Staging A Rally

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.

The Letter Liz Cheney Didn't Write, and the Movement That Isn't

Some of us were just going for the bread and circus, but when we went there, we found neither.

A few days ago, while posting on Facebook, a post from a friend popped up, as they'll do.  It was someone I actually know in real life, who I think tremendously highly of, sharing a post by Liz Cheney.  If it hadn't been recommended by my friend I wouldn't have read it, but I had to see why he liked it so much.  And indeed, I liked it, too, but I was immediately suspicious that it had not, in fact, been written by Liz Cheney, because she would know better than even to fantasize about some of the things in that letter.

The letter sparked excitement in millions of other people, according to the stats.  It was shared tens of thousands of times, seen by millions over the course of a few days, and that, in itself, makes it worth dwelling on for a little while.

It began, "Dear Democratic Party," and proceeded to complain eloquently about what a dead horse the whole thing is, and then to make a number of excellent recommendations about the sorts of things the party could do to resist the terrifyingly fascistic future Trump and friends seem clearly to have in store for us all.

What the real Liz Cheney surely already knows, unlike the pretend one who wrote this letter, is that these ideas about what the Democrats could do if they wanted to be part of some kind of resistance are fantasies.

I don't want to diminish the enthusiasm of anyone who is seeking to figure out how to build a future for our society that isn't fascist.  We need a lot of vision and enthusiasm in that direction.  And we also need to know where we won't find such vision, and why we won't find it there, so we can hopefully find a different source for all that, where it might actually exist.

A lot of people have just come home from rallies across the US with a feeling that this resistance they so desperately want to see isn't materializing.  The issues folks are raising at these protests don't seem to be getting to the heart of most of the problems we face.  Folks who went to rallies with signs about things that no one on stage was talking about felt dejected.  Folks who went to rallies where there was no live music at all -- the vast majority of them -- also felt dejected, because that's what happens with rallies where you're just listening to people tell you things you already know too well.  It's depressing.  Now, predictably after that kind of experience, people are staying home, with the rally sizes having precipitously shrank.

I don't know whether the "hands off" theme will be a thread that continues to weave its way into the future of these protests.  But at the April 5th and the April 19th protests, many people were left to wonder about which things we want the administration to keep its hands off of, and which ones we're not particularly concerned about. 

So we say hands off Social Security, hands off the EPA, hands off the courts and due process, hands off abortion rights, hands off the LGBTQIA+ community, perhaps hands off USAID, and even hands off NATO.

What other "hands off" signs and speakers did we not see at these rallies, which represent issues that are of vital interest to so many of us?  And why did we not see those signs, or hear from speakers representing so many other pressing issues?

In the interest of helping to clarify the nature of the political moment we find ourselves in, I'll explore some of the "hands off" themes you probably didn't hear addressed at one of these rallies, and why that is the case.

Hands Off Gaza

The now-openly fascist state of Israel is actively committing genocide.  It has now been 7 weeks since Israel allowed any food, water, medicine, or anything else to enter Gaza, where there is now a full-blown famine to add to the complete lack of clean water, lodging, electricity, etc.  The genocide, however, has been ongoing since October, 2023, and has been funded and otherwise supported by the leadership of both of our political parties.

Hands Off the ICC

Although both Republican and Democratic administrations are often enthusiastic about bringing various African and eastern European heads of state to the Hague, the US is itself not a member of the International Criminal Court.  There has never been enthusiastic support for joining the ICC from the leadership of either party.  Democrat-led governments in the US have not sanctioned the court the way the Trump administration has, but they have also never wanted to subject the US to the scrutiny of international law.

Hands Off UNRWA

Both the Biden and Trump administrations have uncritically supported the most outlandish and unsubstantiated claims the Israeli fascists have made about the UN agencies that have been essential in allowing Palestinians in Gaza to survive over the past 80 years.  Now the Israeli fascist regime claims UNRWA, by far the biggest organization distributing food and running schools in Gaza, is a terrorist group.  The response to these wild accusations by the Biden administration was to cut off funding to this critical UN agency.

Hands Off Journalists

While the US client state of Israel has killed over 200 journalists in the course of its war against the entire population of the Gaza Strip, many of them obviously targeted for assassination along with their extended families, the US government has remained silent about these crimes, and has just sent more weapons and money to Israel.  The Democratic Party leadership supports Israeli fascism and genocide, and this is incontrovertible, judging from how they continually vote for sending more weapons systems and ammunition of every kind to support Israel's genocidal war.  Additionally, the leadership of both parties has supported the case against Julian Assange, which was, fundamentally, punishing a journalist for being too good at his job.

Hands Off the Independent Media

Long before the Democratic Party became complicit in the slaughter of hundreds of journalists in Gaza, the Democratic Party has been working hard to undermine whatever has remained of independent media in the US after the deregulation of the industry.  The deregulation of media in the latter days of the twentieth century began with Ronald Reagan, and then continued with Bill Clinton, who took Reagan's deregulation and made it much, much worse.  No administration following Clinton has tried to re-regulate journalism, or tried to reverse the trend of ever-increasing concentration of media ownership by a handful of billionaires.

Hands Off Whistle-Blowers

The persecution of whistle-blowers such as Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, or facilitators of whistle-blowers such as Julian Assange, has been an entirely bipartisan affair.  Democratic Party leadership has condemned these whistle-blowers with the same sort of enthusiasm as their Republican colleagues have, and Democratic administrations have pursued the legal cases against all of them.  While it is also true that it was under Democratic administrations that Chelsea Manning's sentence was commuted and Julian Assange was released from maximum-security prison, the damage to whistle-blowing and to press freedom had already been done.

Hands Off Public Housing

We have been in the midst of a full-blown housing crisis in the USA for the past twenty years or so, but there is no widespread effort anywhere in the country for the government to start building housing again, or for the government to effectively regulate the housing market.  This is obviously because the politicians of both parties are ruling on behalf of the wealthy landowners, or at least on behalf of the "mom and pop landlords," not on behalf of their tenants.  The decline in funding for housing that began in earnest with Reagan, as with so many other things, got worse under Clinton, and never recovered under any future administrations.  At this point "hands off public housing" sounds more like a joke than a demand.  What public housing?

