some ongoing questions about music & protest.
A brief talk delivered for Music & Protest in Historical Perspective, an online panel sponsored by the LePage Center for History in the Public Interest, Villanova University.
I want to begin with a quote from the great musician and political activist Barbara Dane, who died at 97 just a few days ago. A life well lived. She remarked to a reporter from the Guardian, while in hospice no less, “There’s a power in music that unites people. You can take a roomful of people and make them feel their kinship in a way that nothing else can with a song.”
It is this sense of kinship, particularly what anthropologists call “fictive kinship,” that I want to use as a kind of spotlight for my brief comments for this panel.
In my own research on rock and folk music in the 1960s and 70s, I repeatedly noticed how music broadened the nature of what we mean by protest, primarily through its capacities to foster a sense of kinship.
Here we see the Vietnamese rock band the CBC. Kinship is quite literally on display here, as the band consisted of a family of brothers and sisters.
But kinship also gets complex, and very quickly. With whom did CBC’s music foster kinship, exactly?
The group became known as the Beatles of Saigon when they played in the seedy nightclubs during the Vietnam War, as well as on US military installations, also at traditional Vietnamese weddings, and even at the…
…Saigon International Pop Festival, an event modeled on the famous Woodstock Festival in upstate New York in August of 1969.
Yet the Saigon International Pop Festival was no rebellion against the mainstream, exactly. It was not even clearly anti-Vietnam War. It was, in fact, organized by pro-war elements within South Vietnam, as a benefit for injured troops in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.
So here is no simple “which side are you on” story of music as protest: a seemingly antiwar event, Woodstock, now became associated with pro-war parts of South Vietnamese society.
Of course, the event was really about dreaming of no war, given that it was about trying to generate funds for injured soldiers. Yet it was not clearly antiwar, as rock music is often imagined during the 1960s. It was something far more complex than simple, direct protest. It was about the more amorphous possibilities of multidimensional kinship.
CBC’s kinship was no simple thing. Playing the latest rock hits from “back in the world,” as Americans in VIetnam called the US and England, and all places not Southeast Asia, and playing them virtually note for note, CBC became quite popular with many different groups. They were beloved by local Vietnamese youth, known as cowboys, who rode around on motorbikes with existential dread and a sense of nihilistic rebellion amidst a war of occupation. CBC also became extremely beloved by American military personnel, much to the dismay of the official US brass, who despite the band’s appearance as headliners at a pro-war event, nonetheless associated CBC’s acid rock with the decay of morale among US military personnel, who were losing interest in waging the war and instead getting caught up in a hedonistic warzone smog of marijuana smoke and a swirl of psychedelic electric guitar howls. The international population living in Saigon loved CBC too.
They were the hippest band to know or to go see, at clubs with names such as Plantation Road, Sherwood Forest, the My Phoung club, and the Fillmore Far East.
The only people who did not like CBC alongside the US military brasss seemed to be their opposition: the Communist-oriented VIetcong, who bombed the band at a club performance in Saigon in 1971, supposedly in the midst of the CBC’s performance of Jimi Hendrix’s song, “Purple Haze.” The bomb killed a young woman who had dated CBC’s drummer and injured some of the band members.
So what kind of protest, if it even was protest, did CBC mount with their music? What kind of kinship did they invoke? Was their music merely a vessel for a kind of imperial American soft power: the exportation to the war zone of a hip capitalist rock culture that seemed to offer liberation, but in fact incorporated young people into the very systems of empire—whether military or commercial—from which they thought rock music announced a departure? Was plugging in to the rock amplifier merely a way of getting wrapped up in its wires?
Or, was CBC’s rock music a kind of protest, a sound of many people coming together to reject the larger forces making their lives so miserable with war, violence, alienation, and division? Was rock music a way to give the finger to the authoritarian forces creating this havoc and suffering, to flip the bird at the fools in charge?
