The Final Straw
By By Michael Idov
Looks like the current administration will, after all, leave one mildly positive legacy: the return of the protest song. In the Clinton era, with its convoluted shades-of-gray conflicts (Serbia) and unexciting GOP villains (Newt), the genre was all but dead. The closest thing to a genuine article I can recall from the late ’90s would be Lou Reed’s "Sex With Your Parents (Motherfucker) Part 2," an embarrassing jeremiad against the right-wing talk radio.
Compare this with "The Final Straw," last year’s staple at R.E.M. concerts. Less a cry against the Iraq war than a semi-swallowed sob, it was possibly the world’s first protest song to explore the pangs of ambivalence:
And if I ignore the voice inside, Raise a half glass to my home, But it’s there that I am most afraid. […] And I offer love with one condition. With conviction, tell me why.
Beastie Boys, a slightly less intellectual outfit, are almost veterans of the genre: they’ve long been keeping an uneasy balance between progressive thought and lyrics about beer and Klingons. Sure, they have turned in a massive groaner on the recent "To the 5 Boroughs" ("We’ve got a president we didn’t elect / the Kyoto treaty he decided to neglect / and still the U.S. just wants to flex"). But they’re not a lost cause, either. "In a World Gone Mad," a free download from last year, packs infinitely more bite in a concise couplet:
It’s not the politicians but their actions I despise You and Saddam should kick it like back in the day With the cocaine and Courvoisier.
Also in: David Bowie, who’s revived "I’m Afraid of Americans" for his current tour (a song featuring the hardest riff of his career, incidentally). Then there are the usual suspects Zack de la Rocha and System of a Down, as well as somewhat embarrassing efforts from John Mellencamp and Lenny Kravitz. Kravitz, as is his custom, has overdone it a little: he recorded strained duets with Iraqi and Palestinian musicians last year, a move that, for all its obvious good intentions, smacked of PR and tokenism. On the other hand, the new breed of protest songs are exempt from criticism as long as they provide a balance to the myriad Toby Keiths singing about putting boots in foreign asses. ("It’s the American way.")
