by Geoff Olson

Strange Fruit is one of the most influential songs of all time. It began as a poem in the late 1930s by Abel Meeropol, a schoolteacher troubled by a photograph of a lynched black man in the American south.
The poem, which Meeropol wrote under the pen name Lewis Allan, eventually came to the attention of a nightclub manager, who passed it on to 24-year-old jazz singer Billie Holiday. She crafted it into a song, but her record company refused to record it. Holiday had more success with Commodore Records, which released the song in 1939.
Few white Americans living today realize that the lynching of blacks was not an uncommon event in small towns of the American South in the early decades of the twentieth century. Holiday’s song was a stark, contemporary rendering of something that polite, white Americans preferred to ignore.
Early performances of the song inflamed many a listener – not against lynching, but against the song itself. According to British music publication Q magazine, “Holiday was often abused, sometimes physically, by outraged nightclub patrons when she performed the song. Radio stations wouldn’t play it, and Time Magazine described the song as “a prime piece of musical propaganda.” Nevertheless, activists sent copies of the record to US congressmen, and the song became a rallying cry against racism.
Strange Fruit is not often thought of as a typical protest song. There is no fiery indignation, no call to action. The tone is mournful, even claustrophobic. Still performed by jazz singers, it has yet to become a museum piece. The adopted son of Abel Meeropol told America’s PBS channel, “Until the last racist is dead, Strange Fruit is relevant.” It succeeded, and still succeeds, by rendering no judgment. It’s a record of bare witness.
The late jazz writer Leonard Feather once called the song “the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism.” Q magazine describes Strange Fruit as one of 10 songs that actually changed the world.
Holiday’s vocal indictment against lethal racism was not the first American song of protest. We Shall Overcome was penned and sung during the American Civil War. Nearly a century later, it became a civil rights staple for singer Pete Seeger, and two months ago, Bruce Springsteen revived the anthem for his album of traditional folk music, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.
It’s plain to see why the New Jersey native has gone the folkie route at this moment, when you hear a couplet from the third track, Mrs. McGrath: “All foreign wars, I do proclaim/Live on blood and a mother’s pain.” The inclusion of this eighteenth century Irish ballad on Springsteen’s album underscores the fact that the most memorable protest songs are as timeless as their black wells of inspiration.
Of course, protest music is inevitably associated with the sixties. It’s easy to over-romanticize a decade that witnessed an immense chaos of self-exploration, self-indulgence and – selflessness. But no one can deny that great tunes were part of the mix.
The singer-songwriter was one of the chief architects of the sixties’ Manhattan Project, a psychosocial bomb meant to upset apple carts and flatten hierarchies. A generation’s naive over-estimation of its transformative power didn’t negate its catalogue of social, intellectual and artistic successes. At minimum, we still have the music.
After protest music’s high water mark of the sixties, the tidal flats of seventies’ disco, eighties’ synthpop and nineties’ grunge had many activists wondering if the ship of musical dissent had sailed for good. With the war in Vietnam over, the targets were no longer quite so obvious or inspiring. Singer-songwriter grievances against “the man” became déclassé.
The vacuum was filled somewhat by big-money, musical benefits, which consistently bred overblown ballads about international togetherness. The fire had gone, and the embers threatened to spark little more than superstar sing-a-longs.
But as Bob Dylan said, “The times they are a-changin’.” With the advent of a new millennium, protest music’s death rattle has turned out to be more like an extended clearing of the throat. In the age of peak oil, ecological breakdown and reptile-brain politics, agitating tunes are on the upswing.
It’s been a bit of a wait. In the wake of 9/11, efforts were made to contain any sentiments straying from the approved script of “Islamofascist” terrorists. Comic Bill Maher was the first sacrifice to the Moloch of consensus opinion.
US media behemoth Clear Channel Communications, which owns 1,200 radio stations in the US, issued a post-9/11 list of prescribed popular songs, which was distributed by the independent newsletter Hits Daily Double. Denying a rumour that this was a list of songs to be banned, John Hogan, president of Clear Channel, said that the list was only a suggestion, and “never a policy or a directive.”
The stated rationale – sensitivity for a republic grieving from the events of 9/11 – was partly believable, owing to the typically conservative nature of large, business organizations. That would explain why Leaving on a Jet Plane and Another One Bites the Dust made the grade.
But why the inclusion of all songs by activist band Rage Against the Machine, and John Lennon’s song of peace Imagine? Some commentators suspect that Clear Channel, a major donor to the Republican Party, in preparation for hearings on corporate monopolies in broadcasting, was doing everything it could to make its loyalties known to the Republican-controlled legislative and executive branch.
“The day that changed everything” certainly changed the tone and direction of popular music for a time, with few artists vocalizing anything off-key in the beltway chorus of vengeance. Artists who stirred things up, whether in recordings or through their remarks, discovered themselves the target of well-organized opposition. The Dixie Chicks’ slights against Bush resulted in a nationwide campaign against them. It later came to light that this was no real grassroots campaign; Clear Channel-owned radio stations had organized bonfires of Dixie Chicks albums all around the country.
In 2004, aging punk priestess Patti Smith released her album Trampin’ with its 12-minute sturm und drung track, Radio Baghdad. Smith excoriated the Pentagon’s “shock and awe” triumphalism, while celebrating the contribution of Iraqis to world civilization. In spite of a killer riff, that was enough to make it radioactively, radio-unfriendly. The tune sank along with the album.
