What are the musical anthems for this moment? While sitting here in my house, social distancing due to my age and health situation, and watching massive numbers of people across the nation raising fists and carrying signs of protest, I started to wonder.
Perhaps, because I am in my 70s, I’m less apt to hear new music. Since I’ve retired from teaching, I no longer have classrooms full of youngins assisting me with my new music “edumacation.” Maybe I’ve missed something somewhere. If so, I hope you will correct me, or update me. Through the generations of struggle I’ve witnessed and participated in, my life has always been attuned to music that is an organic part of any movements for social change. I hear a specific song, and a flood of memories, attached to a political struggle, accompany it in my mind. Nina Simone singing “Mississippi Goddam” or “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” come to mind.
Though I’ve been writing a series on Black jazz, folk, and blues music the past seven Sundays, I’d like to switch gears slightly to respond to what I’m seeing in the streets—#BlackLivesMatter—and relate that to music.
I’ll begin with Ms. Nina’s “Mississippi Goddam,” since I already mentioned it. I don’t think I’ll ever forget her saying, “this is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.”
Simone wrote the song in just one hour, as a furious response to the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers and the four little girls killed in the Birmingham bombing; she pulls no punches, managing to also spit in the eyes of all those advising Black people “to go slow” with our demands for equality. She also references right-wing, McCarthy-era inferences that the Civil Rights Movement was a “communist plot.”
The lyrics, written in 1964, could just as easily been penned today.
Oh but this whole country is full of lies
You're all gonna die and die like flies
I don't trust you any more
You keep on saying 'Go slow!'
'Go slow!'
When I saw her perform it at the Village Gate, when she got to “You don't have to live next to me, just give me my equality,” I cheered.
Here are two versions. There are several more performances preserved, each one with different nuances.
First, Simone’s original recording of “Goddam,” live at Carnegie Hall.
Next, a live version from the Antibes Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival in 1965.
The mainstream reaction to “Goddam” was swift, as Chika Duga wrote in 2018’s “Mississippi Goddam! — The Song that made Nina Simone into a Revolutionary.”
At a glance, one might not understand the significance of Mississippi Goddam. Historical context can provide some answers. Firstly, language considered inappropriate was nonexistent in music and seriously censored. Secondly, public messages perceived as anti-American propaganda were blacklisted. The culture of language coupled with the culture of the bible belt, and the criticism of a confederate stronghold was a recipe for public backlash. Now, take those two elements and add the fact that Nina is black woman — a proud one, with dark skin, African features, and the boldness to admonish governments and leaders. Mississippi Goddamn is akin to an act of war from a David to a Goliath.
The backlash was immediate. Radio stations in the South banned the song. Cases of 45s (a phonographic record that’s played at forty — five revolutions per second) were returned from radio stations cracked in half. As her activism and outspokenness continued, venues hesitated to book her. Nina was blacklisted by the very same people that used to support her. Such is the paradox of performing to an audience that enjoyed her but did not understand her.
And yet, the song’s reach grew and grew. Lord, how I wish someone would update it to “Trump, Republicans, and Racists Goddam.”
I don’t know if “I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free” reaches the height of an anthem, but it was and is for me. Written by jazz pianist Billy Taylor in 1963, it was Simone’s delivery that touched a chord in the hearts of Black people fighting for their lives.
The wishes of so many of us can be seen in her face as she sings “I wish I could break all the chains binding me,” and then again as her barely controlled anger shifts into joy and validation of self and she shouts, “I know how it feels to be free!”
When I speak of modern anthems, I’m not just talking about songs that top the charts or songs that powerfully address inequity, and inequality—there are and have been plenty.
Nearly four years ago, when “I can’t breathe” still referenced just one police murder caught on camera, Rolling Stone published this list of 22 songs, birthed in the age of Black Lives Matter.
Two years after the death of Eric Garner at the hands of NYPD officers, “I can’t breathe” remains perhaps the most disturbing phrase in modern American history. Which makes it all the more courageous that Ellisha and Steven Flagg, Garner’s siblings, refuse to let the tragic day they lost their brother fade into history. This month, they released “I Can’t Breathe,” their second song commemorating Garner, joining countless other musicians who have pledged their support to the Black Lives Matter cause.
The movement has politicized popular artists and helped to shake the commercial cobwebs from hip-hop and R&B. During the past four years, high-profile musicians have issued everything from anthemic rallying cries (Beyoncé’s fearless “Freedom”) to open-ended conversation-starters (Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “White Privilege II”). Artists such as D’Angelo and Kendrick Lamar emerged with readymade, multifaceted statement albums; smaller artists like Houston MC Z-Ro and icons like Prince released songs in response to various instances of police brutality; and even typically apolitical megastars like Ariana Grande and Usher have joined the outspoken chorus.
