— Sleater-Kinney must be one of the only rock bands on the road that wishes some of their tunes were out of date. But with war just a few small diplomatic failures away, the rock trio from Portland, Ore., finds some of their latest songs keep getting more current.
"It's really sad how appropriate these tunes are," said Corin Tucker, of the antiwar numbers on One Beat, the band's latest album. "I don't think when we wrote them that we had any idea how these feelings of fear and anxiety would increase."
There's no shortage of anxiety on the streets of Europe, North America and the Middle East, where millions have demonstrated against another Gulf war. But songs that articulate these feelings are scarce in the electronic media that otherwise can't get enough "war news."
"Where is the questioning, where is the protest song?" sing Sleater-Kinney in their acerbic Combat Rock. ". . . Our country's marching to the beat now / and we must learn to step in time."
In the wake of the confused silence that overcame many politically minded artists after Sept. 11, most of the antiwar songs now getting attention in the mass media are retreads from the Vietnam era. George Michael's version of The Grave, Don McLean's 1971 song about a loyal marine slaughtered in the field, is in rotation on British MTV. Sonic Youth participated recently in a New York club concert that revisited the Vietnam Songbook, published in 1969. Paul Weller has dusted off Marvin Gaye's What's Going On for his current concert tour, and Yusuf Islam (the former Cat Stevens) has emerged from retirement to re-record his Peace Train, a song that reached the hit parade in 1971.
The lack of new material is such that John Mellencamp's decision to write and record a new tune called From Washington ("he wants to fight with many / and he says it's not for oil") made the news section of The New York Times. But Mellencamp, who at 51 is old enough to have been a Vietnam draft prospect, admitted to the Times that the song is an adaptation of an old Carter Family tune, and that he's not writing in an idiom that's likely to catch the ear of young protesters.
The death of the protest song has been announced many times before, and always prematurely. Harry Chapin lowered the form into its grave in 1989, in his song Last of the Protest Singers ("He doesn't get much work these days / He's billed as a novelty act"). But Chapin was only surveying his corner of the field, which was that of a singer-songwriter who could trace his roots to the politically conscious folk revival of the Sixties. He didn't notice the very topical noise coming from rap groups such as Public Enemy, whose Fight the Power appeared on the soundtrack of Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing at about the same time Chapin was singing last rites.
Like every other form of popular music, protest songs tend to bond with their own generation. The founders of Broadside, the influential mimeographed song-journal that provided a spiritual home for Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger in the early Sixties (and which was commemorated two years ago with a lavish box-set from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings), were Depression-era leftists. By the end of the decade, the energy of protest had flowed away from their kind of music, and into blues-rock.
Another decade later, punk bands such as the Clash and the Sex Pistols were making the sound of protest harsher and more media-savvy, though less amenable to mainstream radio. Rap, and an even more pungent form of punk from groups such as the Dead Kennedys, got political in ways that the first mass audience for rock couldn't hear, because it wasn't listening.
Sleater-Kinney, the British-based Asian Dub Foundation (ADF), Winnipeg's Propagandhi and Hamilton's Warsawpack all come from that later tradition. The intellectual background of their music has more to do with notions of exported oppression and manufactured consent than with the old-time socialism that motivated Seeger and Phil Ochs. The ADF's recent Blowback explicitly links Sept. 11 and the coming war to the politics of oil and the American habit of supporting and then demonizing satraps such as Saddam Hussein. And like the folk-singers of the Sixties, the members of ADF and their peers were honing their analysis years before anyone spoke of war.
None of this stuff is likely to be heard on any mainstream radio station in North America. Gone are the days when it was possible to have a hit with an openly political song such as Neil Young's Ohio, which jumped on the charts shortly after National Guardsmen killed four protesting students at Kent State University in 1970.
The generations have changed, and so has the system of media ownership.
In the U.S., the two biggest radio companies have increased their combined holdings from 115 stations to over 1,400 since a more permissive media-ownership law came into effect in 1996. A similar bulking up in Canada (where Corus Entertainment now controls 52 radio stations) and through the rest of the music-media industry means that a small number of very wealthy people are deciding just how much political music is going to be heard.
"You got five corporations that control retail," according to Public Enemy's Chuck D. "You got four who are the record labels. Then you got three radio outlets who own all the stations. You got two television networks that will actually let us get some of this across. And you got one video outlet. I call it 5-4-3-2-1. Boom!"
To get a song on heavy rotation is now a big-money proposition. According to Don Henley, the former Eagles rocker who recently testified before a Senate committee looking into radio mergers, concentration of ownership has nurtured a new payola system in which record companies pay large sums to "independent" promoters who have the ear of radio programmers.
Record companies who handle political neo-punk or rap either can't or won't spend that kind of money, and even if they did, they'd be thwarted by the style guidelines of the most popular radio formats.
The media industry is keenly interested in rebellion, but only as a marketing tool. Fortunate Son, Creedence Clearwater Revival's bitter song about the class structure of warfare, has been recycled in an ad for Wrangler jeans. Ford adapted The Clash's London Calling ("Now that war is declared . . . Come out of the cupboard, all you boys and girls") to promote Jaguar. Sleater-Kinney has been playing Fortunate Son in concert, but it's anyone's guess whether further performances of the song on the band's tour next month with Pearl Jam next month will get fans thinking about peace, or about denim.
The Grammy Awards ceremony found another way to acknowledge dissent while diffusing its point, in a tribute performance of London Calling (by Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello and the Foo Fighters's Dave Grohl) that turned the song into a rock-celebrity moment.
Video clips of World War I aerial dogfights displaced the tune's war reference to a combat even more remote than Vietnam.
On the same broadcast, Sheryl Crow made protest into a fashion accessory (the slogan No War, spelled out in rhinestones on her guitar strap), and Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst suggested that the whole nasty conflict should just go away. Like a lot of angry-seeming figures on the rap-rock circuit, Durst's kind of rebellion is about personal lifestyle, not global political change.
But what should we expect? It's a rare musician who will cancel a North American tour, as Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour did recently, to make a political point. Entertainers who sell the most never lose sight of the nature of entertainment, which is not about presenting people with unpleasant truths or calls for action that they don't want to hear.
"Musicians and artists are not political leaders," said Sleater-Kinney's Tucker. "I'm not a great orator. But we can play songs that have meaning for people. We can provide an outlet for people's antiwar feelings."
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