Where Have All The Protest Songs Gone? (Naked City)

We live in tumultuous times, with many parts of the world going through the hell of war, social upheaval and the oppression of dictators and oligarchs – Trump included. Yet look at the popular songs of the day, the multi million hits on Spotify and the current top forty – and you’ll find very few that deal with this turmoil.

In the 1960s, protest songs, a genre made famous by people such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, were everywhere and reflected a new generation of young people opposed to conflicts such as the Vietnam War and capitalist greed. Much of today’s contemporary popular music is bland, hedonistic, boringly introspective and says nothing about the world in which we now inhabit.

Maybe it’s time to turn back the clock and look to the songs of yesteryear for some present day inspiration and a real slap in the face reality check. What could be more appropriate than the mid-60s Eve Of Destruction, a song written by P.F. Sloan and made famous by the gravelly voiced Barry McGuire.

“The Eastern world, it is explodin’, violence flarin’, bullets loadin’, you’re old enough to kill but not for votin’, you don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’?”

Throw in a verse about severe climate change and at least a reference to somebody who accepts a secondhand Noble Peace Prize and then declares a takeover of a sovereign country, and you have an anthem of our times.

And speaking of Trump, how about a reprise of Neil Young’s Let’s Impeach The President, originally written as a protest against George Bush but equally applicable to the lunatic now in charge.

“Let’s impeach the President for lyin’, and misleading our country into war, abusing all the power that we gave him, and shipping all our money out the door.”

On a less serious note, bring on Hoodoo Zephyr’s parody of the Andy Stewart classic, Donald Where’s Your Troosers. Written to coincide with Trump’s 2018 visit to the UK, the Aberdeenshire-based punk folk’s version soon became a viral hit.

Needless to say, Trump’s ‘troosers’, and his grubby underpants, went missing many times in the Epstein files, with the real truth heavily redacted.

Admittedly, many of the classic protest songs of the 60s and 70s, don’t ring with the same intensity and conviction that they originally espoused. Whether we are now better informed of the world’s evils and injustices, or simply a lot more cynical, songs like Pete Seeger’s We Shall Overcome or Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come sadly don’t have the same resonance today.

Maybe they just need to be updated to make sense to today’s younger online generation. Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised could possibly be re-written as The Revolution Will Not Be On Free-To-View – but you can check out a rerun on Netflix.

And if the Republican movement here is ever revived, perhaps Rainbow’s Kill The King could become a soundtrack for the movement.

One of the standout traits of a good protest song is the reaction it gets from both the conservative media and the various arms of government.

When N.W.A recorded Fuck Tha Police in 1988, paying out on the LAPD for their racism and brutality, they received an official warning from the FBI via their record label.

When the Sex Pistols sang God Save The Queen in 1977, comparing the British monarchy to a bunch of fascists, the BBC and most commercial radio stations banned it during the Queen’s jubilee the same year.

Here at home, many would hope for a revival of Pauline Pantsdown’s brilliant 1997 hits I Don’t Like It and Backdoor Man, given Pauline Hanson’s supposed surge in popularity and her current dislike of everything from immigration to paper shopping bags.

The alter ego of gay activist and academic Simon Hunt, Pantsdown was a sensation in the late 90s, raising the ire of Hanson herself and becoming one of the most requested artists on Triple J.

Where are the fearless satirists like Simon Hunt today, prepared to stick it up the bigots and cop the inevitable conservative backlash?

Powerful satirical and protest songs can have a huge impact in shaping public opinion and motivating positive change – especially when we are, dare I say, all on the ‘Eve of Destruction’.