Pursuits: I still remain cynical about rock stars and protest

I’m not sure you know who Miriam Makeba was. And I’m pretty certain you’ve never heard of a song called A Piece Of Ground.

But for me, Makeba and that song have a special significance. It was the first protest song I heard and my introduction to the genre.

 

   I was very small when I first heard it and I think that it was the haunting melody and the richness of Makeba’s voice that first grabbed me. But after I had heard the song a few times I began to listen more closely.

 

   The lyrics seemed slightly mysterious to a child growing up in Bombay. “Now this land is so rich and it seems strange to me/That the black man whose labour has helped it to be/Cannot enjoy the fruits that abound/Is uprooted and kicked from his own piece of ground.”

 

   What on earth was all this about? I asked my father who owned the cassette on which the song appeared and he explained the background to me. Miriam Makeba was a famous South African singer, he said. But South Africa was run by a racist White regime that discriminated against the Blacks and forced them to live separately under a policy called apartheid. Makeba herself had been forced to leave her own country and now lived in New York, where the song had been recorded.

 

   Once I had this rudimentary understanding of the background, the song began to make more sense. I found the last verse particularly chilling: “White man, don’t sleep long and don’t sleep too deep/Or your life and your possessions, how long will you keep?/For I’ve heard a rumour that’s running around/That the Black man is demanding his own piece of ground.”

 

   My parents were not particularly keen on Western popular music. But they had a strange romance with protest songs. In the 1940s, my mother had been a student in America and had campaigned for Henry Wallace, perhaps the most left-wing candidate for the Presidency that the US had ever seen until then. The Wallace campaign attracted lefties of all shapes and sizes and my parents’ friends included people like the great American folk singer, Pete Seeger, and later, the Black American tenor, Paul Robeson (they were especially proud of a photo of Robeson holding me when I was a baby: a big strong Black man holding a terrified brown child).

 

   And so, even though I wanted to listen to the Beatles or the Stones, they drew my attention to such songs as A Piece Of Ground, Joe Hill, Guantanamera (the Pete Seeger version not the later pop hit) and Which Side Are You On? The songs did not always make much sense to me but I got the general idea: music was a way of telling the better off that they had to listen to the underprivileged.

 

   Then, something strange happened. The protest songs that my parents were so keen on suddenly became fashionable and trendy. Joan Baez sand Joe Hill at Woodstock and the performance was captured in the movie. All of Pete Seeger’s songs were re-recorded by younger artists and even those that I had regarded as rubbish (If I Had A Hammer, for instance) became big pop hits.

 

   The Beatles acknowledged the influence of Bob Dylan who started out as a folk singer in the tradition of Seeger and Woodie Guthrie. Sweetened versions of Dylan’s songs were taken to the charts by the likes of Peter Paul and Mary and Joan Baez. The protest song tradition that had once been the hobby-horse of my leftie parents was now the centre-piece of the Woodstock Nation.

 

"I respect the likes of Joan Baez, Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen, whose protests seem grounded in reality and whose music works towards larger goals."

   But even when I was in my early teens, I was slightly cynical about the protest movement. Makeba had something solid to protest about. Robeson faced discrimination as a Black man in America. Seeger sang from the perspective of a trade union organiser and a civil rights activist. But the protest singers whose songs hit the charts with such regularity in the late 60s and the early 70s seemed to me to be rich White boys with nothing to complain about.

 

   Take the case of Crosby Stills Nash and Young, for a while the most successful group in America. Two of them were not even American. When Graham Nash sang about the violence at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 (“in a land that’s known as freedom, how can such a thing be fair?”) it was hard for me to forget that he was actually from Manchester and that I had seen him on TV two years previously, singing Bus Stop with his old group, The Hollies. As for Neil Young, who grew very agitated about American politics (“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/Four dead in Ohio”) he was a Canadian and none of the stuff he protested about had very much to do with him or his country. (Ditto for Joni Mitchell, another Canadian who grew very agitated about events in America.)

 

   It was hard for the cynic in me to suppress the thought that protest rock was a commercially-savvy exercise aimed at American youth who were upset about the war in Vietnam, not because they cared about the Vietnamese but because they did not want to be drafted into the army. Could it be a coincidence that once the draft was abolished, the citizens of the Woodstock Nation all cut their hair and went to work for IBM?

 

   I guess it is something about my upbringing that I still remain cynical about rock stars and protest. I respect the likes of Joan Baez, Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen, whose protests seem grounded in reality and whose music works towards larger goals. But can you take the Rolling Stones seriously as the voices of protest? Even when they struck radical chic poses with such songs as Street Fighting Man (“the time is right for fighting in the streets”) you had to read the lyrics closely to recognise that they were washing their hands off the revolution. (“What can a poor boy do but sing in a rock and roll band?”)

 

   As for John Lennon, surely he was the greatest humbug of all time. What can you say about a man who records songs like Imagine (“imagine no possessions”) while simultaneously occupying four apartments at the millionaire’s paradise called the Dakota in New York City? Some other-worldly revolutionary, he turned out to be! I do not deny that music can make a difference. In the 1970s, the gay British singer, Tom Robinson, forced homosexual issues into the national mainstream with such songs as Glad To Be Gay. Peter Gabriel carried on the tradition of Makeba by recording Biko about the slain south African activist, Steven Biko. And I doubt if Nelson Mandela would ever have been released by the apartheid regime were it not for the pressure mounted by actors and musicians who staged massive televised concerts to demand his freedom.

 

   But for a protest song to be sincere and effective, it must either come from somebody who has something to protest about or from someone who is willing to put his money where his mouth is. All too often, alas, protest songs are written as a kind of knee-jerk response to commercial pressures. They emerge out of nothing, they make no difference, and their essential insincerity rings through in every note.