For my critical thesis at The New School, I wanted to think about the future of music culture in the age of streaming. One component that was of particular interest to me was the future of protest music. Ever since the 2017 Women’s March, a momentous show of protest, I’ve searched for a song or artist who seems to be its voice, or at least to symbolize it the way handknitted pink hats have. In general, the lack of great popular protest music seems odd in a political sphere that has been turned up to 11. In a 2019 essay titled “It’s a brave new world. Why is our protest music stuck in the past?” The Washington Post’s pop music critic, Chris Richards, addressed that noticeable absence while explaining why it might exist. He kindly agreed to let me interview him as part of my thesis research, and we further explored the topic.
Whitney Ayres Kenerly:
When your piece about the lack of good protest music came out in the Washington Post last September, I was really drawn to it. It articulated a lot of things I had been thinking. So I wanted to know what inspired you to write about it.
Chris Richards:
I think the first thing was, as a critic, I've just learned that it's better for me to try to write about things that are happening instead of things that aren't. Because it's difficult to describe an absence, and I'm guilty of making that mistake over and over again. I just wrote a story a couple of weeks ago about that sort of lack of the discussion of ecology in country music, because country music is so much about the outdoors and place and you would think that there might be a couple of songs about saving the planet. And there's basically like one or two in the history of country music. And I found, and I reminded myself, "Oh right, this is dumb because I'm writing about the absence of something." It's difficult to do. So to answer your question, the thing that got me onto it was the success of Donald Glover's song, and the success of The 1975 song.
““There’s this eagerness to champion political music, but that’s not what makes a protest song great. I think that the great protest music, it’s sort of resonant beyond accolades.””
This sort of amorphous thing is bigger and more complicated than we ever thought in the pre-Napster times, when the industry was sort of spoon feeding us our musical diet in a lot more of a controlled way. I think whatever the masses are today, they're very, very eager for the protest music that maybe you and I feel is missing. So when these big songs came along, a lot of sort of formal praise was attached to them immediately. Obviously “This Is America” did very, very well at The Grammys. The 1975 song was song of the year for Pitchfork and I think for the New York Times as well. So I think there's this eagerness to champion political music, but that's not what makes a protest song great. I think that the great protest music, it's sort of resonant beyond accolades.
You hear it in the streets. And I get to this point later in the story, and we'll talk about it for sure, but I think you need action to consecrate the power of a song. And that's why you have “Alright” by Kendrick Lamar being I think the best protest song of the era because people were singing it in the streets. It was like something that people carry with them when they put their physical being into their protests. And that's I think one of the key elements to what makes a great protest song. It's not giving it a Grammy, you know?
WAK:
You outlined three key components to a good protest song. One is empathy--you have to kind of draw people in. Two is vision--you kind of have to propose a replacement. And then three is that it needs a power that moves you. How did you settle on these three elements to define what makes a good protest song?
CR:
It's a great question. I think I tried to look at which songs I thought were successful and draw out the commonalities. A song that I don't think I mentioned in the piece would be “Fuck The Police” by NWA. It's specific. It's about a problem. And it doesn't quite, I mean the solution is to fuck them. But the solution isn't quite the key part of it, but it does go after a specific thing. “Ohio” by CSNY, it's about a specific incident. And I think specificity might even be like a fourth element you can put in there. It's really great to have a target. It helps people grab on to what's at stake. Because the thing that you're proposing is a solution. That is a difficult part of this time. That is the paralysis of this era that goes back really to the 90s. I mean it's like a postmodern predicament, right?
The problems of this planet are so vast. It's really, really difficult for young people to visualize where to start and what the solutions are. And that's why The 1975 song is so frustrating to me. Because it's just kind of this laundry list of the world's woes and it's like, "Well, you're not doing anything that Twitter doesn't do for us every moment of the day." You know, the song is doing what the news cycle does, it reminds us of the world's problems. So I think also maybe the fourth characteristic might be having a specific target. A band that I grew up with was Fugazi. I grew up in the DC area. They were incredibly important to me. They were like my religion as a teenager. And as I got older, the thing that I really came to cherish about them is they identify the targets for me.
