I’ve been thinking about protest music for the #BlackLivesMatter movement. I’m an old guy, unfamiliar with the Billboard Top 50 for most of the millennium. Still, I wonder who’s been making music that speaks to this political moment.
At demonstrations I’ve attended around Brooklyn songs have been few, far between, all chestnuts a half-century or more old: “We Shall Overcome,” “Amazing Grace,” “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.”
Not that anyone should expect pop charts in any era to teem with protest music. For context, I looked at Top 10 singles for 1968-71, the years of MLK’s and RFK’s assassinations, Vietnam War protests, campus free-speech movements, Kent State.
Of the 40 top singles of those four years, more than 35 were songs of love and loss: “Close To You,” “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head,” “Love Is Blue,” “Build Me Up Buttercup,” “Sugar Sugar,” “Hey Jude,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” The 5th Dimension hit it big with “Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In,” but that’s too dizzily astrological to be political. (“When the moon is in the Seventh House/And Jupiter aligns with Mars/Then peace will guide the planets/And love will steer the stars.”)
By my count, three contained explicitly political content:
— The Rascals’ “People Got To Be Free” (#5, 1968), which pins responsibility for poverty alleviation on individuals: “If there's a man/Who is down and needs a helpin' hand/All it takes is you to understand and/To pull him through, ah hah/Seems to me/We got to solve it individually, ah ah.”
— Sly & The Family Stone’s “Everyday People” (#5, 1969), a song of racial acceptance from a Black-led, integrated band: “I am no better and neither are you/We are the same whatever we do."
— Edwin Starr’s “War” (#5, 1970), whose message is clear enough: “War: what is it good for?/Absolutely nothin’!”
In 1971, Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” reached as high as Number 2 on the U.S. charts but ranked just #21 for the year, behind such classics as The Osmonds’ “One Bad Apple,” Donny Osmond's “Go Away Little Girl,” Tony Orlando’s “Knock Three Times,” John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
The American music buyer’s tolerance for protest is, we can conclude, limited.
While they may not have topped the charts, plenty of songs have addressed police violence in the last six years, since police shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Songs that I’d be happy to sing at future protests:
“Black Rage,” Lauryn Hill’s savage turn on “My Favorite Things”: “Black Rage is founded on two-thirds a person/ Rapings and beatings and suffering that worsens/ Black human packages tied up in strings/ Black rage can come from all these kinds of things.”
“Sandra’s Smile,” by Blood Orange, in which Dev Hynes mourns Sandra Bland, wonders why Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, is even asked about whether she can forgive her son’s killers.
Usher’s “Chains”: “I spoke to Tamir Rice mom and she told me be strong/It won't be long 'til it's justice/They won't have votes but refuse the discussion/On how certain cops they shoot us for nothing/Revolution is coming.”
Just out: “2020 Riots: How Many Times,” in which Trey Songz sings before the gospel choir kicks in: “Don't be colorblind, 'cause when they're killin' mine/They’ll try to justify it/Oh, each and every time/Playin’ in a park, takin' your jog/Sittin’ on the couch, in your own house/Never seem to matter what we do/You think we don't matter, but we do/You got a problem, 'cause the city on fire/But you quiet when n****s die.”
Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout,” a propulsive tune in which she name checks, among others, Walter Scott, Jerame Reid, Philip White, Sean Bell, Trayvon Martin, Aiyana Jones, Kimani Gray, Emmitt Till. The repeated “Say his name!”/“Say her name!” has become a street chant at every protest I’ve attended. (David Byrne closed sets with the song in his “American Utopia” show.)
Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” deemed most likely to become the protest anthem of this decade (despite a chart peak at #14, in March 2016), with a chorus that claws through centuries of pain to find unlikely optimism: “And we hate po-po/Wanna kill us dead in the street for sure, n****/I’m at the preacher's door/My knees gettin' weak and my gun might blow/But we gon' be alright.”
I wasn’t expecting contemporary tunes when Vienna Carroll led a sing-along Sunday at an event sponsored by the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. Carroll is a historian, playwright, and actor as well as a singer of gospel, blues, and folk tunes. Her performance was straight from the folk tradition: a lot of education dispensed in short lectures about a song’s history; quick run-throughs of the chorus to teach the crowd; then the song, with the audience gamely pitching in.
It was a gorgeous evening, with breezes off the canal and, for a time, the clanging of the bell on the Carroll Street Bridge as it opened to let through a tall-masted sailboat. About 150 people gathered to listen and sing — all White, by my estimation.
She sang “This Little Light Of Mine” before digging into more interesting territory. Carroll urged us to get comfortable with religious content before singing Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You Gotta Move” ("You see that woman/Who walks the street/You see that police/Upon his beat/But when the Lord get ready/You gotta move”).
Carroll dedicated the Rev. Gary Davis’s “You Better Mind” to Black Trumpian Candace Owens, who Carroll said was “making her money, I guess;” the song warns, “You’ve got to give an account at the judgment, you better mind.”
Before singing the shanty “Shallow Brown,” Carroll talked of 19th-century Black sailors who in Southern ports were confined by law to ship’s quarters, since when they encountered slaves they’d speak of how much better African folks had it in foreign countries. If the sailors went ashore they’d be arrested, then charged room-and-board for their jail stays until their ships left port.
She sang prison songs, work songs. She noted how African-Americans had worked to free themselves from slavery, never passively accepted their fate, before the rousing spiritual “Singing With a Sword in My Hand.”
It was good to be reminded how music conveys truth through time.
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