Whatever happened to Protest Music?

Marlon Brando in The Wild One, looking out at the world wearing a biker jacket and a sneer, speaking for the post war generation and pretty much every generation since. What do you hate so much about the world? Take your pick.

Fast forward five decades and American post-punk band Green Day had something they hated: Iraq, the lies that had been fed to an entire generation by Bush, Blair and a compliant mass media, the paranoia of the endless 'War On terror'.

The result of their unease was American Idiot, a millennial howl of protest that was a hit around the world, selling more than 3.4 million copies and even spawning a hugely successful stage musical which opens at the King's Theatre in Glasgow on Tuesday.

It's success poses one huge question: where's all the other protest music?

Here are 16 classic protest songs which remind us just how powerful the genre can be when it comes to social change. Some are inspired by little more than teenage angst, others are soaked in blood. But all make a case for change that is simply unanswerable.

We Shall Overcome

(Various Artists, writer unknown)

If you've ever taken part in any protest march chances are you have sung this song. It first saw the light of day in late 1948, and is probably now most associated with the civil rights movement in America in the 50s and 60s, performed by the likes of Pete Seeger and Joan Baez.

The details in the song are vague - who exactly are we and what specifically will we overcome? But that vagueness allows the song to be attached to virtually any campaign. It's very ubiquity is its success.

Strange Fruit

(Performed by Billie Holiday, written by Abel Meeropol and published in 1937)

An eerie and haunting metaphor for the lynchings of African Americans in the South, inspired by a photograph of the 1930 hanging of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana. Holiday's emotional reading became a highlight of her act. When she performed it at Cafe Society in New York's Greenwich Village the owner, Barney Josephson, insisted waiters stop serving before she began, that it should be the last song in her performance and that the room would be in darkness save a single spotlight on the singer's face. These may have been cynical theatrical devices but they served to underline the song's undeniable truth.

Freedom Come All Ye

(Written by Hamish Henderson in 1960)

A song which takes aim at a battery of targets and scores a bullseye on every one: the role of Scots in the modern world, the tradition of the Scottish soldier as simultaneously imperialist canon fodder and oppressor, needless death and the need for a truly multi-racial future. The breadth of its vision and depth of its view have encouraged its supporters to argue it should be Scotland's national anthem. It most recently played a central role in the opening of the Commonwealth Games at Glasgow in 2014, sung by South African soprano Pumeza Matshikiza, who grew up in the Cape Town township Nyanga, which is referred to in the lyrics.

The song is also featured on Ding Dong Dollar: Anti-Polaris and Scottish Republican Song, released in 1962.

Mississippi Goddam

(Written by Nina Simone in 1964)

Simone's response to, among other atrocities, the bombing of a Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama begins almost as a show tune before reaching a raging crescendo. The target of the singer's righteous anger switches from the perpetrators to those who argue for a measured pace in the journey to equal rights. "You don't have to live next to me, just give me my equality," she demands, while destroying a piano. The song was banned in several Southern states, who said the word Goddam rendered it unplayable.

Only A Pawn in their Game

(Written by Bob Dylan and recorded in 1963)

There's plenty to chose from in a canon which veers from the more simplistic and straightforward protest of The Times they are a Changing' to the angrier, more metaphorical likes of Maggie's Farm. This song though, is more ambitious: placing the terrible assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in the context of an economic structure which victimises poor whites as well as poor blacks. Dylan wore the crown of protest's king uncomfortably and soon rejected the responsibilities that came with it.

When Will We Be Paid (The Staple Singers, 1970)

In which the patience of civil rights campaigners Pops Staples and his three children finally runs out. After listing the black contribution to American over hundreds of years, from picking cotton, laying the railways, slaving on domestic duties and fighting in wars, Staples ask, not unreasonably, when payback is due. The whole experience is elevated by the fact that Mavis Staples is arguably the best singer the planet has ever known.

Gloria

(performed by Patti Smith, 1976)

How to take a song by Van Morrison's old group and refashion it into an astonishing attack on the whole concept of Christianity while at the same time playing games with sexual identity... All within the first three minutes of your debut album. There's not much left of the Them classic, which simply serves as the bare bones of Smith's manifesto for her art. "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" is probably the best opening line of an album ever. Smith 's fevered sexual obsession with the eponymous Gloria predicts the experimentation with sexual identity which will become one of the tropes of the coming decades.