You know what I mean? They taught me about environmentalism, the ills of misogyny and public street harassment in a song like “Suggestion” [a song from the band’s 1998 self-titled ep that asks from a woman’s perspective, “Why can’t I walk down a street free of suggestion?”]. Their songs were about specific things. They kind of opened my awareness to what the specific ills of the world were. When you're going through that teenager’s discontent, you know something's wrong. Fugazi helped make those things specific for me. But in terms of the three things, yeah. Empathy. It has to be a song that people can be drawn into and connect with. It has to be "catchy" in some kind of way. I think if we have entirely, I mean there's a long history of incredibly abstract protest music. If it can't be chanted in the street or played over a loudspeaker or danced to, I think it will be less effective. So that's one thing. And maybe like the empathy part and the motivational part do something. They're pretty closely connected.
And then the third idea: envisioning the solution. Should that be the musician's job? I mean really we're not counting on artists to rewrite the government for us. So I think maybe that ties into this fourth idea, that being specific about what the problem is helps people understand what they're up against and what needs to be the weed that needs to get plucked out of the garden for the flowers to grow, if you will. But again, it's just like, with any kind of criticism, I just like thinking of things like, ‘What is successful to me?’ I put them next to each other. It's like Venn diagram stuff. Like what do all of these things have in common, what falls in the middle? And those are the characteristics that I kept coming back to when I was writing.
WAK:
On the need for specificity, I agree it's kind of hard to have an anthem if there isn't a clear message. And that's why I was really happy to see your piece. You articulated what I felt, which was that the only good, in my opinion, really great protest music has come out of Black Lives Matter. Because it really hits on all the components. Why do you think Black Lives Matter has inspired such great music?
CR:
Yeah, that's a great question. It is a protest movement that I think was probably, and I'm speaking a little out of my depth here, but I think it seems like it was more consistently "in the streets" than other protest movements were. You talk about the Women's March, and I always thought too like “where was the song for this?” But the Women's March unfortunately was one big, very important and powerful gathering of people. It was huge, but it wasn't sustained. It didn't keep happening every weekend after weekend. And that's the thing about Black Lives Matter: is it echoes the Civil Rights Movement. We like to think of the Civil Rights Movement as like this one Martin Luther King speech that we all get to hear every January again, and we think of the March on Washington. But it was a long, years-long sustained thing, and it was a battle that went uphill for years and years and years and years.
““Music is a physical vibration of air in three dimensional space. It is something that happens when people gather together in a place. It consecrates those gatherings. It synchronizes minds.””
And I think that's what a successful protest is. You know what I mean? It's not something you can just show up one Saturday afternoon with a bunch of people and solve with a snap of the fingers. It requires commitment. It requires time. So in Black Lives Matter, sadly, it's a movement that still has to be fought and still has a long way to go. And you know, pre-quarantine times, it's a protest movement that I think continued to gather in public space. Something I always write about as a music critic that I think is really important is to remember is that music is a physical vibration of air in three dimensional space. It is something that happens when people gather together in a place. It consecrates those gatherings. It synchronizes minds. I mean music's ability to synchronize people goes all the way from the way from how the military marches to the way that we dance to a techno track in the club.
Rhythm helps different brains kind of acquiesce and come together. So protest music has to be able to do that. And in order for that to happen, you have to have the people getting together and happening. But also the music that we've seen flourishing in parallel to Black Lives Matter of course inherits a ton from the music of the civil rights era as well. So you have these kinds of concurrent timelines where people are fighting for similar things across generations. So just as the Black Lives Matter movement inherits a lot of political ideology from the Civil Rights Movement, I think the music of this time obviously inherits a lot, aesthetically, from the music at that time as well.
WAK:
I want to come back to the physicality. That's really important. Hashtags don't need anthems. And if people are upset about a shooting, or new policy, and tweet about it, they feel like they've done something. Or maybe they go to one fundraising concert.Do you feel like these things have sapped some of the creative impetus for protest music?
CR:
That's a great hypothesis that I definitely think has something to it. The one thing I thought about before we even got on the phone today, when I was thinking about your questions, was the other part about it that's so difficult, the other big obstacle that music has in terms of forming these sort of coherent protests, anthems that we remember from yesteryear, is that our musical tastes are so highly, highly fractured now. And that's something about the Limewire world that you walked into in college. Like immediately, this idea of a monoculture just totally explodes. And there aren't many artists with voices that a majority of people will rally around today anyway, let alone the message that they're sending.
