May 13, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS Dorian Lynskey
Ecco
ISBN 978-0061670152
660 pages
$19.99
Reviewed by Dave Shiflett
Protest music isn't what it used to be. "Steal From Walmart" and even the hundreds of anti-war songs that blossomed in the blood of the war in Iraq don't approach the societal resonance of "We Shall Overcome" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," as British music critic Dorian Lynskey confirms and mourns in "33 Revolutions Per Minute."
"I began this book intending to write a history of a still vital form of music," Lynskey writes. "I finished it wondering if I had instead composed a eulogy." As eulogies go, however, this is a lively and sprawling one, beginning with a chapter on "Strange Fruit," written in 1939, and ending with largely ignored attacks on George W. Bush's military policy.
"Strange Fruit," a darkly powerful meditation on lynching, was anything but ignored. It put its singer, 23-year-old Billie Holiday, on the map and remains vibrant today. While protest songs up to that point were "propaganda," Lynskey writes, this one "proved they could be art."
"Strange Fruit" is far more vocally demanding than most protest songs, including Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," written in a New York flophouse in 1940 and borrowing part of its melody from the Carter family's "Little Darling Pal of Mine." In a similar sharing spirit, "We Shall Overcome" commandeered an 18th-century melody and boasts four lyricists, including Pete Seeger, whose rendition found an instant fan in Martin Luther King Jr. "There's something about that song that haunts you," King said, though it did have its critics. "I don't believe we're going to overcome (by) singing," Malcolm X told a Harlem rally in 1964. "If you're going to get yourself a .45 and start singing 'We Shall Overcome,' I'm with you."
Lynskey writes passionately and often admiringly but doesn't stint on the criticism, giving ample praise to Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" but adding that fellow folkie Tom Paxton dismissed "Blowing in the Wind" as "a grocery list song where one line has absolutely no relevance to the next line." Lynskey also reminds us that Dylan was a master of sometimes clunky contrariness: A few weeks after John F. Kennedy's assassination, he claimed a strange kinship with Lee Harvey Oswald: "I saw some of myself in him," he told a New York audience, which rewarded him with a bouquet of catcalls.
Singalong fans will appreciate Lynskey's inclusion of Country Joe McDonald's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag," perhaps most famous for the Fish Cheer that preceded it at Woodstock and helped launch the F-bomb's glorious ascendancy. In this case, the criticism comes from McDonald himself. "What's almost unfathomable is the smallness of it," he says. "It was just another song." Yet we still remember that rag, unlike the hundreds (if not thousands) of songs inspired by the Iraq war. The absence of a military draft might explain the difference. In an earlier era, singing anti-war songs might be considered an act of self-preservation; today, our volunteer services drain such warbling of its urgency and audience.
The book ranges far beyond the '60s and includes songs celebrating gay and black pride, protesting apartheid and hunger, and denouncing various meanies, including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. There are also amusing nonmusical asides, including a fond remembrance of punkster Jello Biafra's 1979 run for mayor of San Francisco, in which he took a respectable 4 percent of the vote, though that placed him behind Diane Feinstein and Sister Boom-Boom. Biafra later said that punk was "a close-minded, self-centered social club" and "a meaningless fad."
The theme of smugness and encroaching irrelevance weaves through the book, with Lynskey reminding us early on that many protest songs are short on chord changes and long on sanctimony, with fans to match. He characterizes the attitude as "We understand. We are not like them. We are all on the same side."
He gives a terrific example of another problem: the profundity-aspiring musician, in this case country singer Steve Earle, who insisted that American-born Taliban member John Walker Lindh was something of a post-adolescent everyman: "I became acutely aware that what happened to him could have happened to my son, and your son, and anybody's son," weirdly suggesting a widespread youthful desire to join an ultrareligious warrior group that doesn't allow you to drink beer or listen to popular music and stones you to death for unsanctioned sex.
Thankfully, we get a more sober observation from the voice of reason himself, Keith Richards: "You don't shoulder any responsibility when you pick up a guitar or sing a song, because it's not a position of responsibility."
Is protest music dead? The better question, Lynskey writes, is "Is anybody listening?" Not to protest music, it seems, which interrupts the pursuit of unencumbered entertainment. "It is not just that people have lost faith in any performer to help bring about change," he concludes. "They resent anyone who attempts to do so."
Perhaps the only way to bring protest music back home is to reinstitute the draft.
Dave Shiflett is a writer and musician in Midlothian, Va.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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