The end of the Vietnam War was also a turning point for protest songs

NEW YORK, Apr 26: Out of the many Vietnam War protests she performed at in the 1960s and 1970s, Judy Collins can never forget one in Washington, DC, where she stood before thousands and sang Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War”.
“It was just me, and Bruce Langhorne playing the guitar, for this huge event. … And everybody knows the words and very quickly they all start singing along,” she says, remembering the “amazing” spirit of those rallies. “It does trigger something in the brain to hear those songs. They make you say, ‘I must be able to contribute something.'”
The end of the Vietnam War, 50 years ago, also helped wind down an extraordinary era of protest music.
For Collins and such contemporaries as Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary, bringing the troops home was a mission that carried them around the country, and the world.
The journey was shared with like-minded audiences who joined in on “Masters of War”, “Give Peace a Chance”, “Blowin’ in the Wind” and other standards — as if to say the songs belonged as much to the movement as they did to the singer.
The causes have endured, and proliferated: arms control and apartheid, women’s rights and globalisation, climate change and police violence.
And protest songs have been written for them, from Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” to Steve Van Zandt’s “Sun City”. But few, if any, have entered the collective cultural memory like the music of decades ago: Protest songs are as common as ever, protest anthems are rare.
“These days you have all these genres and all of these identities, and things are more decentralised,” says Ginny Suss, who helped organise the 2017 Women’s March in Washington and helped found the Resistance Revival Chorus, a collective of dozens of singers who specialise in protest music.
Ronald Eyerman, a professor of sociology at Yale University and co-author of the 1998 book “Youth and Social Movements,” says that it’s been a long time since a song like “We Shall Overcome” has emerged, one so universal in its message that it can be adapted to any number of issues.
“Protest songs tend to be very specific to an issue and a time and place,” he observes, adding that he can’t think of “any anthem related to mobilisation about climate change or gay rights.”
The rise of protest music in the 1960s fits into the greater narrative of the post-World War II era. Growing prosperity and young technologies such as television and transistor radios helped give the emerging “baby boom” generation an unprecedented sense of autonomy and common experience, and the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movements united millions across race and class and geography.
Eyerman notes that the military draft, which ended in the early 1970s, made Vietnam more than just a moral issue for Americans, but one with a “personal, self-interested dimension.” And rock and folk music helped forge a soundtrack of easy melodies and memorable, resonant phrases for an explosive historical moment.
“There was just an incredible intensity of feeling about the political situation,” says Dorian Lynskey, author of “33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs,” published in 2011. “A lot of people expected an imminent revolution.”
Protest songs in the ’60s and ’70s weren’t only heard at protest rallies: From “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “People Get Ready” to “Ohio,” they also placed high on the Billboard charts.
Bill Werde, former editorial director of Billboard and director of Syracuse University’s music business school, the Bandier Program, says protest music still exists in the US, but he isn’t sure the appetite exists for them as mainstream hits.
He points out that there is a lot of protest music happening outside of the US, like that of the popular Iranian singer Mehdi Yarrahi, who shared a song titled “Roosarito”, Farsi for “Your Headscarf”, urging women to remove their mandatory headscarves.
He was flogged by Iranian officials over a conviction for possessing and consuming alcohol. Or the Indonesian post-punk band Sukatani’s anti-corruption anthem “Bayar Bayar Bayar” (“Pay Pay Pay”).
“It has led to this nationwide call for greater freedom of expression under an increasingly authoritative regime there,” he says of Sukatani’s song. “This may be hard for some folks to understand or to accept, but I think one of the simple realities may just be that things aren’t bad enough here in America for people to really feel that urgency, when you compare America to places like that.”
Puerto Rican rapper and filmmaker Residente, known for releasing socially conscious music on topics including war, colonisation, socioeconomic inequality, climate change and beyond, disagrees. He says that there are contemporary protest songs — you just have to know where to look.
For example: Bad Bunny’s “Lo Que Le Pasó A Hawaii”, “What Happened to Hawaii” in English, a song that ties the US colonisation of Hawaii to the Puerto Rican fight for independence.
Last year, Residente released “Bajo los Escombros,” (“Under the Rubble”) with Palestinian artist Amal Murkus, dedicated to the children killed by the war in Gaza. “There are not many songs talking about it,” he says.
Eyerman wonders if the recent mass demonstrations against Donald Trump will “grow into a national force,” with a “distinctive protest anthem.”
Like the 1960s and 1970s, the country is deeply divided, politically and socially. But Werde otherwise sees a more limited landscape for protest music.
He cites the increased consolidation of the music industry and demise of legacy media outlets, which means “today’s hits are smaller than they used to be” and there are fewer opportunities for protest songs to become full-on anthems. The only way that happens is if “things reach a certain point … like with George Floyd and Black Lives Matter.”
Songs played around that time included Lamar’s “Alright”, Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” and Beyoncé’s “Freedom”, which came out before Floyd’s murder in 2020. (AP)

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