Guest Blog: Our Subversive Voice

Our Subversive Voice: The History and Politics of English Protest Songs, 1600–2020 by John Street, Oskar Cox Jensen, Alan Finlayson, Angela McShane, and Matthew Worley establishes the protest song as a mode of political communication. Covering five centuries in England’s history, from street ballads and art song to grime, hymns, music hall, and punk, this book explores the causes that protest songs adopt, the conditions that give rise to them, and the institutions that have suppressed them.

In the guest blog below, John Street gives us some context and an introduction to the protest song.

Visit the Our Subversive Voice website for case studies of particular songs and themes; interviews with songwriters and experts; a bibliography of scholarship and anthologies; and contributions from other writers with an interest in the history and politics of the protest song – both English and otherwise.

Our Subversive Voice: The History and Politics of English Protest Songs, 1600–2020

The meeting of the right-wing Alliance for Responsible Citizenship was hosted in London this year. Among its speakers were the leaders of the Conservative Party and Reform UK, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, a former Prime Minister of Australia, the writers Niall Ferguson and Jordan Peterson … and Oliver Anthony. The last is neither a politician nor a writer. He is a protest singer, famous for “Rich Men North of Richmond,” which was briefly #1 on the Billboard charts in 2023.

“Rich Men” was an unusual protest song in at least two respects. It was a hit; most are not. It espoused a right-wing, populist cause; most do not. But it was typical in two other features. It was made in the US and was accompanied by an acoustic guitar. These latter elements are what tend to define “the protest song” in popular discourse. It is that twentieth-century tradition associated with Woody Guthrie, early Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Ani DiFranco, and many others.

However, it is a perception that grossly distorts the life and times of protest songs and protest singing. Our Subversive Voice challenges the conventional view by tracing the history of the protest song over more than four centuries, by locating that story in England, and by including music of all types – multi-verse broadsheets, anarchist punk, concert oratorios, music hall satires, rap rhymes, church hymns, and many more.

These protest songs have accompanied popular complaints throughout the centuries. They existed long before the right to “protest,” as we understand it now, and they have been constant in their targeting of the political elite and those who served it.

“Vox Populi,” for example, was sung during the huge, sometimes violent street demonstrations that took place between December 1641 and January 1642. It acted as a rallying call for protest at the power of the Anglican church. The demand was for the removal of the bishops. The song described the clerics as “fat belli’d priests that have Livings great store” and the “rude regiment” who “endeavour … To set the proud Prelates on Horse-back againe.”

Two centuries later the protest of “medical orthdoxy” was directed at the power of another elite, the doctors and their campaign for vaccination against smallpox. The same complaint was heard in 2020 in Van Morrison’s tirade against Covid regulation, “No More Lockdown.”

Our book draws on some 750 examples of such songs. The charges against the elite may change, but what remains the same is that political anger is conjured as song. This is not an incidental or anecdotal aspect of politics, but a core feature of it. The protest song is political communication, a means of conveying political ideas and sentiments, and of mobilizing action.

The protest song is a form of rhetoric, similar in some ways to political speech. The rhymes and repetitions of the politician are also to be found in music. But different too in how voice, melody, and rhythm animate mind and body, choreographing protest as well as articulating it. Songs perform politics.

Seeing the protest song as political communication also means asking questions about how it gets made – and how it gets suppressed. The protest song does not exist simply because singers and songwriters have a political conscience. Songs are not simply translations of ideologies and manifestos. Nor do they exist simply because of the causes and crises that afflict the world. There is no limit to those afflictions, but only some inspire a song. Protest songs are the product of networks, both political and musical, and of cultural, social, and financial capital.

Protest songs and their performers are also the survivors of regimes of control and repression. Our history tells of the imprisonment and censorship of writers, and even of their execution. It is a history that is also part of a continuing present. Recently, 1,000 UK musicians supported the album Is This What We Want? as part of a campaign against tech companies hoovering up their creative efforts in the name of AI. The twelve tracks are the sound of empty recording studios. “This silent protest album,” commented the Financial Times, “says a lot.”

But for the moment at least, the protest song endures as a vital form of political expression. In February this year, the young British musician Sam Fender released his record People Watching, in which he decries the destruction of working-class communities, masculine toxicity, university tuition fees, and the privatization of social care. His tour of stadiums has sold out.

John Street is emeritus professor of politics at the University of East Anglia.