rich. That’s what he meant when he wrote “this land was made for you and me.”
Billy Holiday sang the song “Strange Fruit” in 1939. She didn’t write the song, it was written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish civil rights activist but Holliday would say the song was her “personal protest” of black Americans being lynched in the South. She was only 23yrs old when she first sang it. Tell me singing these lyrics back then didn’t take guts.
“Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees”
Musicians will always put out songs for their political ideologies and causes they believe in. In the past we had Sam Cooke – “A Change Is Gonna Come”, James Brown – “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud”, Creedence Clearwater Revival – “Fortunate Son”, Marvin Gaye – “What’s Going On”, Plastic Ono Band – “Give Peace a Chance”, The Wailers – “Get Up, Stand Up”, Buffalo Springfield – “For What It’s Worth”.
Those same thoughts and outrage continue, it’s just focused on the causes around us now. In more recent times we got Public Enemy – “Fight the Power”, N.W.A – “Fuck tha Police”, Rage Against the Machine – “Killing in the Name”, Kendrick Lamar – “Alright”, Green Day – “American Idiot”, Bruce Springsteen – “41 Shots”, U2- “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, Ani DiFranco – “Which Side Are You On”.
Things are changing in our country now. We are becoming more divided and those divisions seem to be much more amplified in this day and age. I see a lot of similarities to the sixties and early seventies where it was us against them, the only thing that always changes is “who they are”.
In 2016 Tom Morello in an article with the L.A. Times said “dangerous times demand dangerous songs.”
He also said “there has never been a successful social movement in this country that has not had a great soundtrack.”
I think he summed up everything I’ve been trying to say in one sentence.
Headline Photo – Joan Baez in London 1969 (Photo Credit: Keystone-France)