So that's a huge part of it. And then of course, it's not just that our musical tastes are being splintered across different styles or different artists that we like. It's our attention that is being splintered across all these different media channels and formats, and social media being one of them. Again, I think obviously the power of Twitter as a political tool has been incredible, and it's just taught me a lot as a human being. I've been turned on to many ideas there that I wouldn't otherwise have gotten.
But again, I do think that political action is something that requires physical bodies out in the world to really, really make it happen in a lot of cases. And that's where I think music does something that a hashtag can't. But I think you're absolutely right. Yes. People do feel like they are participating in political action in these social media spheres, and in some ways they are, for sure. But fundamentally, I do think that protest is a physical activity, again, and music is a physical art form. So they're always going to go together in some way.
WAK:
The other thing I loved about your piece was kind of this nostalgia keeping us stuck. In the 60s and 70s it felt like the world was expanding, but now it feels like it's contracting. It feels like the planet's dying. It feels like upward mobility is shrinking. It feels like we don't have this manifest destiny more, but we're kind of getting smaller. And I'm wondering if that affects our ability to envision a future?
CR:
I think very, very much so. Nostalgia is not something that's limited to music. You can obviously get a huge, huge fire-hosing-dose of it anytime you turn on the internet. So much of the music journalism of our time is anniversary celebration. Celebrating the five year anniversary of Young Thug's "Barter 6," celebrating the 20th anniversary of this Aphex Twin record. And to me that's so crazy because anniversary numbers are so arbitrary. I mean, we care about five because we have five of these [holds up fingers]? We care about 20 cause it got four limbs. It's like these are the times that we think it's important to reflect on what's important. I would love to read like flashback nostalgia journalism, music journalism about records that were having a resonant moment in the culture. Like why do we have to wait for something to turn 20 to talk about it if it matters when it did? It's really of consequence when it's 16 and a half, you know?
So there's a huge nostalgic lens that we view music through, and also all culture through. But that's the thing. So “nostalgia” of course, as you know, the literal meaning of it is a painful recollection of the past or a painful yearning for the past. As the listener, I always think of nostalgia as how we can look back on music maybe without the pain? Of course, we need the past to understand who we are, to understand what our values are, to measure our progress, to measure the values that we've held onto over a course of time.
So I'm not saying don't ever listen to music from 1998 again, of course you're going to. But I'm always interested in how the past can help us figure out the "right now" in music. And I think that is a huge, huge crisis of our time, especially because the future is so scary. It’s like when people have been binge watching friends on Netflix, is that helping them better understand their predicament in 2020? I have a hunch that it's not. I think that it's the comfort of remembering a time when you didn't have to worry about all this stuff. That of course is important.
We do need escapism to give ourselves a break from the relentlessness and the forward push of reality. You're talking about a world where young people are confronting this collapse, which I think is a really apt way of describing the future. The idea of the American dream and the promise of doing better than your parents has now evaporated. You're definitely going to make less money and do worse in almost every situation. That's just so, so real. And also too, not exactly new. I had just seen the movie “Reality Bites” for the first time like a month or two ago. And it starts with Winona Ryder giving the valedictorian speech at her university. She's giving a speech and she's talking about like, "My fellow graduates, this is our time to go forth into the world and solve the problems." And then she said, "And we're going to do it by..." and she misplaces the next note card and she says, "I don't know." And then everyone just cheers and goes crazy.
And it's like the darkest comedy ever, but it's a reminder that Generation X was going through this same kind of crisis. Nirvana, the band, and hip hop you could argue, are like the first kind of postmodern "there's no future" kind of music of their time. So this crisis of "no future" isn't quite brand new, but it certainly feels more and more acute. We didn't have the Netflix account to dive into the cartoons of our childhood back then. There is this crisis of what comes next, how do we build the tomorrow? How do we have a more compassionate world? And I hope that music can be a part of that.
““It’s the peril that as listeners, as consumers, as citizens, that we fall into when we just think that yesterday’s solutions are going to solve tomorrow’s problems.””
