I was doing a little online concert from my living room on the occasion of Earth Day, during which I mentioned that I'm glad to see people organizing protests in the face of at least some aspects of the current administration's agenda, but that the protests need much more music in them. This elicited a fair bit of response from people who are involved with organizing rallies and are seeking to make them more appealing.
I don't want to appear paranoid, but I have no doubt that there have long been people involved with the protesting bits of society whose job it has been to make sure the protests are as boring as possible. That notwithstanding, it's important for cynical old leftists like me to remember that sometimes protests are boring because the organizers just haven't had a chance to think about how to make them interesting.
This piece is for those folks who are endeavoring to manifest a movement, and as part of that effort, are trying to organize memorable and inspiring events. This is a worthwhile aim, and events that adhere to the basic principles I shall now explore, by my observation, are the ones that help build movements -- rather than drag them down and diminish them, as badly-organized rallies can do instead.
So, my advice on staging a rally.
Create a spectacle. Take space. Manifest visually what we're trying to communicate. Don't shout at traffic or orient towards passing cars. Take space and let them see you, and join you.
Taking space, ideally, means building large structures out of things like wood and cardboard that communicate. We can call it art or whatever we want to call it.
If you're trying to manifest an atmosphere that is opposed to war and militarism, for example, then there's all sorts of things you can do with a tank. Don't have a tank? Build a life-size one out of wood and cardboard and paint. This will require many people to participate in both the building of the prop and the operation of it, and that's good. It's collective action, which itself communicates all the right things.
Create a sonic spectacle and take over the space sonically as well. There are many ways to do this. One is by having a loud sound system. If your community includes musicians, as it needs to do, then there are people among you who have sound systems and know how to use them.
If you're in a position where you need to buy or rent a sound system, for a small crowd, a battery-powered Bose S1, or a pair of them, could be a simple solution. Whatever sound system you've got, the most important thing for projecting the sound is to elevate the speakers, so they are above the heads of the people there. Typically you do this with speaker stands.
Whatever you're doing with that sound system should mostly be music. You can play recorded music to begin with. As the crowd gathers and you're ready to start the program, transition then to live speakers and live music. But mostly music.
Music is what will attract passersby and make them interested in what's happening, and music is what will keep people there, help them feel like they're part of something, and like they want to come back. Music will make the movement grow. Without music, or with just a little bit of it, the movement will shrink. It will do the opposite of what you want, unless you're working against the interests of movement-building for whatever reason.
Of course music only works if it's good music, but it doesn't necessarily need to be overtly political music. Great if it is, or if some of it is, and if it's good political music, rather than the preachy kind. But if the musicians are on board with the cause, you let them figure out what they're going to play, and it'll probably work out just fine that way. It's OK if most of the program isn't directly related to the cause as far as what's happening on the stage. Speakers in between performers can re-focus attention on why we're organizing and coming out in the streets in the first place.
But to answer that question of why we're out in the streets is complicated. Yes, the reason may be because we oppose regime corruption, or our government's participation in or support for wars of aggression. The reason may be because we don't want to see so many IRS workers getting fired. But whatever the reason, we have to remember that we are not in the streets just to give voice to our reasons for being there. That is, we're not there just to say what we think.
We're there because protests are an important mechanism for building a movement. The movement is why we're there -- to build it. Building a movement means having regular public events, among many other things. And it means having regular public events that serve certain essential purposes -- to foster community, to inspire people, to educate passersby and draw them in.
For all of these purposes, good live music and lots of creative art-building projects are not peripheral, they are absolutely central. As anyone can tell you in the world who has participated in a genuine mass movement, music is the beating heart of the struggle. Perhaps it's not the brain of the struggle -- but what happens to a body with no heart? It dies, immediately.
In French they're not called demonstrations, they're called "manifestations." This is very appropriate, because what we're trying to do with a good demonstration is manifest a little taste of the kind of world we want to create. A good protest should have the feeling of a festival of resistance.
There is nothing the least bit frivolous about creating a festival atmosphere. It is merely human. We are inherently musical creatures, inherently drawn to storytelling. This is how we communicate best with each other, going back thousands of years. There's no need to reinvent the wheel here, or pretend I'm making this stuff up. We all know it's true.
Don't shout at people -- tell stories. Don't repeat chants you learned on TV on a documentary about the Sixties -- sing together. Songs people know, and songs people don't know. Teach them songs they don't know, and soon everyone will know them, and they'll be part of the collective experience, repeating a process that is taking place somewhere in the world every day.
Following a recipe that protests should involve cardboard signs, inadequate sound systems, no live music, with lots of speakers who are shouting their condemnation of their country's leadership and whoever else, will deliver people who feel deflated, disempowered, and depressed, as a general rule. It will not draw in passersby, it will repel them. It will not build a movement, it will shrink it.
Following a recipe that protests should be full of art and music and should be using these mediums to communicate and reach the hearts of everyone, be they passersby or participants, when done well, will build a movement. Numbers at future events organized like this will likely grow, and the community you're creating will build on itself.
In the past, the folks who would be organizing rallies full of art and music were also running summer camps, playhouses, street theater troupes, festivals, printing presses, record companies, and publishing houses. Full-spectrum communication -- the only way it really works.
Free the imagination. Open your mind, and look at reality afresh. Clear the cobwebs of propaganda we've all grown up on, and think for a moment about how it was that the antiwar movement in the 1960's successfully demilitarized the hearts and minds of millions of potential conscripts?
Key ingredients involved putting on free festivals every week in San Francisco, and organizing antiwar coffeehouses -- generally involving lots of live music -- outside of every military base in the US. The idea was to draw people in to what was an alternative society, rooted in creative expression and experiencing the beauty of life, rather than one's patriotic duty to kill communists.
This is just one example of when culture was used in a way that had an absolutely seismic impact on the US government's war effort at the time. History is full of so many other examples of music and art being employed to help movements grow and win, as is the broader world around us today. You can look at the movement against the war on Gaza in places like Yemen or Jordan, the uprisings in Egypt or Tunisia, the popular struggles of all kinds throughout Africa and Latin America, or Portugal, or Ireland, you can look at your average union rally in Germany.
Looking at US history, you can soak up the deep knowledge of music as a weapon in the struggle for the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1910's, during the Depression-era struggles of the 1930's, or within the extremely musical ranks of the Civil Rights movement. You can look to so many other places and times as well.
Look for successful movements where culture did not play a central role in building the resistance, you'll find none.
We ignore these lessons at our peril. And if we embrace these lessons, we might stand to do something more effective than alienating the general public with another bullhorn-and-cardboard-sign session downtown.
Another world is possible -- and we can manifest it in the streets, at least enough to point the way there.
