Get Up Stand Up

By James Poniewozik

The problem for anyone trying to make what Bob Marley once called "rebel music" today is not that there's too little rebellion out there but, by Western pop culture's liberal definition, that there's way too much. Since the dawn of rock 'n' roll, popular music has been de facto rebellious, at least insofar as the term is defined by record labels and soft-drink ads. All it takes to be a rebel in America, it seems, is to be young and loud. In a music culture where a rebel is the Backstreet Boy with a goatee or the rapper with a lifestyle like a CEO's--where being political means playing party music at the odd benefit for Tibet--the mantle hardly seems worth fighting for.

The angry rockers and folkies of the '60s and '70s had it easy: How hard was it, really, to denounce war and societal repression to an audience of kids who had less than selfless motives to want to get high, laid and not shot? Today Western popular music is aimed at largely comfortable, unrestricted youth in a country at peace. The political battlefields, more and more, are economic--class conflict, globalism, the environment. So making rebel music in some sense means attacking the pillars of your Nike-clad audience's own comfort.

How, in other words, do you convince listeners with high-tech jobs and PlayStations that they're working on Maggie's farm? Through the '90s, that was essentially the mission of Rage Against the Machine, which covered that Dylan classic on its last album, Renegades (2000). Apropos of another of its Renegades covers, Kick Out the Jams, Rage aimed to be a modern-day MC5, using hard-edged music to ram through a hard-nosed message that was less about peace and love than about old-fashioned, a-pink-slip-and-a-six-pack populist anger. But they were also one of the few acts in recent years to crack the charts with an unfiltered political message. They were, in their words, "calm like a bomb." Even higher-profile, socially conscious artists like Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen have seemed increasingly like museum docents in their recent work, curating the legacy of '30s-era populism.

But step outside the borders of the world's hegemon--to Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America--and you find a different scene: namely, musicians and an audience who really have something to bitch about. Protest music in other parts of the world is complicated by a dynamic unfamiliar to Western listeners. American political music is traditionally an individual's complaint about the surrounding society. Standing on a street in Lagos or on a beach in Brazil, or staring down an invading army of Pokemon and Britneys, however, it can be equally as radical to speak out for your society. To a protest singer in Mali or Haiti, is the target a government that stifles personal freedoms or a global juggernaut that threatens local traditions and economic autonomy? Is the oppressor the state, which might jail you for playing your music, or Western entertainment conglomerates, which can so thoroughly marginalize your music that you might as well be in jail?

What's more, the very term protest music has always assumed a Western liberal-humanist bias. We think of earnest guitar strummers in natural fabrics singing for human rights and tolerance. But as recent history teaches, in the new cold war--between the Hollywood/Mickey D's axis and every other world culture--genuine cultural pride can morph into nationalism, racism and worse. To the world's musical rebels today, is the enemy within or without?

The answers are various and not simple. Nigeria's Femi Kuti, son of Afropop pioneer Fela Kuti, has, like his father, created a vibrant, pulsing, sweaty, sexy sound that's half African by way of Africa and half African by way of James Brown. His politically conscious music (Kuti heads the political party MASS--Movement Against Second Slavery) reflects that same complex consciousness of borders. Kuti knows, for instance, that African kleptocrats have often used nationalism for their own ends, and he gives neither Western cultural imperialism nor African corruption a pass. "We get the wrong people for government," he sings on Blackman Know Yourself, "Who force us to think with colonial sense/Na wrong information scatter your head/You regret your culture for Western sense."

If a song is a form of debate and the lyrics its text, the music itself is the equivalent of oratory--the intangible oomph that drives home the rhetoric. Kuti's music--American R.-and-B. guitar and horns over African percussion--is not just a sound but also the manifestation of a political idea: that the black man should know himself yet not be afraid to use the tools of the West to his own ends. Mali's chanteuse Rokia Traore, conversely, is a diplomat's daughter who grew up around the world but uses her native tongue, Bamanan, and Malian instruments on spare and lovely songs like the feminist Mancipera, which calls for the liberation of African women from subservience. For Traore as for the American folkies of the '30s and '60s, mastering the traditional music of her homeland figuratively allows her to claim a true connection to her people and her native roots even as she seeks to redefine their traditions.

Conversely again, China's tenuous protest-music movement has focused on Western-influenced rock, which the government first banned (as a bourgeois and immoral influence), then in the late '80s grudgingly opened up to (as a talisman of capitalism), with heavy censor oversight. Just as China has spent the past decade trying to prove that communist capitalism is no contradiction in terms, so is it trying to show that defanged rock music can be the totalitarian capitalist's pal. (Take the danger out of rock and what do you have, if not a Britney Spears Pepsi commercial?) Arguably it has been successful on both fronts. The recent recordings of China's foremost protest rocker, Cui Jian, whose Nothing to My Name was an anthem of the Tiananmen protests, have become more introspective and apolitical, and the Chinese rock scene has become muted.