As a critic another thing I think about all the time as well, when I'm measuring a group who is using elements from the past or as a throwback or whatever, is: Are they using it to stride forward? I almost think of it as footsteps. If you're going to have one foot planted in the past, are you using that foot to launch yourself into tomorrow? I think it's important to always make sure that the past is being used to kind of help people solve their way through the right now. And if there's a way to use our history, and use our memory, and use our nostalgia to help navigate the problems of tomorrow, I'm all for it. It's the peril that as listeners, as consumers, as citizens, that we fall into when we just think that yesterday's solutions are going to solve tomorrow's problems.
You see it right now with what's going on with so many people on the left wanting to return to the Barack Obama years. They're not coming back. I understand that it's a comforting idea and that it was a comforting time for a lot of people, but we don't live in that world anymore. Maybe some of the ideas from that time can help us move forward, but not all of them. So it's a huge crisis that I think spans not just young people, but everybody living on this planet right now.
The other part about the digital world is how crazy it is that we have all of our history at our fingertips at all times. Imagine a world where you can't go back and watch all the Sesame Street episodes that you want to from when you were growing up. That was just how the world was: you left the past in the past. As consumers, as digital citizens, it's a really treacherous thing where you can kind of live in the memory hole if you want to. But if you believe in progress, it's learning how to negotiate that relationship in a smart way.
WAK:
I think progress also needs new voices. I feel like the internet age promised this great democratization of art, and in so many ways, both in music and in music criticism, I just feel like it didn't deliver. I almost feel like something about technology has made it harder for new voices to kind of get to our ears. Anyone can blog. Anyone can have Bandcamp, but it's so hard to break through that noise. Do you feel that record companies are less likely to take a risk on new voices now, and more likely to kind of bank on the nostalgia?
CR:
I think it's a really good point. The democratization that you're talking about, I think in a way it did happen, but we still live under capitalism. So the mechanisms that are delivering music to us are going to remain sort of singular and powerful as long as we live in a capitalist system. There's always going to be people who will talk about how Spotify is so horrible by corralling all of this money to artists with a certain playlist and how they're designing our tastes for us. And I agree, that sucks. But guess what? MTV did that. You know, mainstream radio did that before that. So we're just living in the next iteration of the capitalist system. But the democratization is there. It's on the listener to go search for it. Now, I understand that not everybody is like me and is paid full time to go questing out into that digital wilderness to find out what's going on.
So we want to be able to rely on gatekeepers and trustworthy sources to be able to help us find what's out there. These power structures are still in place, they just have new names and new forms. And as ever, it's on the industrious listener to go forward and find out what they're into. I said earlier that the monoculture has been exploded. Well, not completely. There is, especially in music journalism, tons of critical consensus going on, and a lot of that is just purely financial. People know they need the web traffic of the Fiona Apple review, straight up. And no publication is going to not have one. And she's worthy of course.
I mean absolutely we should be discussing the Fiona Apple record. I'm not saying it's wrong. But when you look at the Top 10 lists at the end of the year, and you see these same artists over and over again, that's discouraging to me as a listener, for sure. And I think it's just a symptom of the fact that even though it's all available for us now, the people who are in control, who are herding our attention, are still the ones trying to make money.
WAK:
It seems like the way we discover music is so different now and we kind of lost that personal touch a little bit.
CR:
Yeah. I think it's on people to go out and find it still. One, there are still people out there who love music, who can be your friends. But it just takes a lot more work because they're not in the high school cafeteria anymore wearing a Black Flag t-shirt, and then you go, "Black Flag, what's that?" Like you have to find them. So all of these things are still out there. There are incredible digital radio stations out there that are playing all kinds of insane stuff. It's just on people. The personal thing that you're talking about is important because I think a lot of our friendships have become digitized. I have friends who I'm incredibly close to who I haven't seen in years.
““I do think that if listeners are really hungry and want to find something, it takes work, but it’s there.””
I talk to them all the time, but I talked to them on my thumbs in these little bubbles that go "Whoop, whoop." So it's really easy to say, "We've lost our connection to our humanity," or whatever. We just have to fight to maintain it. And I do think that if listeners are (and this is like a drum that I always want to bang in my criticism) really hungry and want to find something, it takes work, but it's there. That's the thing that's amazing. It's not like you're just going to be digging for gold with no hope. You'll find amazing things. It just requires a shovel and the time. And that's the other problem with capitalism is that we're working constantly, so who has the time to recreationally try and go discover music? Not a lot of people. I'm one of the tiniest of a percent of human beings on this planet whose job it is to go do this thing that people can't find enough recreational time to do. So I'm very grateful for it and it makes me crazy.
