I consider myself to be liberal—quite liberal, actually—but I’ve never been much of an activist. I’m one of the countless millions, decried in numerous folk songs and speeches, who eats their discontent, swallows their dissent, keeps their disgust inside. I’ve campaigned for a politician once (Kerry in ’04, during the general election), but I’ve never been to a protest or a union rally or a march. There are many reasons for my avoidance of activism, but here are the three most prominent:
1) I’m extraordinarily lazy
2) I don’t really think protests/union rallies/marches work most of the time
3) standing in a crowd and chanting some terse message—even a message I generally believe in—makes me sort of sick: I’m uncomfortable with the flattening of ideas, the removal of nuance for the purpose of creating a smooth, sleek message that necessarily comes with group protest.
And so, I’m a terrible person, a bystander to history.
And what of protest songs? Well, I’m not opposed to them in principle, but too often they’re not very good songs. Lyrically, they tend to be preachy (naturally), obvious, and often clumsy. Take, for example, two songs by the immensely popular band System of a Down, “B.Y.O.B.” and “Boom.” Both are essentially anti-war songs; the former, from 2005, is explicitly anti-Iraq war. I certainly don’t have much of a problem with the sentiments expressed in either song, but the way in which they’re expressed is trite. The following lyrics are from “Boom”:
“Modern globalization,
Coupled with condemnations,
Unnecessary death,
Matador corporations,
Puppeting your frustrations,
With the blinded flag,
Manufacturing consent
Is the name of the game,
The bottom line is money,
Nobody gives a fuck.
4000 hungry children die per hour,
From starvation,
While billions spent on bombs,
Create death showers.”
Yes, yes, yes: the military-industrial complex is bad, we are steered towards conformity and indifference by capitalism, and we spend too much money on bombs. I agree, System of a Down. But the problem is this: on the off chance that someone who doesn’t agree with these sentiments—or perhaps simply hasn’t thought about these issues a lot (maybe a teenager?)—hears this song, they are not going to be convinced of anything, because the lyrics are a mishmash of tired leftist slogans devoid of any gripping personal element. Contrast this with a song like “Clampdown” by the Clash, which is about roughly the same thing:
“The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there’s nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don’t owe nothing, so boy get runnin’
It’s the best years of your life they want to steal
But, you grow up and you calm down and
You’re working for the clampdown
You start wearing the blue and brown and
You’re working for the clampdown
So you got someone to boss around
It makes you feel big now
You drift until you brutalize
You made your first kill now”
What’s different here? The second person! Instead of singing about abstract concepts—globalization, for instance—the Clash have made you, the listener, the star of a horrific bit of fiction in which you become, in effect, The Man. It’s a song about the same thing as “Boom,” but it gets its point across in a way that’s more emotionally accessible (it is, of course, about 1000 times more enjoyable musically, too). If you want to write a song about the horrors of war, don’t write lyrics like “war is bad”; write about a solider dying in a trench. The lyrics to “Boom” and “B.Y.O.B.” are the pop music equivalent of bad fiction: bereft of subtlety and devoid of believable, relatable characters.
One thing neither the System of a Down songs nor “Clampdown” has is self-doubt or self-recrimination; both songs are pretty sure of themselves and their righteousness. This is the norm for protest songs (and for protests), since it doesn’t really pay to express doubt about your message or your chances of success when you’re trying to get people to agree with you. This is why “The One Who Got Us Out” by Ted Leo is such a remarkable song: it’s a protest song, and a stirring one at that, that manages to also be humble and full of doubt. Musically, the song has an ABABCCC structure, with the A sections consisting of very fast drumming backing an almost jazzy melody (I can hear it being sung over a much slower beat with the notes swung). The B sections are much slower, and the C sections feature Leo singing very high in his register. The sections don’t seem like they should fit together, but they manage to cohere into a solid, memorable song. Lyrically, the song begins with the line “I know I like doing a lot of talking/Time goes on, I’m talking still,” a striking first line for a protest song. Leo then goes on to mention soldiers “dodging grenades and rockets” before again turning on himself: “Sometimes there’s something about my being on the sidelines doesn’t jibe.” Again, some self-recrimination in a protest song!
In the C sections at the end of the song, Leo expresses frustration at his inability to fix a problem he sees as being so egregious that it should never have persisted for as long as it has:
“Well what can you say to take that weight away?
I look into the endless bottom, and all I want is what should be.
And I’m damned ashamed to feel this rotten
Can we reclaim what’s been forgotten?”
All of this hand-wringing and doubt pays off: at the end of the song, when Leo finally implores the listener to join him in doing something about the war—”Take it to the floor of Congress…Turn into the one who got us out”—the call to action feels real, hard-earned, full of passion. It’s also possible that, unlike most protest songs which offer only vague appeals for “something” to be done, “The One Who Got Us Out” has a specific goal in mind: the album on which it appeared, Shake the Sheets, came out weeks before the 2004 elections, and though I assumed when I first heard the song that “take it to the floor of Congress” meant protesting in a manner so visible as to be noticed and commented on by our national politicians, perhaps ol’ Teddy was just trying to get out the vote! I admit that that’s a questionable reading of the last line of the song, but it would fit: when the army “weighs 1500 tons” you “better find another solution,” as the Clash said, and that solution is voting. It is, perhaps, the only real way we have of effecting change in this country, but it just doesn’t seem like enough when the problems that need to be fixed are so immense, and so we sit around and wait for election day and feel like we’re just talking and talking and talking still.