Blitzkrieg Bop

(Written and performed by The Ramones, 1976)

In 1976 it was over. Rock was dead and its rotting corpse was stinking the place out. Its stars lived decadent lives in ivory towers, entirely divorced from their audience. Any sense of community and shared values left over from the 60s counter-culture had entirely disappeared. In 1976 the rock journalist Mick Farren wrote a seminal piece comparing the whole sorry mess to the Titanic. He warned of "an iceberg that is drifting close to the dazzlingly lit, wonderfully appointed Titanic that is big time, rock-pop, tax-exile jet-set show business". That same year saw the release of the first music from The Ramones. On Blitzkrieg Bop four New York punks cast adrift decades of rock pomposity. They looked through the windows of the Titanic and knew that enough was enough. What did they have to say about it? "Hey Ho, Let's Go". At the time, that was exactly enough.

Them Belly Full

(Written and performed by Bob Marley, 1974)

While rock had been atrophying, reggae had been growing stronger and angrier in a surreal alternative universe, a Caribbean 'paradise' beset by poverty and violence, obsessed with strange religions and stoned on marijuana. And through the smoke emerged Robert Nesta Marley, a reggae star who looked just like a rock star, except he had fire in an empty belly and was consumed with rage at the despair of his people. The tragedy and threat of the disposed has rarely been captured more succinctly than in this song: "Them belly full but we hungry, a hungry mob is an angry mob."

Ghost Town

(Written by Jerry Dammers, performed by The Specials, 1981)

After releasing their first album the success of The Special's rowdy mix of Pop, rock, reggae and ska swept them into the upper echelons of success. When things calmed down they turned their attention to the urban decay and unemployment which were turning Britain's cities into wastelands. It was a very different sound. It spent ten weeks in the top 40, three at number one. Its critique of a political philosophy which turned city centres into husks was biting.

American Idiot

(Green Day 2004)

The first single from the album of the same name, and the band's first top 5 hit in the UK. Its lyrics reflected a generational feeling of paranoia, although, like Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA, it leaves itself open to misinterpretation by an audience who just might not be paying close enough attention. The single and album certainly established the band's reputation as cultural commentators, created a new stage show and provided a soundtrack moment on Wedding Crashers, which pretty much defines having your cake and eating it.

Acid tracks

(Phuture, 1987)

Protest songs without any lyrics to speak of ... How's that work? This is among the first acid house music to be released - and it changed EVERYTHING. Chicago collective Phuture helped re- establish the dance floor as a collective experience of ecstasy, a revolutionary force by its very nature. Forget the 60s hippies and the punks of the 70s, the acid house explosion was a genuinely inclusive mainstream culture which reached every street in every town in Britain: the living embodiment of one nation under a groove.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

(Written and performed by Gil Scott-Heron 1970)

While the musicians predict hip-hop, Scott-Heron's lyrics investigate the relationship between radical politics and capitalism and comes to entirely the wrong conclusions. Understandably perhaps, Scott-Heron underestimates capitalism's ability to annexe radical ideas, suck the danger from them and commercialise whatever is left. Today we know that the revolution will certainly be right back after a message about a white tornado, or white lightning and will absolutely definitely go better with Coke. Scott-Heron had still to figure out that there is nothing that capitalism cannot make us buy.

Alright

(Written and performed by Kendrick Lamar, 2015)

OK ... Coulda, woulda, shoulda mentioned Grandmaster Flash's The Message, How We Going to Make The Black Nation Rise Again by Brother D and Public Enemy's incendiary Fight the Power ... Hell, pretty much the whole hip-hop back catalogue. But let's instead get bang up to date. Let's peel back the many layers of meaning in Kendrick's masterful portrayal of the black experience: the stereotypes, violence, oppression, mental illness and the sheer resilience that is his To Pimp A Butterfly album. Let's celebrate a single than can furiously call out trigger-happy police officers leaving black bodies in the street while still offering defiant optimism.

Freedom

(Beyonce, 2016)

Lamar pops up on this too, the best tune in the best album of the decade so far (probably of the century so far), addressing once again the theme of police brutality as one of the world's biggest superstars furiously highlights the Black Lives Matter campaign and enrages right-wing America with Black Panther references at, of all places, the Super Bowl. Beyonce protests at everything here, but mainly at the experiences of black American women through the centuries. She does so from a position of unimaginable wealth and privilege yet shows how useless they are as protection by stripping bare the effects of infidelity. Are the 'facts' of her marital betrayal true? Does it matter when the pain is this raw, this honest?

A Man's A Man

( Robert Burns 1795)

Simply the best protest song ever written, giving voice and dignity to the poor and hope to mankind. What's not to love?