Hands Off Rent Control

By the 1980's, rent control, which used to help make housing affordable for people across the US, was done away with by the landlord lobby, which took its policy proposals from one state legislature to the next.  State legislatures dominated by both parties voted to ban rent control in most of the US.  The results for affordable housing access have been an unmitigated disaster, and the leadership of both parties likes to maintain the unsubstantiated fiction that rent control doesn't work.  Hands off rent control?  What rent control?

Hands Off China

Bill Clinton and the next several administrations after him, along with the vast majority of the Congress of both parties, were enthusiastic supporters of what they called "free trade," which meant subsidizing US industry to export itself to China and other countries, in order for the owners of industry to make bigger profits at the expense of the American working class and the Chinese working class, both.  At the same time as this process was taking place, various politicians saw fit to blame China for what was happening.  This "blame China" phenomenon became more and more popular on both sides of the aisle.  Trump imposed huge tariffs on China during his first term in power, and Biden never lifted them.

Hands Off Yemen

The Saudi Air Force was bombing Yemen and killing huge number of people with American weaponry for years before both the Biden and Trump administrations got into the act of bombing Yemen themselves.  Both administrations believe Yemen must be punished for opposing Israel's genocide, and both have engaged in destructive bombing campaigns as a means of trying to bring the Yemenis to heel.

Hands Off Iran

The treaty that had been negotiated with Iran under Obama to limit Iran's nuclear development which was torn up by the first Trump administration was never re-established under Biden.  Instead, the Biden administration worked closely with Israel, siding with the client state committing genocide, and against the only country that took military measures in response to it.

Hands Off Undocumented Immigrants

The fact that the US has millions of undocumented workers within its borders at any given time has long been a strategic "failure" of the system.  This "failure" guarantees a large, super-exploited workforce, which is the workforce the US has relied on for running most of the country's agricultural sector and most of the meatpacking industry as well.  Since the post-World War 2 era, as this system of exploitation has become further institutionalized and normalized in the US, there has never been an administration with an alternative vision for how to reform this black market.

Hands Off Student Protesters

The war against academia and against free speech in the USA has been led by both parties.  Chuck Schumer just wrote a book about his fantasies that people who are opposed to Israeli fascism are really secret Jew-haters, just pretending to oppose fascism and genocide because the ones committing these crimes against the Palestinians today happen to be Jewish.

Hands Off Free Trade

For many decades there was bipartisan support for what they called "free trade," as represented by the rules of transnational entities such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.  In more recent years, tariffs against China have become popular, on a bipartisan basis.  Neither party is led by free traders anymore, and both parties are led by people who would prefer to blame China for the problems the US has created for itself over decades of failed bipartisan policies.

Hands Off Culture

For most people around the world who have not been part of the mind control experiment we usually call "America," the idea of going to a protest on a regular basis where all that happens is people wave signs, shout slogans they learned on documentaries about the Sixties, and no one on the stage plays any music at all, seems completely preposterous, like a strange joke.  But here we are.  If anyone is going for the bread and circus, they will find neither one, at one of these protests.  Yes, Bernie and AOC are, thankfully, often combining their appeal with that of some well-known musicians, but they are the oft-sabotaged exception to the rule, not representative of party leadership, as much as they may hopefully intimate.

We need a movement against fascism in the USA, desperately.  But the idea that this movement will be led by a party that today actively supports an openly fascist regime in Israel that is openly committing genocide, or a party that has a decades-long track record of pretending to be in opposition, while supporting every self-destructive reform the Reagan administration ever dreamed of -- the party that eviscerated the ranks of once-useful federal agencies thirty years ago, while supporting the idea that nations around the world should give over more and more control to anti-democratic transnational entities in the relentless pursuit of "free trade" -- is a fantasy.

We desperately need a social movement with optimism, but this optimistic social movement needs to be born out of reality, not patriotic-sounding daydreams about an opposition that is only such in name, not in deed.  

A social movement led by such a party isn't a social movement.  How could it be?  The potential for that kind of movement exists, always.  But as far as I can tell, manifesting a movement like that first requires having a popular understanding that such a movement won't be led by a party that primarily represents the interests of capitalism and empire.  Any united front to be found with capitalism and empire could only result in a nightmare, as far as I can tell.

Travelogue 4.2025: Random Reflections of a Wobbly Wobbly

After our visit to Mexico, we spent several days in southern California and three weeks between England and Scotland.

I tend to write a few thousand words about whatever comes to mind at the end of one of my concert tours.  Sometimes it's all fairly coherent, but coherency or consistency isn't necessarily the point of these travelogues, unless that's how the world appears to be -- which it generally doesn't.

I'll start where I left off with the last travelogue, after Kamala and I left Mexico, which was on March 24th, after a spectacular five days we spent there, celebrating St. Patrick, the St. Patrick Battalion, international solidarity, and everything Irish.  We both knew the beginning of the tour -- our stay in Mexico City -- would be the highlight of it, and it was, though the rest of it was just wonderful, too.

The entire tour was more a working vacation than anything else.  I mostly blame my own lack of organization for the tour not being as busy as it could have been.  Kamala is trying to help me with this project of getting better organized, but we have a long way to go with that.  The fact is, if someone hasn't organized a gig for me in the past couple years, I tend to forget they exist, from an organizational standpoint at least, and they generally stop hearing from me.  If they're not actively looking to see what I'm up to, or actively paying attention to my email list or social media posts, then we lose touch with each other.  This is very bad, but it's how it is.

One thing I'm a bit better at keeping track of is which ones of my friends have homes with nice accommodations for guests.  The geographical concentration of the gigs meant that although we had 10 appearances between Los Angeles, England, and Scotland over the past 3 weeks, we only stayed in 5 different homes during these travels, thus adding to the holiday vibe.

