Friends of the Earth invited prominant people to contribute to question, ‘Which is the best protest song?’
Which is the best protest song?
They can stir our hearts, emotions and actions. But which are the best-ever protest songs? Oliver Bennett asks prominent people to share the music that moved them most.
Where Have All The Flowers Gone, Pete Seeger
“… it was the great peace song of our youth and is sadly needed as much now as it was then.”
Michael Morpurgo, author of “Didn’t We Have a Lovely Time” (Walker Books).
Blowin’ In The Wind, Bob Dylan
“I like this song because it has vigour, vision and passion and yet no fixed answers. Sometimes we radical activists get fixed in our ‘answers’ and ‘solutions’ whereas Bob Dylan’s song asks us to remain open and always ready to accept new answers.”
Satish Kumar, Editor of Resurgence
Imagine, John Lennon
“Like this song, I believe in the positive power of imagining the ideal scenario. I prefer a ‘call to action’ rather than reacting to others actions and shortcomings, especially when existing images of hate, violence and war are so commonplace. Imagining is the first step towards realisation, and universal ideas imagined collectively are the most powerful protest of all.”
Anupama Kundoo, architect
“I choose this song, simply because there really is no bigger dream than all the world living life in peace.”
Sarah Butler-Sloss, founder director of Ashden
A Change is Gonna Come, Sam Cooke
“Ultimately a message of hope and positivity – not always the case with the protest song – A Change is Gonna Come… trod the tightrope between popular success (it reached number two in the charts) and being packed with meaning. I love the myth behind it too, that Cooke was motivated by Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind. As Peter Guralnick wrote in 2005’s Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, when Cooke first heard that song, he ‘was so carried away with the message, and the fact that a white boy had written it, that . . . he was almost ashamed not to have written something like that himself.’”
Juliet Haygarth, CEO of ad agency BMB
Mississippi Goddam, Nina Simone
“This is the most visceral protest song I know. She wrote it in one hour, in a boiling rage about the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing, and you can feel that urgency — the dangerous thrill of letting out everything she couldn’t say before about being black in America. There’s no studio recording, only live versions, so it always feels like something raw and in the moment. It’s a show-tune, a furious unburdening and an ultimatum. It’s the sound of someone who isn’t going to put up with injustice for one second longer.”
Dorian Lynskey, author of “33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs” (Faber)
Diamonds and Rust, Joan Baez
“…a perfectly pitched protest song about Bob Dylan’s treatment of her. Baez sings that he was ‘good with words’, especially vague ones. But to be awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature? Perleeease. I protest.”
Dr Jeremy Leggett, director of Solarcentury and chair of SolarAid
Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves , Annie Lennox
“I don’t believe we should sit back and watch things happen, but rather we should stand up and fight for the change we want to see. To me, this song encourages women and girls not to hang around and wait for the invitation to become leaders.”
Juliet Davenport, CEO of Good Energy
Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell
“This is an early environmental protest song from 1967. ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. With a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot’. Green belt protectors are still fighting to stop ‘paving paradise’, but fortunately, another line had greater success. ‘Hey farmer, farmer put away that DDT now. Give me spots on my apples but leave the birds and the bees now.’ DDT was banned in the USA 5 years after she wrote this song.”
Alistair Barr, Barr Gazetas architects
Jerusalem, William Blake (music by Hubert Parry)
“It encourages me to go on fighting against ‘the dark satanic mills’ in our environment and in our minds – and because most people belting it out don’t have the first clue as to just how radical its message is.”
Jonathon Porritt, founder director of Forum for the Future
Shipbuilding, Elvis Costello
“It’s hard to choose between Abel Meeropol’s Strange Fruit, about the lynching of black people in the American South and made famous by Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording [main picture: Billie Holiday]; or Elvis Costello’s Shipbuilding written during the Falklands War to a melody by Clive Langer [also sung by Robert Wyatt].
“The tremendous power of both songs derives from the subtle and oblique way they start talking about the issues, so that the enormity of what is being described is magnified by the surprise when it hits you. If I had to choose it would be Shipbuilding for putting across a penetrating and complex idea with heart-aching simplicity.”
Sunand Prasad, Penoyre & Prasad architects
A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, Bob Dylan
“…. partly because it was presciently anti-nuclear but mostly because – with time – it has become an increasingly powerful metaphor for a gamut of social and environmental damage. His Nobel Prize seems somehow fitting, if one of the criteria is that your words remain contemporary with the passing years. A genius of our time and a voice that hints at both the desolation and the better angels of our heart.”
Sir Tim Smit, co-founder of the Eden Project
With God on Our Side, Bob Dylan
“The song is a hymn to the reasons we find for justifying conflict of any kind and was aimed at the Vietnam War. It could be just as relevant today, for any number of other issues in the world.”
Tom Shutes, entrepreneur and philanthropist
Walls Come Tumbling Down! The Style Council
“Paul Weller bought the class war of Thatcher’s Britain into the Top 10 with an irresistible melody, proving that pop music could be both educational and get you on the dancefloor.”
Daniel Rachel, author of “Walls Come Tumbling Down: the music and politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge” (Picador)
Ball of Confusion, The Temptations
“We were all into Ska and Tamla Motown at the time and when it played in the clubs it blew our minds, and coincided with youth cultural changes in the UK.”
Marc Lucero, comedian and filmmaker