A new generation of artists are addressing racism, violence and disillusionment in a way that hasn’t been heard in decades. Read on for our list of some of the most powerful new protest anthems to come out of the Black Lives Matter era.
I think I have a small quibble with their use of “anthem” for all the songs they list. I am probably biased, because as a child of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) I have an expectation for songs to move people to march, carry them forward, and become part of a collective and generational consciousness. It also helps when you can sing along. To that end, I do remember hearing people chant, sing, and shout “Say his name!” from 2013’s “Hell You Talmbout,” at rallies.
Then and now, chant leaders with bullhorns have evoked powerful responses.
Sometimes, they don’t even need megaphones, like this young man, who shouts the words in one final act of defiance.
We know there is a long list of major songs linked inextricably to the CRM. Mavis Staples holds an interesting discussion of them in this 2009 conversation with Dr. Milmon Harrison, professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California Davis. She talks about how she and her sisters got started, their work in the movement, their relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the impact of his assassination.
As soon as I hear the name Mavis Staples or the Staples Singers, ”I’ll Take You There” starts playing in my head.
I know a place
Ain't nobody cryin'
Ain't nobody worried
Ain't no smilin' faces
Mmm, no no
Lyin' to the races
Help me, come on, come on
Somebody help me now (I'll take you there)
Have a listen.
Facing History details some of the background behind the family’s early involvement in the movement.
Freedom songs, often adapted from the music of the black church, played an essential role bolstering courage, inspiring participation, and fostering a sense of community. Andrew Young, former executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, remembered how music helped build bridges between civil rights workers and members of the communities they hoped to organize:
They often brought in singing groups to movement friendly churches as a first step in their efforts... They knew how little chance they stood of gaining people’s trust if they presented themselves as straight out organizers: people were too afraid to respond to that approach. So they organized gospel groups and hit the road.
According to lead singer Mavis Staples,
“The songwriters knew we were doing protest songs. We had made a transition back there in the sixties with Dr. King. We visited Dr. King’s church in Montgomery before the movement actually got started. When we heard Dr. King preach, we went back to the motel and had a meeting. Pops [Mavis’s father, who played guitar and shared lead vocal duties with his youngest daughter] said, “Now if he can preach it, we can sing it. That could be our way of helping towards this movement.” We put a beat behind the song. We were mainly focusing on the young adults to hear what we were doing. You know if they hear a beat, that would make them listen to the words. So we started singing protest songs. All those guys were writing what we actually wanted them to write. Pops would tell them to just read the headlines and whatever they saw in the morning paper that needed to be heard or known about, [they would] write us a song from that.”
Of course, I’m not just talking about the CRM here. Just last week, protests for Black lives in Columbus, Ohio, led Republican Gov. Mike DeWine to announce he was activating the National Guard; that had me humming “Ohio,” Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s anthem of Vietnam War protest, before I even consciously thought about it.
I soon learned I was not alone in that response. I logged onto Twitter and saw hundreds and hundreds of tweets like this one.
My brain soon segued right into Buffalo Springfield’s iconic “For What It’s Worth.”
Rolling Stone revisited it in 2016, in “‘For What It’s Worth’: Inside Buffalo Springfield’s Classic Protest Song.”
The eerily quiet song captured the uneasy mood of the moment that extended beyond Los Angeles to Vietnam, and lyrics about “a man with a gun over there” and “young people speaking their minds/Getting so much resistance from behind” were the sound of the rock counterculture cementing its socially conscious voice.
“For What It’s Worth” has transcended its origin story to become one of pop’s most-covered protest songs – a sort of “We Shall Overcome” of its time, its references to police, guns and paranoia remaining continually relevant. The Staple Singers were among the first to cover it, in 1967, but since then, it’s been recorded by a mind-bendingly diverse number of acts.
Mavis Staples is still getting young folks to connect with the song today. Here she is at FreshGrass 2019, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
When I see fires burning in cities, like the ones recently seen on the news, the musical accompaniment to urban rebellion in my head is Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues,” which I featured alongside of James Brown’s “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” in a story about the Holy Week uprisings after the death of Dr. King.
While planning to write this, I had a conversation with my editor, Jessica, about my thoughts about protest anthems. It inspired her to talk with her friends and family—who all experienced their teen and young adult years sometime between 1985 to today—about what songs had strong political connections to them. Many (or most) on the list she delivered to me were songs I hadn’t heard, by artists I’m unfamiliar with, and I’ve been doing some major listening ever since.
With that exchange in mind, what songs resonate with you and your politics? What issues do these songs address, and how do they motivate you to action in your struggles for change and justice? Finally, what songs do you think are both emblematic of a particular period of political change, and have also become anthems that transcend time?
Looking forward to listening to your responses, but don’t get so caught up in music that you forget to vote.
Black lives matter.
