6 New Trends But a Familiar Message

“Questioning anything and everything to me is punk rock.”

– Henry Rollins

Of course, the awareness of certain styles of music are a barometer of how effective their messages are delivered and understood. While punk and new wave that first arose in the early to mid-seventies may have had a select and even limited audience, there was no shortage of strong messaging. As we’ve have noted, other musical genres picked up the baton, but were they as effective in spreading their messages for peace and social awareness or social justice? We mentioned Chris Butler a few pages back. He knows the Kent State story well.  Butler also knows a lot about the music industry as part of the bands Tin Huey, the nationally known Waitresses, and as a successful solo musician. He calls it “a huge bloody topic!”

“Give Peace a Chance,” he tells us, “is the protest song equivalent to McCartney’s ‘Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time.’ If we are stating ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance’ as opposed to ‘We want fucking peace!’ — that’s a big difference. ‘Ohio’ is an amazing song and in the classic folk tradition where you take a traumatic incident, whether it’s a miners’ strike or Phil Ochs doing ‘the news.’ Bob Dylan made a sarcastic comment about Phil Ochs, saying that, ‘He doesn’t write songs, he writes the news.’” Is that a bad thing? Butler does tip his hat to CSNY for producing a song that was not only powerful when it premiered but has stood the test of time, and he can see the Phil Ochs way of thinking. He also wonders about the degree of commitment.

He points out, “On one hand, it’s a powerful, reactive message but on the other hand, it’s like, where is the line between reporting the news and bringing awareness versus exploitation?  The big question I have about that is that I know Graham Nash and David Crosby have played for free at Kent. They’ve donated their services to various causes, but my question is 1). whether Neil Young has ever come back to Kent and 2). did he take any of his publishing money from that song and contribute it to any of the causes? Maybe the answer is yes, but that would be something I would want to know about.”

Bob Lewis was on the front lines of the first phase of new wave music. A founding member of Devo, he was at Kent during the events of May 4th, 1970, and says you have to understand the history of protest music to reflect on its possible direction. According to Lewis, there are two things to consider. “First,” he says, “the music. Sixties protest music was driven by issues like civil rights. Some folks saw that as left leaning stuff from the 1930s. Voices like Pete Seeger, the Weavers and ‘Which side are you on?’ When we progressed to the civil rights era and Vietnam protest it focused our attention because everyone knew somebody that was getting drafted and going to Nam. All the guys were listening because their futures were being determined and their girlfriends, wives and families were involved as well.”

He continues, “This is also the biggest part, the ‘pig in a python’of the baby boomers.  Kent State went from 8000 students to 20,000 almost overnight! It was like, ‘What the fuck are we going to do with all these kids?!’ So, they hired a bunch of new faculty and that brought in a lot of more progressive ideas and thinkers, too. It was kind of like the perfect storm for protest music at that time. You had the civil rights issue, which was important, but you also had the issue of life and death and war and peace. At the same time, you have this big bulge in the baby boomer population. So, you have this weird thing in the music industry where you have a lot of start-up record companies: Electra / Asylum, Alpert and Moss starting A & M Records [etc.] It’s no longer just Warner and CBS. Motown was expanding options for artists to get music to their public who were eager to buy. People had disposable income back then. You had protest music, but you also had a distribution network that was not yet completely controlled by big corporations.” Lewis also points out music and its message as a driving economic force.

“When Elvis was first starting out,” he says, “Black music was called ‘race records.’  When Elvis was growing up you had to listen to Black music on the ‘QT.’ But it didn’t take long for the corporate overlords to respond to this challenge. You had Warner Brothers buying up small labels and big recording companies getting in bed with chain stores like Peaches Records and stuff like that. They almost immediately fought back the attempts by the independent record business to get their product out.” But Lewis also notes there were well-heeled investors who were willing to face off against the corporate monster. “Of course, you also had Richard Branson starting Virgin Records and Chris Blackwell starting Island. There was Stiff Records and all these little labels. It was possible for alternative artists to get their product into the marketplace in a way that was not possible earlier than that.” Did that include protest music?

