The Lost Art of the Protest Song

There is something faintly embarrassing about asking where all the protest songs have gone. It is the sort of question a man asks shortly before explaining that music deteriorated at roughly the moment he stopped buying it. Somewhere nearby, a perfectly political young musician is making a record he will never hear because it does not contain the correct sort of guitar.

The protest song has not disappeared. What feels less certain is whether we still expect music to gather people into a public, rather than help each of us furnish a private mood. There is a difference between listening to somebody express your anger and discovering that a thousand people beside you know the words.

We have become remarkably efficient at circulating indignation. Whether we have become equally good at doing something together is another question.

First, dispose of the obituary

The evidence makes a simple decline story difficult. H.E.R.’s “I Can’t Breathe” won Song of the Year at the 2021 Grammys. Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” became part of the sound of Black Lives Matter demonstrations. NPR documented protesters singing it in Cleveland in 2015.

Nor is political songwriting confined to comfortable gestures in countries where dissent can be monetised. Shervin Hajipour’s “Baraye” became an anthem of Iran’s 2022 protests. In March 2024, Associated Press reported that he had been sentenced to more than three years in prison. AP subsequently reported that his case was dismissed under an amnesty.

A genre that can still attract the attention of a criminal court is not entirely lacking in consequence. Announcing its death from a comfortable chair requires overlooking the people for whom writing a song remains a dangerous decision.

The interesting question is therefore not why musicians have stopped caring. It is what allows a political song to become something people use.

A song needs somewhere to go

The history of “We Shall Overcome” is instructive because it resists the familiar story of a great individual producing a masterpiece and handing it down to everybody else. The Library of Congress traces a long development involving religious music, labour organising, workshops and civil-rights activists.

The song travelled through people and institutions. It was learned, adapted and sung in circumstances where the participants had reasons to need one another. Its significance cannot be separated from those relationships.

This is easy to miss when history arrives as a playlist. The recording remains accessible; the meeting, the argument and the person organising transport have disappeared. We retain the stirring soundtrack and lose the administrative achievement.

A movement cannot operate entirely on inspiration. Somebody must book the room. The romantic account gives us a singer with a guitar; the practical account also requires a woman asking whether anyone has returned the folding chairs.

Britain knew how to make this connection

Rock Against Racism understood that music could help bring people together around a political commitment. Hackney Museum’s record of the 1978 Carnival Against the Nazis documents the march and concert organised by Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League in London.

The important point is the connection between the event and the organising. Music gave people a reason to assemble, but the assembly had a purpose beyond enjoying the music. A gig could introduce someone to people they might subsequently stand beside somewhere less entertaining.

Not every effective political record worked that way. The Specials’ “Ghost Town” reached number one in 1981. To my ears, its achievement is that the unease is in the sound itself. You do not have to read an accompanying position paper to notice that something has gone badly wrong.

That matters artistically. The best political music does not sound as though a policy officer has reluctantly permitted a bass player to attend the consultation. It can unsettle, amuse or move you before you have finished deciding what you think.

Singing is a peculiar form of agreement

There is research supporting the idea that singing together does something socially distinctive. A 2015 study led by Eiluned Pearce followed adult education classes over seven months. Participants in singing classes developed feelings of closeness more quickly than those in crafts or creative-writing classes, although the other groups caught up over time.

This was not a study of political mobilisation. It does not demonstrate that a chorus wins elections or that a choir can replace a trade union. It does offer a plausible reason why movements might find collective singing useful.

For a few minutes, people undertake the same action at the same time. Nobody needs to produce an original contribution. Nobody has to distinguish their personal brand of concern from the concern standing next to them.

That is a considerable relief. A room full of people can agree on a song long before it agrees on the wording of a motion. The second verse does not usually require a procedural clarification.

The politics of the private soundtrack

It is tempting to blame streaming for everything. This would be convenient, particularly for those of us who would like our cultural disappointments to have a billing address. But digital distribution also allows political music to travel without waiting for a record company or broadcaster to approve the itinerary.

The examples already mentioned make nostalgia difficult. Modern protest music can spread, acquire meaning and reach people who were never its original audience. There is no sensible argument for restoring a handful of gatekeepers simply because we remember what they let through.

My concern is narrower. A personalised listening experience does not, by itself, create a shared occasion. A song can accompany my discontent indefinitely without bringing me into contact with anybody who shares it.

That is an interpretation of the experience, not evidence that recommendation systems have caused a measurable collapse in political solidarity. The distinction matters. We should not respond to an absence of organising by demanding that a music app develop a revolutionary conscience.

Nobody wants to be assigned a worthy song

There is another danger in mourning the protest song: forgetting how bad some protest songs can be. Political agreement does not oblige anybody to enjoy a tune. A correct opinion can still have a terrible chorus.

Music needs room for ambiguity, wit and contradiction. A song that tells listeners exactly what to think may leave them with little reason to return once they have agreed. The interesting ones make an argument felt, or reveal something the argument alone could not quite reach.

Nor should every musician be required to submit a statement on every catastrophe. Art produced under an obligation to demonstrate sufficient awareness can become as formulaic as advertising. The approved sentiment arrives, the audience acknowledges receipt, and everybody goes home reassured about the quality of their affiliations.

What matters is whether the song makes something possible: recognition, courage, a useful discomfort, perhaps the first conversation between people who had previously regarded one another as strangers.

The part we might actually have lost

The protest song survives. The harder task is sustaining the places and relationships that let it become more than a record we admire. That means valuing the unglamorous work around music as well as the person holding the microphone.

We cannot commission another civil-rights anthem and expect a movement to arrive with the master recording. We can support venues, go to benefit gigs and participate in organisations whose members have reasons to keep meeting after the music stops.

The next important protest song may already exist. It may sound nothing like the records through which we learned to recognise political seriousness. Before declaring the art lost, it would be worth listening beyond our own carefully maintained evidence that it is.

And if we find it, perhaps the next step is to learn the words. There are only so many things a person can accomplish by adding another track to a playlist called Resistance.