I feel like there are lots of parallels between the eighties and now (recession/inflation, yuppies/inequality, skin-heads/fascists, hot-cold wars etc.) but there used to be protest music! Where is that stuff now? Music that’s intelligent and outraged - like we should be!
I’m out of touch now, so if it exists, educate me! Or have the protest songs been removed from tiktok by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act (UK specific, but suppression of protest seems to be everywhere)? (I’ve linked to the Levellers - maybe it really was better back in the day?)
edit: Maybe not the right audience, but if the song is old enough to vote then I might already know it! What’s happening now? Any songs from the last 10 years!
edit: Thanks for everyone’s insights. I’ve spent the day discovering music that I’d never have found otherwise. Really enjoying a load of these, but thanks to everyone! It seems like protest music is confined to certain genres/places, and lots of older songs - maybe they just last longer… which is maybe a little interesting.
Big difference: we’re too tired to protest, and that’s only the ones who are capable of doing it in the first place. Rich bitches have made us stupider and more complacent as a whole, as well, at least where they haven’t divided us and pit us against each other.
Another big difference: we don’t have a whole lot of hope for the future anymore. A lot of that whole protesting thing stems from the hope for things to be better, and with climate change, massive polluting corporations very obviously distracting people with manufactured outrage, the rise of authoritarianism, and several massively public wars, there ain’t a whole lot of hope to go around.
Frankly, I wish there were some people making protest songs. This current crop of people needs a good kick in the ass, myself included. But I don’t have the energy or hope or talent to do it myself.
Excuse me, GenX chiming in. We had that exact same list, with the sort-of-maybe exception of climate change (pollution was really really bad though). Then again , we had the daily doom of nuclear war on our heads.
I guess this what I’m afraid of, but things must have felt pretty scary during the first cold war - Imagine raising children while governments were
openly[edit] testing fusion weapons!I think that music is part of giving people inspiration and hope. Does tiktok just filter out the protest to keep us scrolling?
I’ve participated in in-person protests with various groups about a dozen times a year since 2020 and I don’t even live in a city. People are definitely out here protesting, we just don’t get any media coverage at all unless we break things.
edit- in an attempt to actually be helpful - search the internet for any progressive or socialist activist groups near you and sign up for their newsletters/follow their socials. Try to attend a few events, and there you’ll hopefully meet people who can get you connected to local anarchists/more radical folks who go out and protest a lot. Then you can carpool with folks and share expenses and have a safe group of people to go to protests with.