Lewis is quick to respond to that, stressing, “Devo was protest music! It was perhaps a step removed because it wasn’t obvious. And another thing, with the Amazon (rain forest) burning and the plastics in all of our blood streams and shit like that, in 1971, a year after May 4th, there was an organization called the Club of Rome. They got a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation to do a study on projecting into the future and the growth of population would affect resources. They came out with a report called ‘The Limits of Growth – The Report of the Club of Rome’ and it basically said we can’t afford to keep going like this or really bad shit is going to happen! It was immediately attacked by conservatives and the right and in the eighties and nineties the Club of Rome report became kind of a joke. Anyone who wanted to have ecological concerns would get criticized. ‘What are you trying to do? Another Club of Rome deal?’”

But Lewis says that report in so many ways withstood the test of time, saying “In the last ten years or so, folks have gone back and looked at their data and what they’re saying is, ‘You know, they weren’t exactly right because they didn’t anticipate all the current problems,’ like Roundup (weed killer) was going to be in the water and discarded plastics would be such a problem. But they saw the trend lines indicating we’ve got problems and a lot of concern in the songs Devo did were with an understanding that unless some kind of rational thought is paid to human growth we are going to run into a big wall. It’s going to be a really big problem.” In so many ways, the content of Devo’s music…which was seen as eccentric and even comical for the time… has proven eerily prophetic.

Lewis continues with a look at recent years. He also stresses that we are offering individuals the right to express opinion. As he notes, “Right now, we are looking at the start of resource wars over water in a very short time if they are not already happening.  In fact, part of the reason that Syria destabilized was that we invaded Iraq and a million and a half refugees fled into that country. But Syria also had an eight-year drought with farmlands drying up and farmers forced off their land. Then Turkey, our ally, reduces flow into Iraq and Syria from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and part of the Isis recruiting tools is, ‘We’ll get you water rights.’ Meanwhile, Nestle’s is sucking water out of the bottom of the Great Lakes selling it for bottled water!”  Lewis also points out changing trends in political thought adding, “I also believe the overall ‘then window’ of American politics has shifted radically to the right. The 1956 Republican platform when President Eisenhower was running for his second term had stuff like ‘Make it easier for people to join unions!’ Yeah. Times change! But did we lose direction with protest / message music or do people not recognize the message? Did people lose the message while recognizing the art and novelty of the music?

After a while,” he says, “people did recognize that message. Some really smart people like (former Kent State instructor and noted poet) Ed Dorn and people like that, they realized it right away. At the same time a lot of people reacted very harshly to it because it angered them.”  An early Devo concert at Cleveland’s WHK Auditorium opening for jazz great Sun Ra is an example where the “spud boys” were chased out of the hall, and part of that might have been territorial. Lewis recalls, “There was kind of a tension between Akron and Cleveland. For example, the folks in Akron weren’t burning LeBron’s jersey when he went left for Miami. He didn’t leave Akron, he left Cleveland.” At times, messages can be widely interpreted. Let’s hear more about the musical scene following the events at KSU. Lewis looked at how the audience perceived the messenger as well as the message.

When we went to Cleveland that was the first time we found out that if you were the opening band, you didn’t get to have as much volume on stage as the headliner and that kind of shit that goes on.  The other thing is, if you look at the Beatles White album and you trace each of the songs that lead from one to the next musical form. You got heavy metal on there and all sorts of stuff. The music market started to fragment because there no longer is sort of an American Bandstand where you see the top ten songs that week for the whole country. Now you have world music and the new country and traditional country and hip-hop and rap. Of course, hip-hop and rap has some serious protest music, especially the ‘Fuck Tha’ Police’ stuff.” But a familiar theme emerges once again.

Like others before him, Lewis says it comes down to marketability. “In the sixties and seventies, if you could get your protest song onto vinyl, someone would sell it. Now people access their music differently. It’s kind of like siloes. There are people that don’t go out of their own category of what they want to listen to. In the days of pioneer FM rock radio, you could hear a whole album side! For a lot of FM deejays their play list was whatever the fuck they wanted to play! Then you had the rise of Clear Channel and the music consultants.” Without getting into the evolution of radio analytics, you still have to recognize an audience and what they expect from a station. Who are you looking to serve and how? That can be open to interpretation and even generational. When big money owns a station, you are beholden to the needs of the master…or you look for a new employer. That’s not an excuse or an endorsement, it’s just the lay of the land. Then there’s the generational difference as well as the obvious economic one.

