Summary and Conclusions

So, what have we learned? Hopefully, a lot. We’ve offered a great deal of insight, but it’s what we do with that information that’s so important. Have we seen the end of the age of protest, of music and art with a message, or have we simply failed to see how it evolved? Let’s take a look at what we’ve covered.

Historians dissect and analyze the times we lived in, but popular culture and mass media have proven to be the most effective method of delivering an immediate message to the masses.  It’s nothing new. The griots, the historians and troubadours of Western Africa, spread the news and lore of their culture from town to town in the days before they had access to print. Professor Bob West at Kent State University was a former beat poet who likened the messaging and delivery of the griots to the hip-hop artists of today. A look at the decades of modern popular culture shows the concerns of the masses in their particular eras. The Universal horror movies of the 1930s were centered in Eastern Europe where the Nazi war machine was starting to grow.  Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor comic book heroes of the 1940s were already fighting the war, and paranoia about the nuclear age and a threat to our air space brought us films about atomic bred monsters and UFOS. The war in Southeast Asia provided fertile ground for late Sixties music and we’ll address that in a moment. Concern about AIDS and the blood supply led to the popularity of vampire films in the seventies and eighties and rap artists let their voices be heard about their wide range of issues for years until the present day. What’s the link?

Everything we mentioned is the product of storytellers. Facts are vital but it’s the story that compels us to listen and often to act. William Savage Jr. tells us that “a reliable enemy is a fine thing for a storyteller to have” (Savage, 1990). You can make a very effective case that the voices of protest were united by a common cause, and during the height of the age of musical dissent that concern was ending the war in Viet Nam and driving President Richard Nixon from office.  The horrors of My Lai, the sight of bloodshed and coffins with U.S. servicemen on the nightly news and the angry protests on college campuses and city streets widened the so-called generation gap between the America that won World War II… a declared war…and an overseas conflict fought by the post WWII baby boom that didn’t understand why we were there.  The deaths on the Kent State and Jackson State campuses, the New York Times publication of the Pentagon Papers, and the rise of anti-war candidates all played a role in the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Southeast Asia, and it was the rich pool of talent that challenged the so called “establishment” that helped fan the flames of dissent into a raging political fire.  Even so, it was not an easy task facing off against a very powerful and, let’s face it, very corrupt Nixon administration.

Richard Nixon was driven from office before the fall of Saigon and essentially the end of U.S. involvement in April 1975, but a strong argument could be made that American troops could have remained in Viet Nam even longer had he not resigned in disgrace. Nixon’s fall came the previous August when he stepped away from the White House faced with likely impeachment and even removal from office following the Watergate scandal and reports outlining excessive misuse of power in various levels of government. Even so, the Nixon administration used the power of the presidency and other government offices in an attempt to influence media and silence the forces that opposed him. He had his victories, too. The Nixon White House successfully stalled the admittedly left leaning Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS-TV and despite a lawsuit that ruled in favor of Tommy and Dick it was a hollow victory because they were silenced at a critical point in their career. You could say the same for John Lennon.  His appearance at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally with members of the Chicago Seven brought FBI agents out to Ann Arbor to write down lyrics he shouted from the stage. There had also been rumblings the former Beatle was using it as a dry run to hit the road with an anti-Nixon tour, and his politically charged 1972 album “Some Time in New York City” didn’t exactly endear him to the White House.  It had a small cover photo of the president dancing with Mao Tse-Tung in the nude that pushed him to the top of Nixon’s “enemies list.” Lennon found out the hard way you don’t mess with the U.S. government. That LP turned into the starting gun for a very expensive and contentious legal battle over a drug bust years before in England that feds used as an excuse to deport Lennon. Granted, Lennon eventually won the right to stay and get his green card, but it pretty much put his career on ice for years. So why weren’t the stories being heard to the same extent they were in the years immediately following CSNY’s “Ohio.” We weren’t the first to ask.

By 1975, it seemed the populace that aggressively fought the status quo had become battle weary. Yes, change is inevitable, but many of the tent poles of the counterculture had simply collapsed. The highly produced progressive rock gave way to the simple redefined raw energy of punk with a segment of a new generation rejecting the sounds that immediately preceding it. At about that same time there was the emerging disco generation spurred by the notion that we have been through trying times and let’s just let loose and dance. The flashy club scene that drew many of the superstars of the groundbreaking Sixties pop culture including Mick Jagger, Truman Capote and Andy Warhol to New York’s Studio 54 was celebrated at its height in John Travolta’s 1977 film Saturday Night Fever.  Entire radio formats adopted club dance music and rose triumphantly in the ratings before suddenly crashing when the fad faded into obscurity. Another film, 1982’s Wild Style, centering on the emerging hip hop lifestyle in the South Bronx didn’t get the same media attention partly because it centered on the rougher side of ghetto life, though the music was making its way via underground clubs and low power radio stations much like punk and early rock and roll. In the case of Wild Style, it was music with a message, but the messenger kept a distinct low profile.

