A Countdown of the Top 100 political songs, to help provide a soundtrack to the 2011 Canadian Election. Researched and written by a proud New Democrat.
A beautiful anthem for political change, Sam Cooke's knows A Change Is Gonna Come. The song, both hopeful and filled with sorrow, doesn't hit you between the eyes with what's been done wrong - Cooke knows you know things need changing.
Otis Redding wrote this song to get a little lovin' and respect. Aretha Franklin turned the table, and turned Respect into a feminist anthem.
Respect was recorded on Valentine's Day in 1967. Producer Jerry Wexler said this about the recording:
Aretha added another dimension to the song. This was almost a feminist clarion. Whenever women heard the record, it was like a tidal wave of soronal unity. 'A little respect when you come home' doesn't only connote respect in the sense of having concern for another's position; there's also a little lubricity in there - respect aquires the notion of having to perform conjugally in optimum fashion. It was just a very interesting mix: an intuitive feminist outcry, a sexual statement, and an announcement of dignity.
Billie Holiday would close her shows in 1939 and '40 with Strange Fruit. Waiters would stop serving. The bars would shut off the lights. A single light would shine on Holliday. The audience, and Holliday, would often weep after the performance.
Critics were concerned Spike Lee's movie Do The Right Thing would provoke riots. David Denby said Lee was "playing with dynamite in an urban playground" and Newsweek worried the movie would put "dynamite under every seat." Lee pointed out the critics were implying that black audiences were incapable of understanding they were watching a fictional motion picture.
Public Enemy's song Fight The Power played a critical role in the film. The character Radio Raheem walked around the neighbourhood playing nothing but this tune on his ghettoblaster. At the movie's climax, the local pizza shop owner demands Radio Raheem turn the music down and ends of smashing the ghettoblaster. A fight breaks out and Radio Raheem dies after police put him in a chokehold.
Public Enemy's Brian Hargrove explained:
Law enforcement is necessary. As a species we haven’t evolved past needing that. Fight the Power is not about fighting authority — it’s not that at all. It’s about fighting abuse of power.
Banned from many AM radio stations in 1971, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's OHIO received steady airplay on illegal underground FM stations in cities and college towns.
Medgar Evers was a civil rights activist from Mississippi. He worked on a boycott of discriminatory gas stations (Don't Buy Gas Where You Can't Use the Restroom) and other white businesses in an effort to end segregation at the University of Mississippi.
The University of Mississippi was forced to enroll a black student in 1962. A subsequent riot left two people dead and Evers became a target of white supremacists. Evers work researching the murder of Emmitt Till (a 14 year old African American kid who was accused of flirting with a white woman) made him an even larger target. Evers house was fire-bombed, he was nearly the victim of a hit-and-run, and was eventually shot and killed in 1963.
Mississippi Goddam was written by Nina Simone in 1964. It's fantastic. Don't go slow when you're trying to change the world. Run.
Bruce Springsteen is another of a small handful of artists to have two songs in the Top 100. The two songs, My Hometown and Born In The U.S.A., are both perfect examples of where the political and the personal come together to wreck lives. My Hometown is about discarded workers, dying towns, and wanting to plant your feet but being pushed to the ground. Born In The U.S.A. is about discarded veterans, a brutal war, and being kicked after you've already been pushed to the ground.
Halifax freelance music writer Ryan McNutt:
Ronald Reagan thought it was a patriotic anthem. Countless writers have considered it a protest song. And somehow, they're both right. "Born in the USA" is an statement of nuanced, complicated nationalism written against the background of the ultimate 'stars and stripes' decade. The song's title and refrain are ironic when paired up against the verses, but not insincere: this is an anthem about what happens when one's love of country runs headfirst into the harsh reality of the times. Springsteen is bemoaning the phrase "Born in the USA"; he's howling for it to mean something profound again.
For more info on how people can learn more about music by actually, you know, listening to music, check out this 2009 article on the 25th Anniversary of this tune.
Death - the fear of it, the fight against it, creates some beautiful songs. I do wish more political songs would celebrate life, but the spectre of death and the rich seam of material to mine it creates for artists like Tom Waits will also help your heart grow.
Halifax journalist Alex Boutilier demanded This Land Is Your Land be Song No. 1 on the Top 100 Political Music Countdown. I'm contrarian by nature though, and dropped it to No. 10.
Here's Boutilier's defense:
This Land is Your Land has got to be #1. I’m not saying, of course, that anybody who has a lick of political sense is a communist, as Woody was labeled by various critics and friends. To paraphrase Woody: he was never a communist, but he was in the red all his life.
But listen. If you have a song that was recorded in the 1940’s that is still taught to school children – in Canada, no less – and still has some of the verses censored, you’ve got yourself one king hell of a political song.
Verses of Woody Guthrie they don't sing at summer camp:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
In Ira Nadel's Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen, he writes about a 16 year old Cohen's work as a camp counsellor at Camp Sunshine, where he was introduced to The People's Songbook - they sang from the book every morning: union songs and protest songs - songs of freedom. Parents! Send your kids to soccer camp!
Leonard Cohen's version of The Partisan is haunting. The first time I heard it, I was terrified for the narrator and desperate to figure out the French translation to see what happened next. There are a lot of songs about the futility of war on this Top 100. This one's different:
Marvin Gaye's album What's Going On is told from the point of view of an American soldier returning from the Vietnam war wondering when the fighting would end. Here's the title track:
Young men are often sent to fight old men's wars. Edwin Starr served 3 years in the military, and asked America what War was good for. The politicians of the day didn't answer.
Marcus Garvey visited Nova Scotia in the 20's and 30's and gave a speech in Cape Breton that included this passage:
We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind, because man is related to man under all circumstances for good or ill.
The battle continues. Here and there throughout the Top 100 Political Music Countdown, you see references in lyrics to the same fight, sometimes righteous and sometimes futile, re-occuring again and again and again and again.
The Highwayman by Willie Nelson, Kris Kristoffersen, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash is a story of reincarnation and of unending struggle of outlaws, labourers, and spacemen everywhere.
Canadian women make up 22% of the House of Commons, and there are 22 women on this Top 100 Political Music Countdown. Joni Mitchell's on this list twice, one of a handful of artists to break that barrier - a soft voice with big music.
A quote from Mitchell on the meaning of Big Yellow Taxi:
I wrote Big Yellow Taxi on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was this parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart... this blight on paradise.
I find Haiti politics very confusing. Wyclef Jean was allowed to vote in the Haiti election but not allowed to run. While campaigning in Haiti for another candidate, he was either shot or "cut by broken glass".
This is a blog about political music, but please take the time, right now, to read Graham Greene's The Comedians, set in Haiti under the rule of Papa Doc Duvalier and then make up your own mind who you think should be able to be president of Haiti.
Here's If I Was President, with the terrifying line "I'd be assassinated on Saturday" and the true "then go back to work on Monday."
