Rant in D Minor: Protest and Survive

What are we protesting against? Whaddya got... Pregnant women at Thomas Cook sit-ins. The Corrib gas pipeline. The arrogance of a government that tells hundreds of thousands of people who never benefitted one whit from a boom that for most existed only as a series of hypothetical digits that they must knuckle down and bite the bullet like good little proles.

The other night your correspondent watched Alex Gibney’s Hunter S Thompson documentary Gonzo. Now, I thought I was done with Hunter. Too much glorification of what the man put in his system rather than what he put on the page. But Gibney’s film served to focus on the lead in his pencil rather than the guns in his closet. Consider Dr Gonzo in his glory days, from Hell’s Angels through Fear And Loathing through the Campaign years (with intermittent returns to form throughout the last act, particularly when he refused to cry crocodile tears in his Nixon obituary), well, that was some kind of a man. A protest singer in the clothes of a prose stylist.
The most powerful forms of protest also attest. They tell tell stories, function as a hybrid of art and journalism, cast a cold eye on a world gone wrong. The protest song didn’t start with the Civil Rights movement. It started in the psalms and was carried on by the medieval troubadours, the West African griots, the Irish file. Primal blues tunes are often misinterpreted as chauvinistic my-woman-done-me-wrong diatribes when in fact they were encoded missives that substituted ‘baby’ for ‘boss’. The chieftain knew he couldn’t survive without the approbation of the poets. Haughey understood this when he introduced tax exemption for artists.
So what of those who maintain no good work (and worse, no good end) comes from mixing art and politics or social issues? That’s easily refuted. Leadbelly’s ‘Bourgeoisie Blues’. Woody Guthrie’s ‘Deportees’. ‘Maggie’s Farm’ by Bob Dylan. ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ by Sam Cooke. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. ‘Strange Fruit’ by Billie Holiday. ‘To Be Young Gifted And Black’ by Nina Simone. Ginsberg’s Howl. ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ by Gil Scott Heron. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. ‘Fight The Power’ by Public Enemy. ‘The Killing Of Georgie’ by Rod Stewart. Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking. ‘Ellis Unit One’ by Steve Earle. American Idiot by Green Day. ‘A Design For Life’ by the Manic Street Preachers. ‘What I Am’ by Eminem. Orwell’s Down & Out In Paris & London. ‘The Birmingham Six’ by The Pogues. ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five. Palahniuk and Fincher’s Fight Club. ‘People Have The Power’ by Patti Smith. Neon Bible by Arcade Fire. ‘Born In The USA’, Nebraska and The Seeger Sessions by Bruce Springsteen (‘How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live’ for the new national anthem anyone?).
And sometimes it’s not just the word, but the sight and the sound of the fury. The way the veins bulged on Joe Strummer’s neck. The look in Lydon’s eye as he sang “Anger is an energy”. The sweat soaked through Christy Moore’s t-shirt. The shiver of Morrissey’s voice in ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’. Jinx Lennon’s manic cackle.
Need we go on?
We’ll go on.