It could also be argued that, sensing a growing and profitable audience, much of the underground pop culture was now being accepted and marketed in mainstream media of the day.  The underground art of R. Crumb that he peddled on the streets of Haight Ashbury in comics titled Zap, Mr. Natural and Big Ass was by the 1970s seen prominently on newsstands in Arcade — the Comics Revue, and a major feature film about his character, Fritz the Cat (which Crumb hated!)   His original art and stuff produced by Gilbert Shelton and S. Clay Wilson, among others, command huge prices. Poster artists like Rick Griffin, Dave Sheridan, Victor Moscoso and some other notables saw their stuff distributed for free and now hang in galleries.  Then radio went through a major change.

When FM radio started being included as standard features in cars in the early to mid-Seventies the free form progressive stations soon started programming with playlists, promotions and higher energy personalities than seen just a few years before when the AM dial was king. The shared communal experience of FM radio was switching from political and community concerns to heavy entertainment. Few remember that the band Ambrosia started out its recording career as a much heavier based group, but the lighter stuff on their later albums provided a form of escapism with lighter fare that gave them a success of which they only dreamed. Burleigh Drummond, the band’s drummer, said it became evident to both himself and the band stating, “I think there was a period in pop music where that was kind of the theme. Maybe it was a reaction to everything we had been through. You know, we had our share of protests. I mean Ambrosia actually wrote quite a few protests songs in our first two albums. ‘I Wanna Know’ is a protest. Things like that. I think around our third album is when we start having ‘How Much I Feel.’ I think it was a time to kind of celebrate feeling good again.”

The concert business became far more organized and profitable with artists playing large arenas and festivals with sophisticated lighting and sound and escalating ticket prices. The “establishment” that so many had feared had embraced the counterculture in the name of profit and the masses with expendable cash and energy liked what they saw and heard.  But that also meant you played by the rules of mainstream media, and money talked big time.

That’s not to say a lot of great art was not produced during those years.  In 1975 NBC’s Saturday Night  (later known as Saturday Night Live) took counterculture humor to new levels introducing it to a late-night audience that saw heroes emerge from the world of comedic commentary. The twisted satire of National Lampoon gave way to the midwives of this new form of comedy that took it from small stages played by troupes like the Second City and Groundlings to a national stage. Names like P.J. O’Rourke, Harold Ramis, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, John Belushi and Chevy Chase, among others, went from driving from town to town for bookings to major media stardom practically overnight. But remember what we said about the “reliable enemy.” Was there such an enemy in the early days of SNL? Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford was a bumbling slapstick president, but hardly a threat. Some of the SNL crews most memorable moments came in simply reflecting the absurdity of everyday life. It wasn’t a platform to preach revolution, at least not in a traditional sense. The post WWII generation that sought political commentary could see it and share the joke late night with names like Steve Martin, who helped the Smothers Brothers during their rise and battle against CBS. There was Buck Henry, whose dry wit that began in the early Sixties talk programs would be the forerunner of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The Daily Show which many young people in the early 21st century cited as their preferred sources for news.  Henry was a regular host on SNL, which also featured Richard Pryor and George Carlin along with a staff that knew how to “write with a bite”.  The show also featured many artists with a message, but NBC didn’t seem to worry about that hour on a Saturday night. It targeted a hip generation, and as commentators Jonathan Luxmoore and Christine Ellis would write years later the change would eventually go from “generational to the cultural and economic” suggesting “changing social habits have eroded music’s political significance” (Ellis, 2016). Could those seeds have been planted as far back as the 1970s?  There were those who disagreed with Luxmoore and Ellis, and we’ll hear from them coming up.

