Protest Songs & Protest Singers

Protest Songs: 

Have you heard people complain that they don't hear any protest songs. Even songwriter people say 'where are the protest singers?'

The Minotaur By John Munnelly
But are they hankering back to an imagined 60's folk protest singer? Would they go and see a protest singer anyway or buy a protest song or how would a contrary song even get played on corporate radio?

If people question where the protest singers are? Well I ask - where are the good jobs? Where are the sales of Vinyl LP's they might as well ask. Where is anything like before? Where is justice?  The times they are definitely a changing' and music has changed into a business first of all and maybe the musicians too are more about a career and fame than art and culture making.

Was it same choice politically in the 60s? I think it probably was, as WEB Du Bois said and I likely paraphrase here; they are the "same party with two names". But now it's so obvious that both major choices to vote for are definitively shit. Purposefully so. Whether it's for the Party line or presumptive presidents.

They are two corporate elite groups aligned with trans-national corporate & oligarchical interests with only pseudo differences between them. And in the end when the games of power and privilege play out they agree to serve the masters. As evidenced with the secret TPP and TIPP being pushed all over the globe. No citizen or elected person or labor representative got to have a say in the TPP. It is the real deal that is happening behind us while all the other distraction stuff is spectacle, circus and theater for the masses to vent over.

And what do citizens get to do or say if they only choice is a rubbish dis-empowering choice. Maybe traditional folk/protest songs have a place to create a dissonant space that is not aligned with the cultural norming and forced binary beliefs allowed for us by the media and the digital mob. Poor us and the embarrassed founding fathers of the land of the free. 

Colonists lesson one-oh-one 101 is from the Brits, the absolute masters of worldwide colonialism. Their favorite & best method was the use of 'divide and conquer'. What is more true of America today than the schismatic nature of culture, politics and race and the setting of each against other when there is a truer beast to be fought. 'Winter is here' and our fight is not against each other but against the powers and principalities.

It would be nice to be more trusting of authority but I feel that by the time people wake up it'll be too late to change the oppressive stuff that is happening and being put in place right now. Those at the back of the economic 'lynching line' think they have a privilege that will save them; but it only means when they get to the top of the line there will be no one there to object or stand with or for them. Actually it's the bottom they are falling towards but 'they grabbing onto' vestiges of past simplicity to "make America great again" in the vain hope it might save them and restore what they gave away to corporate power already.

The neu-colonialists are only practicing and refining the control and obey techniques on the brown folks now.  In a present future these same devices and oppression's used on urban brown protestors at the weekend in Baton Rouge and against #BlackLivesMatter will be used freely on everyone.  What is the difference between the lone tank protestor of Tianamen square and what I am dubbing 'the Lady of Stillness' in Baton Rouge. We are not so free as the advertisement for Good ol USA says we are.

A nurse, a mother and maybe a saint standing in for the arrested Jesus. Baton Rouge
A nurse, a mother and maybe a saint standing in for the arrested Jesus.

 'We get a choice between awful and despised' 

I'm not too surprised re Bernie bending the knee and that's why I never got on board his train - it was always going to be thus that Bernie was a narrative lined up to 'push Hilary to the left' but never to push her overboard.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQE82hWSxUU

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