One of the most striking aspects of traveling these days that I tend to forget to mention in these travelogues is that the US and the UK are disposable countries.  The amount of trash generated by the average individual in these countries on a daily basis is absolutely staggering -- nothing like what life is like for me at home, where I make my own espresso drinks in my own kitchen, and use real porcelain cups, like most people do at home (whether or not they have an espresso machine in their kitchens).

While it is indeed the case that I have in the past had more than one relative in my extended family who was so disinclined to wash dishes that they used paper plates for every meal, one might hope that this kind of extremely wasteful orientation would now be a thing of the past, but it isn't.  This sort of practice is, in fact, completely institutionalized, and this in the allegedly most progressive and ecological state in the USA -- California.

Whether you're going out for a coffee in the bohemian enclave of Topanga or going out to eat in the more touristy parts of LA, whether you ask for your food or drink to be "for here" or "to go," everything will be served to you in disposable paper and plastic packaging.  As far as I understand the phenomenon, it is cheaper for businesses to do this than to actually wash and reuse dishes.  Given the insane rents most of them are paying to barely stay afloat, every corner that can be cut must be cut.  

And given that the allegedly progressive, ecological state of California utterly fails to regulate much of anything, most definitely including disposable packaging, everywhere you go, if you eat or drink out, you will end up creating enough garbage in a given day that could easily fill a typical kitchen-size trash bag.  This practice of serving people food in disposable packaging could be banned in the stroke of a pen, as it was in France, but no -- not in the land where capitalism rules supreme.

England, Scotland, and Wales are all the same as the USA in this regard.  As with every other bad practice adopted by folks in the USA, it's also become the norm in the land that many British leftists have long referred to alternatively as Airstrip 1 or the 51st State.

When we got to LA we were hearing about chaos at Heathrow Airport in London, which had shut down completely for a day because of a power outage resulting from a fire somewhere near the airport.

Fire also characterized the landscape in LA.  Authorities had shut down access to most of the burned-out neighborhoods, but we took lots of walks around the Topanga Canyon State Park, from which many scorched hillsides could be seen.

While it is indeed the case that a US state has the power to regulate things like disposable packaging use within its borders, seeing the destruction wrought by the recent fires that destroyed so much of Los Angeles, hearing about the mass layoffs throughout the federal government, and hearing about Trump's wacko views on why the western states are so fire-prone, it's all extremely worrying.  The situation was extremely worrying before Trump, but now dramatically more so.

Over half of the state of Oregon is federal land.  Oregon also had the biggest wildfires of anywhere in the US in 2024, so many of which originated on federal land.  If it's just up to state and local authorities to deal with these massive fires, as it seems it soon will be, we can expect many more catastrophes on the level of what just happened in Los Angeles, and soon.

Even if California or Oregon were run by people who had any real interest in dealing with this situation rather than helping the real estate industry profit from it, even if these states were run by people who were prepared to regulate the housing market to stop society from sprawling further and further into the flammable forests further and further away from the urban centers, we'd still be totally fucked, due to the federal government's abdication of any responsibility in managing lands under federal control.

The first most noticeable things about flying into LAX as well as flying into Heathrow was the line at immigration was shorter than either Kamala or I have ever seen.  People may be on the move all over the world, but not many of them seem to be flying into either Los Angeles or London these days.

By a freak coincidence, the clouds parted the moment we landed, and the sun shone down from entirely blue skies everywhere we went, up until our last full day on the island, during which time it drizzled a little bit.  Though sunny, it was still mostly cool and breezy.  Altogether perfect weather, if you don't think too hard about it.  But when anyone we met wasn't busy enjoying the unusually sunny and unseasonably warm weather, they were talking about how unusually dry and flammable so much vegetation was looking like, listening to BBC reports about how the island received 1/4 its usual amount of rainfall for the month of March, and fearing for the future.  The moors have already been catching fire on occasion in recent years, and look set to do that lots more in the next few.

Our three weeks between England and Scotland on this tour involved a full schedule of gigs on three consecutive weekends, but with very little to do in between, aside from having lots of time to make the trip between England and Scotland and back.  So we had plenty of time free to get into trouble, which included singing at three different protests.

Unlike our last tour of that island that shall not be named lest we offend a Scottish nationalist, this time there was no evidence that anyone seemed to hear about in terms of my various cancelation campaigners from either the pro-genocide Israel supporters or the anarcho-puritan sectarian leftists.  This may be because the right noticed their efforts were mainly serving to give them bad publicity, and the anarcho-puritans are thinking better of being on the same side as the Zionists while Israel is committing genocide.

Or it may be because people offering to organize gigs for me have learned to be very careful about choosing venues.  Your typical pub that's barely staying in business can be easily pressured by letters threatening legal action.  If the venue is owned by a labor union, on the other hand, they're much harder to intimidate, and if it's a venue associated with the Irish or Scottish Republican cause, they're used to being called terrorist sympathizers, so such accusations against me slide right off.  Most of the venues we played in on this tour were either associated with a union or with republicanism of the Celtic variety.

Our first gig in England was at the Islington Folk Club, and as always, it was packed, and a great night.  I don't know what that folk club is like on the nights I'm not there, but whenever I'm the feature act, all the songs other participants do leading up to my sets are full of radical notions, while still generally staying within the fold of what is easily recognizable as traditional or trad music from one of those islands just to the north and west of France.  Every time I play at Islington I get to hear yet another poignant a cappella song about a hapless young man who was conscripted into service for the British Empire, only to die young in the process.

Two different Palestine-related fundraisers in Portsmouth were two more opportunities to hear more great music, and poetry and storytelling as well.  The person we stayed with there, as it happened, was marking the anniversary of the death of his son, who was a beautiful young man who had been very active working in solidarity with refugees in France, along with his dad, and then when what they call the full-scale war began in Ukraine, he joined the Ukrainians in their fight against Russia, and got killed.

On our way up to Scotland, where we had gigs on our second weekend on the unnamed island, we spent a glorious day hiking in the mountains of Cumbria with friends who live in Penrith, and communing with the Danish sheep that the Vikings brought over to England a thousand years ago.