Perhaps one area that we should stress is that when “Ohio” was released the outrage over the Kent State shootings was obvious but still very divisive.  In April 1970, WEWS-TV commentator Dorothy Fuldheim, who at the time was 77 and a Cleveland institution, abruptly ended a televised interview with Yippie Jerry Rubin and threw him off the set.  The press and public lauded her as their heroine, but when Fuldheim spoke against the National Guard in the deaths of the four KSU students on May 4th the backlash was so severe and immediate she was certain she would be fired the next day. The station stood behind their matriarch and she never backed down.  The point is that fans who embraced CSNY’s song as an anthem were likely in the younger demo in the so-called “generation gap.” That song was targeted for young sensibility and heard primarily on radio stations aimed at the baby boom audience, primarily on Top 40 stations which reached the greatest number of listeners but also the FM with a more insightful though still young audience. Again, Luxmoore and Ellis could have been writing about the marketability of these messages even then stating, “The promoters have long since cottoned on to the commercial potential of protest music; you’d have to be very determined and energetic to make yourself authentic and visible without them (Ellis, 2016).” Does the modern dearth of protest music simply lack a beat rather than a viable message?

The Hill’s Judy Kurtz notes another important aspect relating to youth in her piece quoting singer John Legend who wisely points out the audience that embraced “Ohio” had much in common with Kent State and protestors nationwide and that was the military draft. Legend has penned his share of songs with distinct messages and as he told Kurtz the audience facing possible conscription “felt a bit more urgency about what was going on. So even now, even though there are a lot of people concerned about what’s happening in Washington, I think there was even more urgency back in the ’Sixties and ’Seventies, and you saw that reflected in the art” (Kurtz, 2017). That urgency centered on a call from the military, and one that the previous generation saw differently having fought in World War II.   Kurtz also quotes noted attorney and music researcher Bob Lefsetz, best known for his long-standing newsletter titled, appropriately enough the “Lefsetz Letter.” His thought is that many name artists are afraid of negative branding stating, “You have people who are into it for the fame, who are told what to do, are extending their brand, and are afraid of doing anything that might alienate anybody” (Kurtz, 2017).  In the past, like some of the folk artists of the 1950s, it could end you up on a Blacklist where you couldn’t find work or, like John Lennon, be under a government microscope. Joan Baez was targeted by ultra-conservative cartoonist Al Capp in his “Lil’ Abner” strip. To be fair there are also artists who don’t seem to care if they do alienate an audience that may not follow them anyway, with Kurtz pointing to Eminem’s free style tirade against President Donald Trump at the 2017 BET Hip Hop Awards. This four minutes and 35 seconds of scathing fury was surprising at first. Eminem is an artist whose work has long been accused of being saturated with misogynistic and homophobic themes. But it’s a point he’s aware of. He spits one line to Trump in the verse that acknowledges their similarity: “When it comes to giving a shit, you’re stingy as I am.”. He even goes as far as to ask his fans who were Trump supporters to lose his number:

“And any fan of mine who’s a supporter of his
I’m drawing in the sand a line, you’re either for or against
And if you can’t decide who you like more and you’re split
On who you should stand beside, I’ll do it for you with this:
Fuck you!
The rest of America stand up!
We love our military, and we love our country
But we fucking hate Trump!”

But this “storm” wasn’t linked to any one incident, and that brings us to another point. The way music is delivered. Artists who made a name with protest music including Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, the Weavers and on and on had live performance, their records and maybe some radio and later TV. Plus, the music industry had changed from earlier days when a company would give an artist three albums to prove themselves. By the 1980s profits became paramount with some artists dropped from their labels because they made money, but not enough.  The chance to develop a meaningful catalog of music diminished with the years, and then there was marketing linked to video. The TV video channels embraced the “hits format” of radio and if the video release of a song wasn’t compelling it didn’t matter what the topic was.  You had to keep people watching. To be fair, there were also some very mediocre songs that had a new life with pictures. There were options. College radio had made great strides in acquiring on-air signals and while they catered to a very select and usually hip crowd, they also had a niche audience that wandered to the far end of the radio dial. Digital would change everything once again.

No one was prepared for downloading, especially the big labels. The late Steve Popovich with Cleveland International Records was a music visionary who had once been on the upper tiers at Epic and other labels and he saw the threat of downloading and streaming early on. Most of his warnings were ignored and Napster took a huge chunk out of record company profits, but the biggest change came with the ease that an artist could record their music without a label and simply market it via You Tube and other music sharing platforms. You had artists who could be set for life with just a few songs and that could limit what they were willing to issue.  They also didn’t have to develop outside of their comfort zone. Add to that the fading influence of traditional media like TV, radio and compact discs. Many younger listeners don’t embrace the traditional media in favor of streaming. In that same article by Kurtz, Lefsetz points out “Prior to the internet, you know we had radio that was dominant, MTV that was dominant, and if something gained traction, everybody would know it.  Whereas now there’s songs in the top 10 where a great percentage of the public does not know” (Kurtz, 2017). And then there is the burning question: Does anyone care?  Is there an artist that can make them care?