WAK:
Yeah. It's like I remember my twenties going to shows all the time. But now it's like people think that we've aged out of going to shows, except for like the big Madison Square Garden shows. Who made that rule that, after 30, you can only go to amphitheaters and see bands that were big 20 years ago? Who made that rule?
CR:
Nobody. And if you feel that's a rule then go ahead and break it. Because I mean I'm 40. The thing about DC that's really cool is there's an all-ages scene here. It literally means all ages. It goes both ways. When we were young it was cool because it meant that you could be 12 in the club, but now it's cool cause you can be 60 in the club and it's no problem. Even across styles too. I love going to concerts and seeing people who are 20 years younger and 20 years older. And it's not irregular. So I don't know if Washington DC is a blessed little wonderful place like that, but I do hope that other communities like that exist across the country. And they certainly can. Break that rule, I encourage you to.
WAK:
Any other points about protest music or the future of protest music?
CR:
Not that I can think of. You know a lot of people wrote to me after that article and they said, "Are you kidding me? Protest music is everywhere." And those readers were right. People are definitely making it. That's something that I think is important. The thing that I was trying to get at in the piece is, why isn't it resonating in this big way? Or why are the songs that are designed to resonate in a big way, like this Taylor Swift song, totally not? Why are they failing? And I wanted to try to be clear with that intention in the piece that I was targeting the big balloons or whatever. But outside of these big protest-minded pop songs, I do think protest music does exist on a community level. And this is something that I think about a lot now, especially in the Spotification of our culture, and musicians are making less and less money.
This pandemic has already been and will continue to be more and more devastating for musicians of all stripes. Whether you're Justin Beiber, who had to cancel your big stadium tour, or you're someone who plays guitar in a bar down the street. Everyone is fucked big time right now. And not to try and put a silver lining on a disastrous situation, but I think a lot about how our entire conception of what music is, is framed through the recording industry, which is roughly a hundred years old. We didn't have an ability to hear music over again until 120 years ago. Back then, music was something that literally happened one time. It was Something you had to walk and be in the physical presence of, within earshot of happening. And it was happening and then it vanished forever.
And that was what music was to us. We played it in our living rooms with our families. You'd gather around and maybe mom would play the piano and everybody would sing. That's what music was for centuries, for centuries, for our species. So I think it's always important to remember that even though we think of music as this magical mystery substance that comes out of our phones into our earphones, it is that, but it's also this fleeting, ephemeral, personal thing. It's very important when it happens on a small level. Not everything has to be a Drake song, or even like a Kendrick Lamar “Alright.” Not every song has to be that way. Protest music can be neighborhood-specific. It can be community-specific. It can be specific to your church, to your school, wherever you are.
And I think that's something that might just be the result of the shrinkage of the world that you're talking about. When the world feels smaller and it feels like it's getting tinier and possibilities seem less, my hope is that we then connect to our immediate communities in a more binding and lasting way, and a more intimate way. And I hope that if we can't have protest music on the level of Marvin Gaye singing “What's Going On,” maybe we could have songs that we share with one another on a community-level. Because that stuff can be incredibly, incredibly important. And I wonder if that's what the future of protest music might be. You mentioned Billie Eilish earlier. I think the frontier that she's on, that people haven't quite gotten all the way hip too, is that her music is literally about intimacy.
““I wonder if the frontier of protest music happens in that more intimate way.””
It's about being close to the microphone and feeling close to you. It's almost like it's happening inside your head. She is very much of this ASMR-raised earbud generation. And her experience of music very much seems like it was headphone music. So if intimacy becomes an aesthetic quality that we begin to appreciate more and more, I wonder if intimacy will be sort of a social component that we come to value more in music.
And I wonder if the frontier of protest music happens in that more intimate way. And this is something you read about in politics too. It's like if you want to change the world, make sure you're voting for your county council people and your sheriffs and things like that. And get change going on a local level because that has a huge effect on you. When you can't control what Donald Trump is doing, you still can have an effect on what's going on on your school board, and those things might impact your life in a much bigger way than how some foreign crisis is handled. So I do think that this idea of remembering, as the world gets smaller, maybe trying to become more engaged with that smallness. I wonder if that's the future of protest music. That's a big question mark.