In Scotland, which is even less used to sunny weather than England is, many people were quite visibly turning pink from sunburn.  Apparently hospitalizations increase in Scotland during sunny weather, due to the tendency of certain Scottish folks to have no clue about the existence of sunburn as a phenomenon, and also their tendency to drink too much alcohol in reaction to the sun coming out, which I don't quite understand.

A relatively new operation being run by a collection of musical radicals in Glasgow is the Keelie Folk Club, who were responsible for organizing both of our Glasgow gigs, each of which was in a really cool venue with a long history of being on the side of the people -- Galgael, a community center that is a home away from home for the homeless and other disenfranchised elements of society, and Lynch's Bar, which was a venue where secret republican gatherings were being held in the days before I was born, and it's been in the Lynch family there ever since.  The granddaughter of the founding family of the place was working the bar during our show there.

Keelie paired us with a bunch of other wonderful acts for both gigs.  One young banjo-playing Wobbly who sings under the stage name Wildcat did a set almost exclusively of Joe Hill songs, sharing anecdotes about the IWW in between songs, most of which were true.  At Lynch's Bar one of the other performers played guitar like Dick Gaughan.  If you don't know why that's a wildly impressive thing, you haven't heard Gaughan's music (and you should fix that right away by listening to his album, Handful of Earth).

The guy who played guitar like Gaughan teaches geography for his day job.  Upon learning that I was talking with a Scottish geography teacher, I was excited for the opportunity to ask him a fairly burning question I keep having.

"What is the name of this island we're on?" I asked.

Dave the geography teacher and DADGAD guitar virtuoso laughed heartily, but otherwise had no response to my question.

One of the fine upstanding radicals who came to the show at Lynch's Bar was the son of the union shop steward at the Rolls Royce factory in East Kilbride who initiated the campaign to boycott any work for the Chilean Air Force's plane engines -- a campaign which resulted in the Chilean Air Force for a time having zero functional fighter planes.

In addition to doing another excellent show in Edinburgh, organized by the same collection of peaceniks who have organized gigs for me there consistently for many years, we played at a protest rally for Gaza in the depressed, post-industrial city of Paisley.  

I talked to many people in both Scotland and England who were very involved with the big rallies for Gaza that have been happening every Saturday since October, 2023, who lamented the fact that the big rallies in Glasgow and London never involve live music.  Rather, they generally involve the same people speaking, expressing the same outrage, and otherwise saying the same things -- things that everyone who goes to such rallies already knows, which is why they're there.

Paisley, instead, was a much more inspiring affair than that, at least.  Still a bit heavy on speakers, but featuring a bunch of music, which made a big -- and entirely positive -- difference.

The way this was organized followed the same kind of logic I am so often preaching to anyone who will listen, about how a rally organizer can make use of local musical talent to improve a rally immensely, and make people want to come to the next one.  Of the four musical acts that were part of the rally, there were two that were singing songs that were specifically about the genocide at hand -- us, and a jazz pianist who wrote one song on the subject, and that's the one she did.  The other musicians included a bagpipe player who played "Amazing Grace" -- which may not be about Palestine, but anyone who is familiar with the song and its meaning can both see and be profoundly moved by the relationship there -- and a couple of folks who did a set of songs that were against war, and written in the 1960's.

Now, some folks will cringe at the very notion of having anyone singing songs from the 1960's at an antiwar protest, and this is really sad.  People know and like these songs, so why should they not be sung?  Especially when there's other music on the program that is more honed in on the particular genocide at hand, songs about other genocidal wars, such as the one the US military waged against the peoples of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, a set of songs from the Sixties fits right in to the mix.

Their set was a perfect example of what can happen if you ask local musicians to do a set at a protest rally.  Maybe they normally sing cover songs in local pubs as a general rule, and they're not politically-oriented troubadours like some of us are.  But then they can just choose a few of those cover songs they sing in the pubs for the right kind of content and voila, you've got a perfect set for an antiwar protest.

As it happened, on the same day that we were singing at the protest in Paisley, across the US there were 1,200 "Hands Off" protests against aspects of the Trump agenda that Democrats oppose, a tiny handful of which included live performers of any kind.

Folks who follow me on Substack may have already read the essay I wrote that was inspired by the lack of music at those protests -- Why We Abandoned Our Most Effective Tactic.  Given the deep association the Industrial Workers of the World had with music and culture in its tremendous heyday in the early twentieth century, I posted this essay to the IWW Subreddit, on that extremely dysfunctional social media platform that is especially popular among young American males.

Typical of such posts of mine on that particular Subreddit, it quickly became one of the most popular posts on the Subreddit, according to the upvote count.  It also quickly attracted the usual sectarian Antifa-style troll farm I've got attacking me on the more badly-moderated Subreddits.  Hoping that the moderators of the Subreddit had just not noticed the trolls who feel the need to spread blatant lies about me and gratuitous insults towards me every time I post there, I wrote the moderators a message, for the first time since I've been on Reddit, asking them if they thought maybe blocking these obvious trolls spreading obvious lies and making obviously disingenuous statements and obviously gratuitous attacks might be a good idea.  They responded that what these people were doing with their insults and attacks and lies was actually called "criticism" and that these people with their comments were actually just "calling me out" for interviewing the wrong person on my YouTube channel four years ago.

So, in case anyone out there is interested, the IWW Subreddit is a troll-infested hellhole by design, not by accident, and the lack of good moderation on the Subreddit is not the consequence of distracted and overworked volunteers, but its actually the moderators' pet troll farm, entirely welcome in their completely dysfunctional ecosystem.  Why I haven't been kicked of this Subreddit as I was kicked out of the Anarchism and Socialism Subreddits (where my posts were also some of the most popular ones)?  Presumably because too many people in the IWW associate me with the union, and would think it more than a little strange if one of the IWW's most well-known advocates were blocked from the IWW Subreddit.