Back to Butler, who stresses, “This is a real tough subject to address” stating, “It is ridiculously nuanced. There has never been a time when in certain areas of music whether it became punk or hard-core feminist musicians like Pussy Riot or Ani DiFranco or on and on.  Real country people, anti-folk people, hard core rappers who pioneered a poetry style… there has never been a time when music has not been an expression of protest and discontent. It changes formats from time to time, but it’s always there and so is music as entertainment. Pardon my French but there’s the new wave saying, ‘Fuck art, let’s dance!’ Things are always mass marketed. If you can get a message song in now and then that’s amazing, but in general it’s always going to be underground. Every once in a while, it may poke its head up with a song like Bob Dylan and ‘Hurricane.’ There are anomalies left and right. There’s a wonderful song by Soho, ‘Hippiechick,’ about a police interrogation. It sounds like a pop song with a sample from the Smiths, was a huge hit but it’s about a police interrogation of a Black woman. My point is that both protest and entertainment have gone on in parallel and, once in a while, one will poke through. Yes, there was a sense of alternative culture that was turned into music that became ‘popular,’ but at the same time, if you look at the pop charts, it’s still going to be Neil Diamond, it’s still going to be fluff.”

Butler says it often comes down to an industry that may not understand art, but certainly know its way around a buck. “There was a consciousness that became part of an awareness by the record companies that, ‘I don’t know what it is but the kids like it! You know, this San Francisco stuff. What the hell!’ When they had a lot of money rushing around and they could take a chance on something because their kid told the record executive, ‘How come you’re not listening to Jefferson Airplane?’ The whole Volunteers album by the Airplane came out and when they played Kent I really sensed that while they may have been sincere there was something funny about RCA Records releasing an album called Volunteers with all these ‘…up against the wall motherfucker’ type songs. I could just see the suits chuckling in their business suite saying, ‘Well, that’s what the kids want. Let’s take a chance on it!’ But this is RCA; it’s one of the oldest, most conservative labels in existence doing this record. It seems like a built-in conflict. If you want ‘protesty’ stuff it’s always there but, yes, it’s usually not mainstream.”

Jim Fox tells a different story about marketability as a necessity.

“No, if you’re susceptible. Let’s put this in the past tense because that’s where it lives. If you had the kind of mind that is curious about things like that, if you’re interested in the condition of the planet, the condition of the world of the race whatever, you could find it. When it was just coming in you had that opportunity. Today, there are two things going on. One, you wouldn’t have the opportunity if it existed and two, it doesn’t exist! Some people would tell you that within rap music it’s still there and it can be.” More on that later.

John Lennon suggested we could be marketing peace like a commodity. Something we can’t live without. He even tried in his own unique way, but at the same time found you can’t get support for anything unless people are willing to buy into it. Even so, he had a voice because of his distinguished career. Record companies knew the Lennon name could move product, but what about new voices? Butler says it’s there, but you often really have to look for it.

“Record labels are in the entertainment business. They’re not in the political business and in terms of the way music is consumed now it’s its own radical protest. That first kid that digitized a CD and spread it around his friends for free, Napster or whatever, that first kid broke the back of the music business. He was probably doing it as a teenage prank. I don’t if that was protest or an economic thing. Why pay if I can get it free? That’s the prevailing thought with streaming and that broke the back of the very established money trail. That song would be played on the radio, it generated a nickel for the publisher, the publishers paid the writers and it was a beautiful little set up system. You sell a record and you may have a bullshit contract, but you are entitled to a royalty. There was a money stream but that is completely blow apart now.” Plus, he says the topic — like the industry and the delivery platform — are often fragmented. “One reason this protest issue is extremely hard to address,” he says, “is you have to define what protest is. Economic? Violence against women? Black suppression? I’m saying it’s out there.  The protests do exist but there are so many different medias and it’s so fragmented that it may be on a webpage or a blog or a college radio station as opposed to ‘Ohio’ coming out of a 50000  watt AM radio station like CKLW blasting out of Windsor Ontario with a clear channel radius of 500 miles.”