Popular music covers a lot of ground and over the years consultants have chopped it up making the thought of breaking a new artist with a strong message highly unlikely or at least very difficult. That doesn’t seem to be the case with comedy, though audiences do tend to follow music and comedy in two very different ways. There are very few comedians like Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield who have signature lines and bits that keep people coming back even though they know exactly what they are going to say. Many new comedians benefit from topical humor to bring in new audience. Even veterans like Steve Martin and Martin Short, who have no shortage of classic lines and characters, consistently update their acts to draw crowds.  Plus, people don’t listen to those same comedic routines over and over like a hit song. They’re more likely to pass them on in everyday conversation.  Not so with a song.

Folk music expert Malcolm Taylor came right out and said it. “Protest songs are no longer seen as an effective form of communication,” adding that social media is the venue of choice, but is he arguing musical style or simply the method we choose to hear it?  Producer Emilio Estefan believes protest can thrive online, stating “Now you get the internet, so people protest, but protest in their own way now because they have the new technology.” That was also the route Estefan took when he assembled a chorus of Latino entertainers including his wife, Gloria, Pitbull, Carlos Santana and others for a song titled “We’re All Mexican” responding to comments Donald Trump made on the 2016 campaign trail.  Even so there are those who suggest pop and rock may have run their course as well.  Naseem Khuri is one of them.

The front man for Kingsley Flood, Khuri told the Boston Herald, “Maybe rock and pop artists have less to say or maybe the genre is simply less relevant, even outdated.” Less to say seems unlikely. Every decade since “Ohio” has seen some degree of messaging in music with topics ranging from nuclear war to poverty to police brutality and beyond. However, the argument about delivery of that type of music may have some teeth. Music formats have become highly segmented over the years and satellite radio, streaming, You Tube and social media offer so many opportunities for specific programming that a breakout artist or even particular song gaining a wide audience ala “Ohio” seems remote. Then there’s the issue of partisan politics.

It might be seen as divide and conquer for those targeting a certain artist or opinion. A specific audience may not have the same voice to respond to those opposed to the message, especially in uncertain times. Natalie Maines of Dixie Chicks found that out the hard way in 2003 when London’s Guardian ran an abbreviated quote from Maines in a concert review stating, “Just so you know … we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.”  Those and other comments just days before the start of the war in Iraq were seen as near treasonous by the traditionally conservative country audience and the Dixie Chicks saw nothing but a rough road ahead. Maines publicly apologized for the slam at then President Bush while stressing her opposition to the war though that wasn’t enough for a radical faction that targeted the band with death threats.  Maines didn’t help her case when she retracted the apology showing an emotional segment of the public, many still hurting from 9/11, that emotional patriotism and free speech can sometimes be on opposing sides. There’s also the disturbing possibility that protest music simply doesn’t sell and a generation of programmers who grew up during the “defining age” of protest music on radio may have abandoned that genre.

Gottlieb suggests that while there have been a few artists who continued promoting politically based music, producers and programmers in the 21st century opt for the Katy Perry / Justin Bieber / Rihanna style artist that promotes “escapism.” The music media, like most commerce, is based on profit and it’s hard to argue that artists produce just that…art…instead of revenue. There are a number of pop artists who can embrace both, including Green Day and even Taylor Swift, but they belong to a very exclusive club.  Those acts established themselves before dipping their toes in the pool of protest and their loyal fans were open to their messages. Still, a search for protest music on mainstream radio has turned into a frustrating ordeal. Plus, today’s media users may simply have too many options in the digital age, but that might also offer new opportunities. We just have to recognize them.

Back to Lefsetz who is quoted saying, “Music does not drive the culture…what drives the culture is television and politics.” It would seem the marriage of the two, especially in light of the 24-hour news cycle in the Trump presidency, would provide an atmosphere for protest music that is rich with potential. Is television being used, even exploited, to its maximum to provide the kind of coverage the voices of protest need? Frankly, the age of traditional mainstream television may be fading. Young media users who have traditionally been early adapters to new technology and systems have fled TV in favor of online programming.  Even so, there have been flash points when protest messaging reached mass audiences via television.

Again, to Lefsetz, who’s quoted as saying “musicians have ‘a decent amount of power,’ judging by massive social media followings.” Social media! Could this be the link to drawing young audiences to protest messaging in the arts? Gottlieb says it’s already begun and part of it stems from artists working outside the traditional industry boundaries.