Of course, throughout our travels we were as glued to news reports as a couple of revolutionary news junkies have ever been.  As everyone knows, it changes fairly dramatically by the hour, in so many ways.  Especially in ways that aren't covered in most of the western world's news reports.  But listening to Al-Jazeera we got daily updates on the numbers of Palestinian children killed after the tents they were starving and freezing in were bombed randomly.  And daily reports about the complete lack of food, water, medicine, or any other kind of aid being allowed into Gaza by the country that controls all of its borders, Israel.  We shared these reports with our audiences wherever we went.  It has now been well over 6 weeks.

Back in England again for our last of three weeks on the island that some people call by the name of "England, Scotland, and Wales" -- which I maintain is a ridiculous name for an island that the Greeks named something along the lines of "Britain" thousands of years ago -- we had a lovely, windy day on the south coast city of Hastings, which seemed more abandoned than it had before, maybe because the last time I was there it was a bit later in the year, when some people go to the coast to lay on the beach and such, which no sensible person would have done on the day we were there.  Well, there were a couple of scantily-clad sunbathers freezing on the beach there, but only a couple. 

We were sharing our spacious London lodgings with a couple of folks who were visiting from Croatia, one of whom grew up in Belgrade in Serbia.  In the midst of the constantly-evolving news about Trump's tariffs on the world and deportations to the gulags, not only has the western world been hearing very little about the rapidly-developing famine in Gaza or the famine in Sudan, but very little news has been getting around about the ongoing, massive, student-led protest movement that has swept the entirety of Serbia in recent months, but Kamala and I became much better-informed about developments there, anyway.  What has been especially exciting to a lot of anarchists such as our flatmates from Croatia has not just been the massive size of the movement and the widespread community support it has enjoyed, but in particular the movement's emphasis on direct democracy and horizontal organizing strategies.

Along with a packed crowd at the London Action Resource Center with us and Steve White and the Protest Family performing, that weekend in London coincided with a protest folks organized at the US Embassy, which ended with Kamala and I and other folks performing at the encampment that folks have been maintaining for months now, across from the embassy.

The new US Embassy in London is a massive, modern building that still has a palatial quality to it, given that it is basically surrounded by a mote.  It's a pretty mote, but still very obviously a mote.  Prior to our action there, Greenpeace activists had come around with some kind of red dye, and made the mote turn red.  The water in the mote is recycled, so clearly putting the red dye in it was a great plan, because days later, it was still blood red.

On the day we were there, a couple hundred folks came around to participate in a mostly silent surrounding of the embassy, with lots of banners against the genocide, and various powerful, artistic representations of the thousands of children that have been relentlessly killed by the Israeli military in Gaza over the past 18+ months.

What's happening 24-7 across from the embassy is a little peace camp, with big banners on display at all times, along with clotheslines with children's clothes and other artistic ways to try to communicate the horrors of Israel's kindercide to passersby.  The embassy workers mostly walk right through the encampment from the nearest subway stop, on the way to and from work, along  with lots of other people.  From what I saw that day, most passersby are either sympathetic, or disinterested, but rarely hostile.  Which seemed notable, given the very upper-crust neighborhood the embassy is located in.

Our very last musical appearance in England was another protest camp, one we only heard about at the Gaza solidarity encampment.  Folks associated with the venerable Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were to set up camp outside the gates of the Lakenheath Royal Air Force base north of the city of Cambridge, where it was recently revealed in a tabloid media scoop that the US and UK have for years been making secret arrangements to use Lakenheath as a base for American nuclear missiles -- much to the horror of many local residents. 

The CND has been around a long time, as have some of the principal CND organizers. Given that many of them are from that generation we call the Sixties generation, or somewhat younger folks profoundly influenced by that generation, the idea of including lots of music and art as part of this peace camp was automatic. When I emailed on Saturday to offer to do a show there on Tuesday, I heard back from them right away, with an enthusiastic "yes please." After getting to the camp I learned that some of my favorite radical musicians from southern England such as Robb Johnson and the band, Seize the Day, also had plans to come perform there the following day. Such a wild contrast with what happens when I offer to sing at a protest in the USA in recent years -- that is, nothing. 

Over the decades it has often seemed at the bigger rallies in the US that used to have music at them that if we had a good sound system and an otherwise optimal setup, inevitably this would mean the rally would get drowned out by a police helicopter hovering overhead.  Of course, if the sound system sucked and no one could hear the stage anyway, the helicopter might be absent.  In the case of our little concert at the gates of the Lakenheath RAF base, the loud noises occasionally drowning out the music came from fighter jets taking off very nearby.

Along with one of our visitors from Croatia, the brilliant photojournalist, Guy Smallman, came with us to Lakenheath.  Guy was also one of the main organizers of the gigs at LARC and in Hastings, so all of these things were very well documented with wonderful photos.

We had gotten to the Air Force base hours earlier than we were scheduled to play, so we thought we'd check out the staging area where folks are camping nearby, when they're not standing in front of the actual gates with lots of banners and such.  We apparently got the wrong post code to head to, but where we ended up was a picturesque neighborhood mainly accessible by dirt roads and canals, where we found quaint houses, houseboats, farms, and walking trails.

While we were walking along the canals and admiring the wildlife and the houseboats, I got a message from folks in Sweden who protested against Israel's participation in the Eurovision song contest, which was hosted in the city of Malmo last year.  They were messaging me to ask if I would be a judge for next month's Falastinvision "Genocide-Free Song Contest."  Looking forward to that.

As it happens, the day I left Heathrow to head home to Oregon was April 16th, and the 25th anniversary of the A16 protests in Washington, DC, when tens of thousands of people came to commit nonviolent civil disobedience, surrounding a 90-block section of the city, and severely hampering the operations of the IMF/World Bank summit that was happening there that week, which was cut short because of our activities.

My first flight back to the US was the main one, from London to Seattle.  Whereas at LAX and Heathrow my experience at immigration was one of waiting for about two minutes in a very short line before breezing through, in Seatac there was no line at all.  I just walked right up to one guy who was working there, and that was it.  The last time I came to Seatac Airport on an international flight, which was maybe a year ago, the line for immigration was a mile long, as it usually has been at LAX and Heathrow.