Many Baby Boomers were raised to question authority and “think outside the box.”  Those are lofty ideals, but when the “greatest generation” saw its progeny oppose many of the principles and beliefs they held dear it resulted in the so-called generation gap that in many ways  extended automatically to a polarizing effect when it came to fashion, music and political thought. It went both ways. Bob Lewis tells us, “The folks who fought World War II did great things, but they didn’t think to question the government with Vietnam. Part of the problem was when we got the brainwashing about the history of our nation, and everything we actually expected it to live up to that billing. Then a generation came forth with Vietnam asking, ‘Wait a minute. Why are we doing this?’ Also, because of the fact that everyone was affected by the Vietnam war and the draft, in April of 1967 twenty of us from Kent drove up to New York for the first big march and there were 500-thousand people marching down Fifth Avenue. It’s hard to get that kind of turnout now because the particular issues are kind of like specialized.” The influence of TV and the alternative press also helped publicize and exacerbate that division for all sides of the issue. Also, keep in mind that in the mid-seventies after the pullout from Vietnam a lot of folks lost that main focus and just figured ‘Let’s have a good time. Let’s dance’, and we had disco.  In the eighties, spurred on by popular culture and the moto ‘Greed is good’ you had hippies and even Yippies like Jerry Rubin becoming stockbrokers and white-collar businesspeople. For those who stuck by their values and often remained poor Lewis says, “Poverty was a good indicator of someone who stayed virtuous.” But today, how relevant is protest music to an angry music audience that may not know what they are angry about, that their movement is not clearly defined? Back to Bob Lewis who takes a stand: Don’t blame the boomers!

“I understand anger, but some folks may not even know that they are angry. I got out of high school in 1965.  I’m looking for a summer job to make some money before I go off to Kent, so I got a job painting apartments; three bucks an hour, which was pretty good for back then. The same guys who hired me to do that had a little office building in Cuyahoga Falls, near Akron.  I’d go in there six nights a week and empty ashtrays and wastebaskets, straighten up and sweep the floor. If I really busted my ass, I could do it in an hour a night. Six hours a week, but they paid me $45 for that because it was still cheap for them. Seven bucks an hour! Three an hour for painting apartments and a brand-new Corvette at that time is $3000! If I work a thousand hours, I can buy a new ‘vette! If a kid came out of high school now, he’d have to be making $60 an hour, and maybe he’s still at that seven bucks an hour stage. We didn’t realize that the post-World War II prosperity was an anomaly in American history. Our generation was real smart. We were smart enough to be born White males in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. We lived better than the Roman emperors did!” He also says, “I understand why kids today are pissed at the boomers, because they think we wanted things to be this way. Gotta disagree with them on that. We didn’t want this. We were warning this would happen! Ronald Reagan and those fucking assholes are the ones who brought us here. It wasn’t baby boomers!”

This begs the question: Can the modern artist target a key audience? In Lewis’ eyes, “To a certain extent, you can’t be knowledgeable to every musical genre. You also can’t be involved in every area of protest because injustice and oppression are so widespread. It’s everywhere. At some point, you kind of get burned out. But I still think that humans and music are inextricably linked.  Humans need music and music needs humans. The age of protest will continue because things will get worse and people will be making songs about it. That’s guaranteed.”

Political messaging and art are alive and well across the globe, and modern punk artisan Ed Hammell agrees, saying, “There’s more protest music now than ever, it’s just not much by White guys. I’ll cite Rage Against the Machine, Dead Kennedys, NWA, Tupac, and Public Enemy. My favorite protest ‘albums’ I guess in the 80’s were by Sinead O’Connor and The Clash — and that’s old stuff. Currently check out Eminem’s ‘Untouchable,’ Kendrick Lamar’ s ‘DNA’, Pussy Riot’s ‘Make America Great Again’, Logics ‘Everybody,’ Xxxtencion’s ‘Hate Will Never Win,’ Joey Bad’s Rockabye Baby and the great Kimya Dawson.” Which brings us to what may be the most popular form of music in the world. Even traditional voices agree that rap and hip-hop are loud voices that cannot be ignored.

