![]() Listen back to the revolutionary anticipation in Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready,” the simmering laments of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” the slicing anguish of CSNY’s “Ohio,” the cabaret outrage of Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.” Listen, for that matter, to the ferocious chaos of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” and think about how the whole corpus of recorded African-American blues grew out of 1919’s so-called Red Summer of lynchings and race riots, a connection Daphne Brooks and Adam Gussow have both traced. They similarly discounted the fact that there had been plenty to rage about in recent years, plenty of social tension to process, as songs like Lamar’s “Alright” and Bey’s “Freedom” attest.ĭespite all these solid objections to the theory, something different does seem to happen to and in music in moments of social tension and political crisis. Those who lionized Reagan-era punk (a genre that of course was mostly white) also ignored, in their implication that Obama-era music had underperformed, all the brilliant music made by black artists during the previous eight years-by D’Angelo, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyoncé, to cite just three examples. If the adherents of the Trump Great Rock Theory didn’t mean to imply that a certain level of suffering could be compensated for by some righteous anthems, this desperate musical silver-lining-ism did downplay the very real casualties that everybody knew were coming. ![]() Plenty of other folks were suggesting similar things to their friends between sets at rock clubs or on Facebook, citing not Berlin but New York, waxing nostalgic for the punk scenes that had emerged in the recession-wracked 1970s and ’80s. It’s hard to track down this notion’s first appearance, but it was already widespread by the time Amanda Palmer voiced it to a journalist in December 2016, comparing the looming Trump regime to Weimar Germany as if she had no clue what had happened next, or perhaps considered it all a fair price to pay for Kurt Weill and fishnets. (Paul Hudson/Flickr)Īfter the last presidential election, a theory made the rounds that under the new administration, music would get really good again. ![]() Sara Marcus ▪ Winter 2020Īdrianne Lenker of Big Thief performs in London in 2017. Big Thief makes protest music for a moment when even language, even stories, even voices, have betrayed us.
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