Not now, of course.  Every hour I hear new stories of the deportations of permanent residents for participating in protests, and others being sent with no trial or judicial process to some kind of endless sentence in a gulag in El Salvador.  And today as I land back in the land of the free, Trump is finally talking openly about treating US citizens to the same fate.

I don't know what's coming next, but I do know that the US left is in the most anemic and incompetent condition it has ever been in since the 1950's.  But at least back then we had Pete Seeger, and even a widespread affection for the notion that music was a powerful medium for communication.  Compared to now, really, the state of domestic dissent in the 1950's looks pretty good.  I wish I could say, therefore, that there was nowhere to go but up, but looking at reality, anyone with a passing familiarity with the history of fascism can tell you that that's not true.

Why We Abandoned Our Most Effective Tactic

“The song is a weapon of struggle, an instrument of the people.”
Victor Jara

“The song is the torch that lights the path of resistance.”
Ahmad Kaabour

“A song can make the powerful tremble.”
Georges Brassens

“Music is the weapon of the future.”
Fela Kuti

“I sing because the people sing with me.”

Mercedes Sosa

“Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.”

Pete Seeger

Last month my singing partner and I were in Mexico City to sing at a festival.  One of the folks we talked to was a former guerrilla fighter with the FMLN from El Salvador.  At some point in our conversation I mentioned how in the US we almost never have live music at protest rallies anymore.  Our friend was aghast.

"But music is the beating heart of the resistance," he said.

He said a lot more, but that was the gist of it.

Last weekend Kamala and I were in Scotland -- singing, among other places, at a protest in opposition to Israel's ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinian people.

On the same day that we were singing in Paisley, there were somewhere around 1,200 rallies happening all over the United States, the theme mainly being opposition to Trump's agenda, especially the aspects of it that are also opposed by the Democratic Party.

I have many longtime friends who have not been previously involved with activism to speak of, who have recently gotten mobilized in the movement against the ongoing purges or complete eliminations of entire government agencies.  Many are employed by the federal government.

As a social movement aficionado, I was curious to see if this new movement springing up would break with any of the trends that have beset so much of US society in recent years and decades that have resulted in, among other developments, the almost complete lack of live music anywhere to be seen in the midst of a protest rally or march.

I have tried through various means to get an impression of what was going on at those 1,200 rallies.  I hope after I publish this piece I will hear from lots of people telling me my impression is woefully mistaken, but from what I have managed to gather, the vast majority of those 3 million or so people who came together across the US last Saturday spent a couple hours listening to speeches and chants, and, with only a handful of exceptions that I've heard of thus far, heard no live music in between those speeches and chants.

So, the anti-music trend continues.  But why?

I've spent a lot of time writing about why live music is such an effective tool for any social movement for bringing people together, fostering and sustaining a vibrant feeling of community and purpose, and making movement gatherings of any kind something people find inspiration from, in the face of whatever horrors they're facing.

I've written a lot about how music is so vital to social movements around the world today and historically, and I've tried to illustrate my writings with lots of pertinent examples.  I've written about how the past 10 or so years of an almost completely nonmusical resistance in the US is a rare exception in history, a real outlier, and also an inherently doomed one.

What I haven't put much effort in to is trying to flesh out how this situation arose.  What factors have gone into people across the US who are organizing protests over the past decade or so generally deciding not to have live music at their events?  How did so many people get the impression, all at the same time, that live music at protests was a bad idea?  What are the rationales for excluding the beating heart of the movement from the movement?  Why treat the beating heart as if it were cancer, and remove it?  How did this happen?

For my purposes here, I will take it as a given that we all agree that music is the beating heart of any potentially successful social movement.  Around the world, protest rallies involving people facing the most dire of circumstances, from Egypt to Yemen to South Africa to Chile to Mexico, can very aptly be described as festivals of resistance, with an emphasis on the festival part -- rallies in most countries are characterized by music, and everyone singing together.  Everyone in most of the world who is a participant in a social movement knows how important the music is for the movement.

Lots of people in the US know it, too, if they're old enough to have lived through movements in which music and culture also played a central role.

Rather than spending any more effort convincing people of the obvious and dire need for much, much more music within the landscape of whatever constitutes the resistance, the left, the opposition, or whatever we may call it, I'll assume we all understand keenly the need for music, and I'll explore some of the reasons why it may be that it's not happening.

I hope that my exploration of the reasons organizers choose not to involve live music in their protest rallies will be helpful, specifically for those organizers out there who see the importance of including live performers in protests, but are getting voted down when they propose the idea, and they'd like to have more arrows in their quiver of arguments in favor of music.

Before I get into the various particulars that I've become familiar with around how these things happen -- or don't -- I'd make the overall point about each of the justifications for excluding music that they all have merit, which is why they seem so convincing to many.  But while each justification for excluding music has merit, if the concern in question leads to the conclusion, "and therefore we'll skip having live music at the rally," then something is probably very wrong with the logical process that got you there.

The answer is always to have live music at the rally -- never not to.  If you arrive at the answer that it shouldn't be part of the rally, then the process through which you arrived at that answer needs to be thrown out, or seriously reoriented.  If it's a matter of picking one performer over another, that's different, and necessary for any competent organizer to engage in making such calls, around programming decisions for both performers and speakers (unless you're hosting an open mic, which can also be a fine thing to do to bring people together and help sustain community).

I don't know if any of these points below seem strange, but they're all the kinds of rationales I've encountered regularly, which is why I'm including any of them.

OK, reasons for excluding live music from the program, and responses to them.

1.  A festival atmosphere is inappropriate for having a protest around such important, serious issues.

When we look at the world around us -- not necessarily around us in the contemporary US, but around the world beyond the US -- and historically in the US and most everywhere else -- we can see that music is the beating heart of any resistance movement.

So how would it be that anyone would come to think there is something frivolous or unnecessary about music?