Yet Green Day’s commercially successful post-punk 2004 effort, American Idiot, with its condemnation of a nation’s “redneck agenda,” turned out to be a harbinger of things to come.
In recent months, US artists have been emboldened by the unholy confluence of bad governance: not just the coalition’s three-year clusterfuck in Mess o’ Potamia, and the abandonment of US veterans suffering from health problems from three successive wars, but also the unconscionable, post-Katrina failure of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in New Orleans, and the continuing erosion of civil liberties under a regime of unrestricted personal surveillance. For US artists and performers, it’s now a national embarrassment of riches.
Moby recently joined REM’s Michael Stipe for an antiwar Bring ‘Em Home Now! concert, and the Dixie Chicks are back in anti-Bush activist mode, with their new single, Not Ready to Make Nice.
Pearl Jam’s pulling no punches on its eponymously titled album, with tracks like Army Reservist and Worldwide Suicide. In Marker in the Sand, singer Eddie Vedder wails, “There is a sickness, a sickness coming over me/Like watching freedom being sucked straight out to sea.”
Some of the most bilious protest music has come from African-American artists, who’ve been registering their social disenchantment for decades in rap and hip-hop. Used to seeing their own people enlisted as cannon fodder in foreign campaigns, Katrina confirmed their worst suspicions about the expendability of their poor.
Kanye West, famous for his statement on national television – “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” – released a CD in 2005 with the track Crack Music. If anyone’s still got questions about Saddam Hussein’s supposed chemical weapons stash, West notes, “George Bush got the answer.”
Old, white warhorses are also rising to the occasion, knocking off tunes that aren’t likely to make it to the presidential iPod.
Springsteen’s Grammy-winning 2005 song Devils & Dust is an almost Sufi-like take on how you can become the very thing you hate. No doubt the lyrical subtlety was lost on some listeners, just as the bitter condemnation in Springsteen’s Born in the USA was once misinterpreted by Chrysler Corporation’s former CEO Lee Iacocca, who unsuccessfully sought to use the song for car commercials.
The most abrasive antiwar entry from an old rocker is surely Neil Young’s latest album Living With War. Written and recorded in the space of six days, and sounding a lot like his old output with his band Crazy Horse, the album has some of the strangled outrage that propelled Ohio, his Vietnam-era lament about the Kent State killings. In Let’s Impeach the President, he asks, “What if al-Qaeda blew up the levees? Would New Orleans have been safer that way/Sheltered by our government’s protection?”
The titles of the songs – Shock and Awe, The Restless Consumer and Looking for a Leader – say it all, exploring a republic gone wrong in a world sent sideways. Young plays the patriot card, undercutting critics from the right who might trot out the tired, but always useful, epithet of “anti-Americanism,” by closing the album with a 100-voice choir singing America the Beautiful.
The protest song, if nothing else, alerts people that there is something in the air that they are all tuned into – Dylan’s “something is happening here,” which Mr. Jones couldn’t quite figure out. While protest songs don’t necessarily translate into action – their effect is rarely so direct – they still communicate one message loud and clear to angry youth everywhere: you are not alone in dreaming of a better world.
So are singer/songwriters merely annotating historical trends, or contributing to them? I believe there has always been traffic between hearts, the arts and the exercise of power. In the mid-eighties, for example, Artists United Against Apartheid helped shame other performers into refusing to play South Africa’s Sun City, and brought a media focus to the issue. Music can help change the world.
Consider the truly great songs of protest from the past, like Neil Young’s Ohio, Peter Gabriel’s Biko, Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man, Buffy Sainte-Marie's Universal Soldier, Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance, Imagine and Happy Christmas (War Is Over). But where’s this generation’s Strange Fruit? One contender comes from Spearhead’s Michael Franti, who has successfully merged the themes of war, poverty, surveillance and racism into Oh My God, a song that is disturbing, funny and mournful in equal parts. It has sweet Temptations-style backing vocals, but the message is as painful as a snake’s venom.
The song rhymes off a rap sheet of racial grievances, starting with the US legal system: “Anonymous notes left in the pockets and coats/Of judges and juries from ‘Frisco to Jersey.” A technocratic lynching results from a politician’s involvement: “A lethal injection, the night before the election/’Cause he got donations from the prison guard’s union.” Franti lifts the rap genre from its pimps-and-ho’s ghetto to the doorstop of the powerbrokers, with the chorus repeating, “Oh my God, they’ve got us thinkin’ genocide.” Franti savages those who are “… still believing the system is workin’ while half of my people are still out of workin.’
“… you can make a life longer, but you can’t save it / you can make a clone and then you try to enslave it? / stealin’ DNA samples from the unborn / and then you comin’ after us / ‘cause we sampled a James Brown horn?”
The lyrics, delivered in an angry growl, diss the cultural gatekeepers for “tellin’ the youth don’t be so violent,” while they “drop bombs on every single continent.” If Strange Fruit can be said to have a sequel, this may be it.
What Kafka said of the novel – “an axe to break the frozen sea inside us” – also holds for the musical anthems. It’s an amazing thing that the heart’s call, expressed in the vibratory energy of the voice, can be captured with the wizardry of electronics and then thrown out into the world, making other souls resonate in response. If singer/songwriters are North American culture’s canaries in the coalmine, it’s time once again to wake up to their calls, before it’s too late.

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