Where's the Music?

For many years now we hear a lot on the news about "the culture wars."  But there's another war that's been going on for decades:  the war against culture itself.

Most anytime that there's a resurgent social movement in the news and on the streets in my adult life, I have learned to expect some rock star baby boomer like Neil Young to editorialize somewhere about how when he was young, music was at the center of everything, but now all you hear is vapid pop songs, rather than songs of resistance and social change.

To which people from younger generations, like me, who missed out on the brief period during which songs the media characterized as "protest music" could get signed to a major label and become popular on commercial radio, would typically take offense.  Looking at reality from my own limited vantage point, I saw social movements that I and other artists were playing an artistic role in.  Most of my fellow artists that have played a role in the environmental movement, the global justice movement, the Palestine solidarity movement, the post-2001 antiwar movement, Occupy Wall Street, etc., have not been famous.  Like me, they have been artists that played at protests and otherwise rallied the troops at concerts and other events -- operating in the background, out of view of the Billboard charts or the Hollywood balls.

It's easy to get offended when someone who was born at the right time to become a protest singer appears to be complaining about the absence of younger generations of protest singers, when you're one of them, and always struggling to survive in that capacity.  It's true, I responded somewhere online to Neil, you won't find this music on commercial radio anymore -- but we're out there!

That was well over a decade ago, and as time has passed since then, and I've lived a little and read a couple more books in the intervening years -- particularly one by my friend Mat Callahan that he published in 2017, The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965-1975 -- I think I owe Neil Young an overdue apology, and a whole bunch of thanks as well.

I mean, I forgive myself for my defensive reaction to the point he was making.  It was understandable.  I was only just born when Neil was at the peak of his rock stardom, and I entirely missed all of the formative events of his youth.  But luckily, people like Mat wrote books about it, as did a lot of other people.  The films are helpful as well.  And many of the participants who were young back then, like Neil, are still around today to talk to.  (Though I've personally never met him, and probably never will, but for the record, I think he pretty much invented punk rock.)

I guess for me, connecting the dots and understanding what all these boomers are going on about has been a sudden development, brought on by witnessing, and to some extent participating in, this global movement against the genocide underway in Gaza.  Although if not for the pandemic, perhaps this realization might have happened sooner.

One of the things that overwhelmingly characterized the protest movement in 2020 -- at least of the ones I witnessed, mostly in Oregon -- was the absence of live music.  At the time, this was mainly explained by the desire to be abundantly cautious about Covid-19, which meant nobody singing, and spreading the virus that way.

The masks were about the pandemic back then, but now they're being worn at protests for other ostensible reasons.  And still nobody's singing at the protests, and if anybody's speaking at them, the sound systems folks are using are usually inadequate for many people to hear what they're saying.

Now that I'm living in an era where it's not a question for me of whether I'm going to be one of the musicians playing at a protest, but whether anyone is going to be singing at this protest at all, the penny dropped inside my head.  Indeed, Neil, where is the music?

The question is not where is the music against the genocide in the charts -- no one is expecting to see any.  But where is the music within the grassroots of this movement?  Or specifically, where is it in the United States?

In so many other countries it's not a question.  The music is front and center, on stage and everywhere else.  In Jordan or Yemen or Germany or Mexico -- but not here.

There are surely many different reasons why this is the case -- some related, others not.  I won't try to analyze all the different trends that may have led us from 1968 to the current moment.  I'll just explore a few salient points.

From my perch, having seen or participated in the social movements that have come and gone from the late 1970's to the present in this country, it remains the case that there has been nothing in my lifetime that has rivalled the kind of massive, highly organized, and sustained social movements this land experienced throughout the latter 1960's, and also throughout the 1930's.

Other social movements have come and gone, we've had some very big demos now and then, and some movements of various sizes have gotten dramatically outsized amounts of media coverage, but in the end, nothing has really come close to what this country experienced in either of those two decades.

To perhaps oversimplify the picture, what were the results of the struggles of these two decades?  In the aftermath of the 1930's, arguably the response by the powers-that-be was two generations of a generous welfare state.  In the aftermath of the 1960's, it would be almost a generation before there would be another large-scale deployment of US troops to fight a war overseas, and to overcome what they called "Vietnam Syndrome."