We can explore this question in all kinds of ways, but the answer comes out the same regardless -- whatever form of logic caused anyone to draw the conclusion that "therefore live music is superfluous and we won't have it in our rallies" is working with a flawed understanding of how social movements have grown and sustained themselves around the world and within the US over the generations and centuries.

It may have been a flawed understanding derived from the influence of Puritanism or some other anti-musical tradition, or a flawed idea introduced by nefarious actors seeking to make sure your movement doesn't grow, or it may have come from some other source.  But it's a hypothesis with no evidence to back it up, whereas the evidence for music being the lifeblood of a social movement is tremendously abundant and global in scope.

2.  A festival atmosphere reminds us and everybody else of the 1960's, and sex, drugs, rock & roll, and hedonists who weren't serious about social change.

In post 1960's USA we are still living in the shadow of the 1960's, and there are reasons for this.

The biggest social movements and the ones that were most threatening to the status quo in the history of the twentieth century in the US have been intensely musical ones -- notably the radical labor movement led by the Industrial Workers of the World in the early part of the century, the Communist Party and associated groups in the 1930's, and later the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1950's and 1960's.

At the time the 1960's antiwar movement was happening and up to the present day, this movement has been dismissed by the mainstream media as consisting of drug-addled, sex-obsessed freaks for whom activism was some kind of a distant afterthought.

Few things could be further from the truth of the matter, and that is actually why this movement continues to be so rejected by the corporate media and other such institutions.  The antiwar movement in the 1960's employed the use of music, in the form of free festivals, antiwar coffeehouses outside of every military base in the country, and so much more.  This movement successfully demilitarized the hearts and minds of millions, and was acknowledged by the leaders of the country at the time to have had a tremendous impact on the ability of the leaders of the country to keep drafting new soldiers, and in their efforts to make them obey orders.

Music was so central to this movement, that any association with it must today still be a negative one.  To actually learn from the past would be far too dangerous.  So, they were just a bunch of ridiculous, utopian hippies.  Look the other way.

3.  We are protesting around a specific set of issues and demands, and musicians are likely to go off-message, possibly in a way that offends someone and/or dilutes our message.

While it is always worth watching out for nefarious actors who want to come ruin your event for you, the vast majority of musicians who are interested in playing for free at a protest are in it because they want to support the cause, and perhaps because they know that their participation in the protest will serve just such a purpose.  Good musicians, of all people, tend to understand the value of music.

It is true, however, that they may not stick to a particular message.  The question is, does that actually matter?  What I think you'll find if you explore the world and the protest rallies that are out there all over it, is that there is no need for all or even most of the music people might play on a stage at a rally to stick to a particular message.  It's not what the vast majority of people there are expecting, or looking for.

When songs are really good and really on-message, this can absolutely be the most powerful moment in a protest rally.  But when songs are about other subjects, or about nothing in particular at all, they still serve a vital purpose as part of a protest rally, to sustain a sense of community and togetherness in between the speakers -- who are hopefully striving to do exactly the same thing, in a different medium.

4.  Having a band would require a bigger and better sound system, which we don't have or can't afford to rent.

A chronic problem with protest rallies in most of the US for decades has been bad sound systems operated by people who don't have a very deep understanding of how they work best.  This happens when the political activist scene is chronically disconnected from the music scene.  

If you're involved with putting on a protest rally and you don't have access to a good sound system, it's almost certainly because you don't know enough musicians.  Almost certainly, if you live in a city, somewhere in that city there are many different musicians who own sound systems that are better than anything you've seen at a protest in your lifetime, if you're young.  Some of these musicians would love to support the cause with their music and with their sound systems, if someone asks them to.

5.  There's a band we'd like to have play, and they can bring their own sound system for the rally, but they don't want to just play for ten minutes.

Of course a lot of work goes into planning a rally, effectively getting the word out about it, setting up the stage if you have one, and a lot of other things that go into it.  Most musicians probably don't want to over-emphasize the amount of work that goes into getting the drum set into the van and transporting all the necessary gear to the rally site and setting everything up there, but it is a lot of work, and may involve renting a vehicle and other expenses.

What often clinches it as far as musicians doing all this work are concerned is the idea that they're doing it all just so they can play a 10-minute set following 2 hours of speakers.  They know, viscerally, that this is a miserable program, people will be fleeing the rally long before they do their set, and that it would only make sense for them to be given more time, and for there to be more music in the program.  Seeing the plan, they say they want to play for more time, or skip it.

They may thus come off to some as prima donnas driven by narcissism, but in all likelihood that is not the case at all, and what would make a lot more sense, rather than not having them play, is having them play for longer.

6.  This protest is about issues, not about famous people or cults of personality.

Some people worry about musicians that may have a following distracting people from the important issues at hand.  Much more likely is they'll help get a bigger crowd, without distracting from anything, and they'll be a good reason why some people want to come back to the next rally.

This is likely going to be the case whether you have a famous musician on the stage or a little-known local one who is good.  Good musicians naturally will aim to sustain the mood that's present, and lift spirits in some way.  Which is a good thing, because most famous musicians won't actually want to sing at your rally, except for the rare few who regularly take strong stances on different issues.

Most successful musicians tend to want to avoid identifying themselves with a group or perspective that may be loved by half the society and hated by the other half.  This is a bad marketing strategy, so you may find that even if you want to have a rock star join your protest, you won't get one.  But you will find lots of good musicians out there who aren't stars who will be happy to play and help you build the movement by doing so.

7.  We'd like to have a band at the rally, but the only ones offering to play for free are made up entirely of white men.

Protest organizers these days more than ever are looking for a diverse spectrum of people to be on the stage at their rallies.  Where I live, in Portland, Oregon, many groups have long had a policy that means that it's very rare that anyone speaking at a rally is white, unless they can lay claim to some form of marginalized status, like they're Jewish, trans, etc.

Although seeking to have a diverse array of people represented on the stage makes sense for so many good reasons, when you take things to such extremes as not having white speakers or musicians on the stage in a white-majority city, especially if the movement you may be involved with is already overwhelmingly involving white participants, you are really shooting yourself in the foot with such policies.