There are also musicians effectively using the internet and social media to pursue a higher level of activism. The Boston based Chad Stokes with State Radio along with his tour manager Sybil Gallagher established their  “Calling All Crows” site described as “a musician-fueled activist organization… that works for a future when the success of live music is measured not only by ticket sales, but by the impact of fans and musicians mobilizing together to make a difference in the world.” You can count Chicana rapper Xela de la X among that number. She performs under the name Cihuatl Ce and told music writer Luis Rivas, “I think that whatever is being played is not because the masses are asking for it. It’s what’s being fed to us. Definitely, I think there’s a degree of people being tired of the monotony of the messages in the mainstream.”  She describes her style as “aggressive, unapologetically militant feminist, gutter music from the streets and the people” and is quick to add, “Mainstream (music) is mad misogynist… If they’re speaking about rebellion and revolution and making change, that shit you don’t hear on the radio.” Social media has proven a convenient and very effective option.

It should be obvious that social commentary in music is nothing new, but at times it needs a jolt to let people know it’s there.  Sometimes it’s the marketability. But drummer Jim Fox says sometimes it’s conscience. He tells us, “I think Viet Nam was a watershed.  Kent State was a watershed, no doubt. But I don’t that explains the decline of music in the sense of importance in people’s lives. That’s really happening and there are a lot of things you can blame it on. You can blame it on video games, blame it on computers. Blame it on all kinds of things that occupy people’s time, where at one time music was what occupied our time.  As a trained musician I have not heard music as important as it was for thirty years, maybe longer, and it’s very sad. I can’t live without a continuous stream of stimulation. It doesn’t have to be new, but it helps to be new to me. There are things I will go back to rediscover. Maybe I missed a Kinks album along the way. That kind of thing. That I think is wonderful and it keeps me alive.  But radio no longer exists. There’s nothing I can hear. I can’t put a radio station on.” Fox also points to the punk genre, which was heavy on attitude that transcends all forms of music.

I would give more credit to the punk movement. I would say that it was more often than not hidden. Look at someone like Phil Ochs. The difference between his stuff and later music was that he was never as popular as some people, but his songs were extremely relevant. There was all the obvious stuff. Anything Dylan did, Joni Mitchell…it was a genre. Go all the way back to the Weavers, which gets you Pete Seeger. But listen to Les McCann’s ‘Compared to What?’ with Eddie Harris on sax. That song was an example that was part of a conscious effort to be part of that movement, civil rights. Whereas the Phil Ochs’, the Bob Dylans,’ the Weavers and a whole lot of the folk scene were really brave because they knew they stood to be investigated. They were operating on their beliefs where a song by someone like the Temptations strikes me as reflecting someone at Motown more than someone in the band. The writer knew what they wanted to express, and they did it successfully, but it wasn’t the motivation from a different place.”

It can be argued that it happened again when MTV finally started airing Black artists and groups like Run-DMC, Public Enemy and Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five, among many others, found a new forum, but MTV has long abandoned its music heavy format.  The internet continues to provide a convenient “safe harbor” for new music, and as Zack O’Malley Greenburg with Forbes writes, “social media has enabled musicians of the current generation—regardless of genre—to keep their music apolitical but deliver more partisan messages directly to their followers if they so choose.” And they are choosing that option a lot.

Sophie Weiner with the Village Voice agrees with the future of political messaging in the arts on social media, and remember Luxmoore and Ellis? She doesn’t buy their argument. She writes, “It’s true that some aspects of social media — namely “hashtag activism” that results in little offline action — may have dulled traditional forms of protest, but the internet has made political music much more accessible. Luxmoore and Ellis’s romanticized version of the 1960s music industry fails to mention the chilling effect the major-label system had on musicians who didn’t fit a certain mold. Not so today, where all you need to create and distribute music is a computer and a Wi-Fi hookup. To say that’s a good thing for political music is an understatement.” She adds that the scope of protest messaging has expanded as well, stating “Queer people and feminists have taken to raw DIY punk to pen some of the most potent protest songs in recent times. Downtown Boys, the Providence, Rhode Island, punk band, are radical leftist feminists,” a genre that would likely have garnered very little audience prior to social media access. Weiner delivers a final firm assessment in these words: “Populist music is, and by its very definition always will be, an evolving form. The images and songs may change, but their goal is always to transform our culture and end oppression. We’re living amid an incredibly exciting intersection of art, technology, and social justice. It’d be a real shame for these writers — and anyone else who shares their fears — to miss out.” It’s how we all use those elements that will write our legacy.  All we are saying…is let our voices be heard.