What were the hallmarks of the massive social movements during those decades, that so shook the ruling class in the US and achieved such relatively huge policy changes?  And in what other various ways has the establishment responded to these achievements, aside from the institution of the welfare state in one case, and a lengthy bout of "Vietnam Syndrome" in the other?

One of the central features of the social movements of these periods, as well as earlier periods, was culture of all kinds, used intentionally as a vehicle for popular education, political agitation, and bringing people together -- often in ever greater numbers.

When Neil Young was young there was a movement that may have originated in San Francisco but which had spread throughout the continent that believed emphatically that music and culture would be pivotal vehicles for bringing about a transformation of the society at large.  

Critical numbers of people believed with a missionary zeal that music festivals should be organized regularly -- weekly -- they should be big, loud, and open to the public, and as more and more of the public got exposed and turned on to the music and the scene, they would no longer want to be part of the war machine.  That was the intent of the movement, and it worked.  Not by itself, by any means -- I'm not suggesting there weren't other important factors, but this was certainly one of them.

With popular culture having been basically hijacked by the movement back then, with music that undermined martial culture permeating every corner of society, it seems to me that those in power have been trying to seize the cultural upper ground ever since.

One form that effort has taken has been the consistent derision of "the Sixties" and the supposedly ridiculous utopian nature of the movements of the day.  I remember listening to pop radio stations in the early 1980's, only five or six years after the end of America's war in Vietnam, and hearing the DJ refer only with open derision to the "leftover hippies" and the era whose music he wasn't playing.  In mainstream media, the period would be repeatedly characterized by naked freaks rolling around in the mud, having sex and doing drugs, everything reduced to its most sensational elements, when the period was mentioned at all.  And now the use of the term "boomer" as an insult is all the rage on social media, and has been for years.

Aside from relatively recent revelations about the FBI's efforts to sabotage the careers of a number of different prominent leftwing musicians in the 60's and 70's, my own observation of the obvious targeting of culture during the global justice movement of the late 90's and early 00's was unmistakable.  At one protest gathering after another during the course of the movement, in one place after another, the police would find a reason to confiscate massive numbers of giant puppets and other things people had been working on constructing for the protests.  

Puppets had long been a powerful tool for communicating what the protests were all about, and this tool was consistently, methodically targeted by authorities at every turn, for years.  There were other consistent, methodical ways they targeted our movement -- police brutality was consistent as were undercover police provocateurs, as was an almost complete lack of mainstream media coverage.  But targeting the puppets was one of those very consistent things.

During the course of the antiwar movements that peaked during the 1991 "Gulf War" and the post-2001 invasions there was the phenomenon of two large, popular, and competing networks of organizations, parties, and activists that were each responsible for organizing the biggest protests.  The names of the coalitions changed over the years, but one of them organized rallies that were about half music and half speakers, while the other one organized rallies that were almost completely bereft of live music.

By international standards, according to my observation of social movements in a couple dozen countries with which I'm intimately familiar, even the half-speeches, half-music model for a protest rally is heavy on the speeches.  The IAC/ANSWER Coalition model of no music whatsoever was and is a real outlier globally.  But it has now become the norm, as could be seen at the protests in 2020, continuing on to 2023-2024, with no competing pole that has a deeper connection with the power of culture manifesting anywhere that I'm aware of, not in this country.

So, belatedly, yes, indeed, Neil -- where's the music?  I know lots of musicians, representing lots of different musical genres and lots of different demographics, including some with songs that would be ideal for any number of different sorts of protests, very much including the ones happening now.  But very few of these musicians seem to be singing at rallies in the US these days, and this has been true for years.

I have so many more questions than answers.  But I think the question is a profoundly important one, a civilizational one, really:  how did music become so completely sidelined in social movements in the US in the modern era?  And how can we reclaim the vital role of culture in building and sustaining social movements, and in doing effective outreach to the broader public, while we still have a planet worth fighting for?

It seems to me that the time is yesterday when we needed to have a singing social movement on the ground that's capable of growing to become the kind of movement we so deeply need, if this madness is to change.

If the question is whether music and culture are essential in building such a movement, it seems to me the answer is abundantly clear, from the history of social movements around the world.  The only real question as far as that goes is how do we bring music back into the social movements of the modern era in the United States, the country that brought the world jazz, blues, bluegrass, rock & roll and hip-hop?  Neil and I aren't the only ones scratching our balding heads.