Protest Songs and the Comic Connection

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-91
Author(s):  
Adrian May
Keyword(s):  
Protest Songs

scholarly journals Transcending the moment

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-508
Author(s):  
Martin J. Power ◽  
Aileen Dillane
Keyword(s):  
Folk Song ◽  
Performance Style ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Protest Songs ◽  
Structures Of Feeling ◽  
Ordinary Person ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Traditional Structures ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Political Songs

Abstract Our paper argues that British singer Billy Bragg performs protest songs that cleverly draw upon musical forms underpinning his positioning as a voice of, and for, the ordinary person, ultimately disenfranchised by governmental adherence to neoliberal policies. While political songs are a product of their time, many of them can also transcend that historical moment and have a longer shelf-life in terms of their capacity to inform political thinking and action. Our song(s) of choice in this paper do so not just in terms of the relevance of their ‘literal’ message but also in how they draw upon traditional structures of feeling and generic elements of folk song to underpin this sense of ‘grass-roots’ critique via a modified, acoustic ballad form and a performance style. This serves to authenticate and legitimate the singer and his message and, in turn, allows Bragg to accumulate political and cultural capital.

Labor and Industrial Protest Songs in Canada

1969 ◽  
Vol 82 (323) ◽  
pp. 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edith Fowke
Keyword(s):  
Protest Songs

Protest Songs from the Textile Mills and Coalfields

2020 ◽  
pp. 176-180
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Coal Dust ◽  
Coal Mines ◽  
Folk Songs ◽  
Southern Appalachians ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Textile Mills ◽  
Protest Songs ◽  
Traditional Ballads ◽  
A Site

Protest songs have sustained strikers on picket lines, memorialized disasters, galvanized support for unions, sparked folk revivals, and established Appalachia in the national consciousness as a site of labor struggle. In Coal Dust on the Fiddle (1943), a collection of songs from the bituminous coal mines, George Korson explains that the folk songs of immigrant miners, traditional ballads of the Southern Appalachians, and African American spirituals combined in music that documented and commemorated life in the mines....

Anglophone Songs about HIV/AIDS

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Jones
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
Aids Activism ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Protest Songs ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
Diverse Groups ◽  
Hiv Aids

This essay focuses on English-language popular songs about HIV/AIDS and offers a five-part typology based not on sonic markers of musical genre but instead on lyric content. Its central argument is that song lyrics carry important political messages and constitute a significant and under-studied contribution to the broader culture of arts-based HIV/AIDS activism. In AIDS-themed elegies, protest songs, pedagogical songs, confessional songs, and a small category of songs in bad taste, songwriters and performers translate the official scientific, medical, and political discourses of HIV/AIDS into vernacular speech idioms. In doing so, ideas and ideologies about HIV/AIDS transcend generic boundaries to effectively reach broad and diverse groups of listeners with varying beliefs, attitudes, and stakes in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

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