There are big historical reasons why the vast majority of successful rock bands throughout the history of what the music industry calls rock & roll have been made up entirely of white men.  This was, and often still is, the policy of the music industry.  R&B is for Black musicians.  Rock & roll is for white ones.  This is how the industry created its racially-categorized music genres.

The damage this kind of industry practice has done to society and to the many musical cultures within it would be impossible to quantify.  But we're not going to make it all go away by pretending it's different than it is.  For a whole variety of socioeconomic reasons, if you want to have more diversity on the stage, this often requires more resources.  Otherwise you may be stuck with the volunteers coming your way being overwhelmingly white.

Here it may be worth noting that white people are also a majority of the country's population, and not a group you want to ignore if you want to have a successful social movement.  It really is OK to have some white people on the stage now and then -- good, even.

8.  We can't have a whole band at our protest.  We were, however, considering having a solo act, but decided against it, because almost all the solo acts offering to play at the protest were white, and therefore don't represent the diversity we would like our movement to project.

As with the racialization of rock & roll by the music industry long ago, the ranks of what the industry came to call "folk" music as well as bluegrass was designed to be a white phenomenon, for the most part.  The Black roots of bluegrass and Appalachian music generally have been largely erased from the collective memory, and now forms of music still deeply loved in so many parts of the country and the world are perceived by some as being at least a vaguely racist form of music.

With socioeconomics being as they are, with institutional, multi-generational forms of racism endemic in society, and with an overtly racist music industry pushing a segregationist agenda for so much of the twentieth century, it is no wonder that the powers that be have had some success in their project of racializing different forms of music in the popular consciousness.

However, even if most people volunteering to play at your event who are solo performers may be white people with guitars, if they're good, and if other good performers aren't coming forward, you need someone to serve the vital purpose music has to offer, and there are plenty of highly competent white musicians who can fill that role -- and should, especially if you can't find other ones you'd prefer.  Err on the side of yes to music, not no.

9.  We wanted to have music at our protest, but the only people interested in performing represented only one kind of musical tradition.  Folk songs make some people cringe, while other people don't have a taste for hiphop, or they think punk rock is just noise, so it's safer just not to have any live performers.

While it can be very good to be considerate of audiences, and maybe not have a really loud, sweary hardcore band playing for the preschoolers, if the musicians are good, most people won't be offended by their musical style.  They'll appreciate it, and they'll appreciate a program that includes different musical styles.  Whether they love all the music, most people will appreciate your effort at inclusion, rather than be upset about your choices that they may have been less impressed by.

10.  We wanted to have live music, but there aren't any performers around here who have recorded songs about the issue we're protesting about.

It's relatively unusual for a songwriter or a band to have a song about a particular current event that may be happening.  Most musicians aren't really part of the overtly political musical traditions you can find on the margins of the folk, punk, hiphop, and rock scenes, among other places.  But if you give an artist or a band a little advance notice and they know what the protest is about, watch what happens.  If they're decent artists, and not just someone you chose at random, then in all likelihood they will come up with a set of songs they may have in their repertoire, or ones they may learn for the occasion, which fit the protest at hand.

11.  It didn't occur to us to have music at the rally.

This probably should be the first thing in the list of excuses, because it's probably the most common reason, in the modern age.

Most young people in the US today who have been to a protest have probably never been to one that involved live performers.  Many older folks haven't been to such a protest either.  Many of the folks at any given time who are getting involved with organizing protests have never done such a thing before, and only know what they know.  The vital importance of most of the program being music just isn't one of those things people tend to know, in contemporary US life.

12.  We were thinking of having a certain performer at the rally, but then we got word that they had written or said something offensive at some point.

Especially the chronically-online among us are often intensely sensitive to falling victim to a trolling campaign, or otherwise being forever canceled by cancelation campaigners, and we often are living cautious lives full of trepidation about this happening to us.  When we hear of someone who has some kind of blemish on their reputation, our first instinct is to pull back, disassociate, keep our distance, and not be tainted.

This tendency in modern society is completely self-destructive.  Our first assumption should be that people are good and the rumors are false.  The maxim of innocence until proven guilty was one of the best advances that civilization ever made, and where it is truly practiced, civilization is so much better for it.  When the maxim is instead to vet everyone for possible past misstatements before associating with them, you will never build a movement that is bigger than a clique.

We can look out for each other and try to protect each other from all harm, and that's a beautiful thing, but we can do it while also operating under the assumption that the rumor mill is churning, and most of what it is working with is nonsense that is best ignored, along with all of your social media accounts.

13.  We'd like to have music at the rally, but we're concerned about it being culturally appropriative.

The idea of cultural appropriation is more well-known now than it probably ever was, and in effect, it can serve to scare people off from associating with anyone who is playing music that we may consider to be from a culture other than the one the player is from, particularly when that musical tradition has a history of being a colonized one, while the musician playing it may be from a background more associated with the colonizers.

For the vast majority of musicians in the world I've ever known or heard about, the racialized system of music genres imposed by the segregationist music industry is something to be abhorred, along with the notion of some people getting recognized as authors of songs because they're white and represented by a record label, while the authors of the songs live and die in poverty.

While we can find this sort of arrangement repulsive, we can simultaneously recognize that especially when the music industry more or less leaves us alone, the natural state for musicians is to cross-pollinate.  If a musician who plays one kind of music is in a land where they play other kinds of music, musical cross-pollination will happen, and most every musician in the world understands this, and thinks it can be a really wonderful thing.

Through this kind of cross-pollination -- for example, African and Irish peoples living in the same hollers together in Appalachia was the genesis for what we today know of as bluegrass, Americana, or country music -- greatness abounds.  Without pretending that the whole process that led to the creation of these forms of music was OK, we can simultaneously see that this music belongs to everyone, and you don't need to be either white, Black, from the hollers of West Virginia, or from the skyscrapers of Manhattan, to equally embrace any of these forms of musical expression.

In conclusion:  more music may help build your movement, less music won't.  And no music will kill it off quickly.