A longtime fixture on the Greenwich Village folk scene all the way back to the sixties and the one-time manager of Bob Dylan and her late husband Dave Van Ronk, writer and folk observer Terri Thal says, “Fewer songs have narratives; more have blunt statements similar to those we associate with rap,” and the legendary Tom Rush shares, “It’s probably not as obviously important, but I do think the whole rap thing, for instance, is definitely part of the fabric.” Add Devo’s Bob Lewis to the mix and he admits, “The targets of the protest movement have scattered. Yeah, Lady Gaga did ‘Born This Way’ so that message was heard loudest by the LGBT protest. Plus, Beyoncé and Black Lives Matter are making their voices heard. Their music is important but it’s most important to the people to whom their music applies. The music spectrum split into highly specialized areas. When you’re seventeen and you hear that special song and it affects you in a way that doesn’t affect you in the same way as when you’re seventy. It’s so important and vital at the time and to what is happening in your life at the time.

Rolling Stone’s Greg Tate observed in 2015, “Black American musical history is chock full of full of amazing fight songs, overt and covert, and more than a few steady-aiming, freedom-fighting chanteuses.” Today, the “rap people,” as David Crosby put it, are now some of our most prominent musical voices of dissent. It may be hard for some folk artists from the defining era of protest to wrap their heads around the “tits and ass” of it all, but there’s very little denying it’s the central voice of musical dissent today.

“Personally, I don’t get rap,” Rush says. “I don’t understand it but clearly billions of people do. I think it’s part of the fabric of the social interactions that go on today.” Hip-hop’s heavy use of explicit language and hyper expression of female sexuality tend to turn this generation of artists off, or at the very least, give an overall impression that the genre is more vapid and commercial than it is political. Still, Rush agrees it’s a large part of today’s social movements. “Especially when it’s getting into social commentary,” Rush said. “Using language I do not approve of and expressing ideas that I don’t endorse but still, I think it’s an important part of the social scene. It’s not as in your face as it was back in the Sixties when some of my colleagues were, you know, taking the establishment to task. Maybe it is. Maybe I’m saying it’s not as obvious because I’m not listening to it all the time.”

Chris Butler suggests that because so much rap is topical its appeal may also be focused on an audience that identifies with the topics firsthand. It can also be cultural as well as generational. “A perfect example,” he points out, “NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton.” It’s from the street but they were able to package it in a commercial way and money makes people weird.  Rap is the top musical form and it influenced contemporary R & B. That brings up another point because soul as a White guy you could say, “Yeah, I can identify with that.” Hardcore rap is very exclusive for an audience that is not aimed at me. It’s brothers talking to brothers, or sisters talking to sisters. I know people who are huge fans of gangster rap, or whatever, but by and large that is certainly not aimed towards my demographic.”

Kent State’s Gene Shelton pointed out a prime example of a hip-hop artist using the landscape for more political messaging than commercial imagery. “Chance the Rapper, people [like him] who come out and address the social ills of America and they base their music on the message as opposed to the materialism of the message. They don’t need a gatekeeper; they don’t need a record company they don’t need somebody to say hey you can’t say that in a song. I don’t know why, but I agree that you would think pop radio we would hear more of a reaction.”

As we look over decades in the evolution of music with a distinct message, you’ll often come across the term “longtime activist.” Perhaps no one deserves that title more than Barbara Dane, one of the premier jazz and folk vocalists who worked with everyone from Louis Armstrong to Doc Watson and Bob Dylan and it seems that age hasn’t slowed her down all that much. Based in Oakland and called “an enduring voice of resistance” by music critic Liz Warner, Dane is still going strong in her nineties, performing and adding to her musical legacy. She also continues to voice opinions in a tone that writer Andrew Gilbert described as “righteous determination” talking stands on a wide range of topics related to social injustice, government oversight, civil disorder, and even the way those issues are described by her fellow musicians. In an interview for this book, she agreed that today’s musical voice of dissent is largely hip-hop.

“Don’t look for a folkie with a guitar and a beard and long hair. That’s not it,” Dane said. “It’s not a question of a style or anything. You’re trying to communicate. Whatever period you live in, or whatever country or whatever language or culture you use all those tools that are there. And they’re using them. All over the map.”

Tracing the genre’s roots way, way back, begins with the music that played a pivotal role for African Americans during the civil rights movement. Activists sang African American spirituals, gospel, and folk music songs like “Tree of Life,” “Eyes on the Prize,” and “We Shall Overcome” to “motivate them through long marches, for psychological strength against harassment and brutality, and sometimes to simply pass the time when waiting for something to happen,” as the Library of Congress put it.

Decades later, protest music continued to be a uniting force for expressing Black issues, but by the late 80s, early 90s, it took on an entirely new form.