Some political artists are also questioning just what "native music" is. The Malagasy group Tarika, which earlier focused on racism and corruption in its own country, took a trans-Indian-Oceanic pilgrimage to Sulawesi, the Indonesian home island of the first settlers of Madagascar, in search of the roots of their roots. The mesmerizing result, Soul Makassar, aims to transcend the local and the global, melding guitar and organ with traditional string instruments. On Aretina, singer Rasoanaivo Hanitrarivo bemoans finding many Sulawesi people ashamed of their own music, preferring Western pop: "You can hear something different/But it is hidden and not played with pride."

It is the intracolonial perspective that complicates Tarika's view. We're used to seeing this kind of pilgrimage and hearing this kind of lament from Westerners, from whom it betrays a kind of reverse Ugly Americanism, a tourist's disappointment that the natives won't be more authentic. But Tarika has no problem following Aretina with a cover of the Ronettes' Be My Baby, which Rasoanaivo remembers first hearing sung in Malagasy.

It's an old story. The West seeds the world with metal oil barrels; the world sends them back as steel drums. For today's politically minded world musicians, this kind of appropriation is itself a political act, a direct echo of the challenge to non-Western cultures everywhere to become global without being globalized, to step on the world playing field without being ground into it. In today's global music, musical boundary hopping is often integral to a political message, as when Haiti's Boukman Eksperyans sets a Creole antiwar chant to the tune of Kyu Sakamoto's 1963 single Sukiyaki, an American chart topper by way of Japan. (For Bookman, even singing in Creole--which has periodically been outlawed in Haiti--is a political act.) Protest singers in Africa and the Caribbean have long preached a musical and lyrical Pan-Africanism, from Kuti's mondo-Afro beats back to Peter Tosh's 1977 rallying cry: "As long as you're a black man, you're an African."

That's a cry that surprisingly few black rap acts in America have taken up, with some notable exceptions. The masterly, literate self-titled debut of Black Star (Mos Def and Talib Kweli) is a virtual symphony of African internationalism. The group's name alludes to Marcus Garvey's back-to-Africa nationalism, and the lyrics paint a red, green and black mural stretching from Coltrane to Du Bois to Ishmael Reed to Derrick Bell. Brown Skin Lady is a love song both to a woman and to Africa itself ("I know women on the continent got it/Nigeria and Ghana, you know they got it/Tanzania, Namibia and Mozambique").

Of course, rap prompts the question of what qualifies as political music at all. By Chuck D's famous definition of hip-hop as the black CNN, bringing the news from the streets is itself a rebel dispatch. (Eminem does the same for the white underclass, when he manages to get past his fixations on his mom, Everlast and boy bands.) And the undying Tupac Shakur--named for a revolutionary and tied, through his mother and musical executor, to the Black Panther movement--is a far more political figure than his lyric sheets suggest. But popular hip-hop, P.-Diddy-all-about-the-Benjamins-style, tends to be more like the black E! channel, celebrating money and fame. Only a handful of artists, like Dead Prez, are calling to change the channel: "You would rather have a Lexus or justice, a dream or some substance?/A Beemer, a necklace or freedom?"

Making a protest you can party to is tough. Michael Franti and Spearhead's latest album, Stay Human, ambitiously incorporates a running play about a Mumia Abu-Jamal-like death-penalty case; the results are music as stiff and analysis as thin as the CD they're burned onto. But it does point to a potential flash point for the revival of protest music in the West: capital punishment in particular and law enforcement in general are bringing together black and white artists as few issues have since apartheid. The New York City police shooting of African immigrant Amadou Diallo created a mini-genre of tribute songs--Springsteen's heartfelt if monotonous American Skin, Wyclef Jean's lilting Diallo and Erykah Badu's oblique A.D. 2000. The justice system may be to the rebel music of the 21st century as the military was to the '60s.

But in a larger sense, the world political music of today is about markets, writ large. The business of rebel artists in the era of business is to figure out their focus in a period governed as much by hidden international market forces as by national political frontmen, when Michael Eisner wields as much power in their world as George W. Bush. Even on American politico folkie Ani DiFranco's latest album, Reckoning/Reveling, you see a global perspective creeping in: "I think in ancient China they kinda/figured out how the body works/but our culture is just a roughneck/teenage jerk/with a bottle of pills/and a bottle of booze/and a full round of ammunition and nothing to lose."

Acupuncture as political pressure point? Sure. In the feminism that informs DiFranco's songwriting, the body is a personal battlefield that maps onto a global one, the political is not only personal but economic, and her enemies, "the mighty multinationals/have monopolized the oxygen/so it's as easy as breathing/for us all to participate." In this light, you could argue that DiFranco's greatest political act as a musician was a classic Marxist one: seizing the means of production, namely her own Righteous Babe record label. Protest music is indeed alive, in some places even thriving. And in a funny way, it turns out it really is about the Benjamins.