Did CBC’s rock music even become an outpost, a sort of alternative induction center, for a nascent Woodstock Nation, a different country or republic of rock that many yearned to join? Was CBC part of a kind of Woodstock Transnational that sprang up within American channels of military and commercial power but was not ever entirely quite of it, instead beckoning with a freak flag of a peace symbol painted within the American flag, waving their long hair at the possibility of a different configuration of kinship, belonging, and participation—a different mode not just of kinship, but of citizenship even—than what the US or Vietnam or any other entity could offer? Could music really do that? Or was it just an American ruse, a false flag of freedom that was not really a form of protest at all?
Even when CBC arrived as refugees in the United States in 1975, after wandering through India, Bali, and Thailand without a home, they continued to perform rock music. Settling eventually in Indiana, then LA, and now Houston, CBC continued to search for the elusive Fillmore Auditorium, the San Francisco club where countercultural hippie acid rock in part began. Misspelled here with one “l,” the band poses by the roadside, as if looking to find a ride to the Fillmore, ready to set out to find, if not exactly of music club in San Francisco where acid rock had first made its anarchic, hedonistic clang of electricity known, or its sister club the Fillmore East in New York City, which Fillmore promoter opened a few years later, or even the aforementioned Fillmore Far East that CBC had performed at in Saigon, but rather maybe a symbolic Fillmore of the mind—or maybe we could say of the ear: the “Filmore” that stood for a fleeting but potent sense of collective kinship, a feeling of mutuality and affiliation generated by music that arose within systems of oppression—militarism, capitalism, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, patriarchy, alienation, exploitation—yet nonetheless harnessed aspects of that system’s technologies and instruments to propose alternatives. CBC did so from within the very channels of power themselves, diverting them in surprising directions out of a war zone and into an American, yet also an international, tale of collective discovery.
Was this a form of protest? Not of an obvious, straightforward sort. Maybe it was more a kind of protest that did something else other than challenge power directly. Maybe it diverted or redirected power by way of invoking and evoking fictive kinship.
CBC accomplished something fraught and imperfect, but also courageous and inspiring. For did not CBC try to fashion the dream of finding a more fulfilling—hmm, maybe we could even say a more fulfillmoreing?— life out of the very circuitry of American military and commercial power that seemed to entrap them and so many others in difficult lives?
They seized not only the means of production in an economy shifting toward symbolic, affective, and information commodification, but they also seized the means of consumption in this shifting, fragmenting mass consumer society that had figured out ways of commodifying cool, of selling rebellion, adapting its possibilities for their own pursuits of freedom, fun, and even of security (they were, after all, paradoxically using hedonistic Western youth culture to keep their together their family, that basic unit of traditional Vietnamese culture!).
With CBC, we can start to ask more fraught questions about music and protest, difficult questions. Here are a few that I would say are worth more debate and discussion:
- How is music at once a vernacular form of expression and also capable of becoming a commodity? What even is the nature of music as a commodity when it comes to protest and politics? And what is the nature of music as part of vernacular expression: whose vernacular expression exactly?
- How is music the expression of individuals and individual autonomy or liberation or emancipation or resistance or dissent? And how do its individual dimensions relate to its deeply communal and collective qualities and capacities?
- How do we think about music as both embodied, which is to say produced with muscles and vocal cords, heard with eardrums and auricular nerves, echoing in chest cavities and making feet and hips move, at the same time that it is also abstract and ephemeral, time-based and symbolic and intangible? For music is bodily and not bodily. And it often makes noise precisely at the boundary between bodies and between bodies and other things: institutions, the walls of particular rooms, even up to the sky and the very heavens above.
- Music takes up space. But how, in taking up space, does music, this tangible yet also intangible form of expression, generate forms of protest?
- Music’s spatial dimensions speak to another key issue: cultural appropriation. For music is at once deeply embedded in particular social locations, bodies, peoples and yet it travels across boundaries. It permeates. When is music capable of being appropriated and bent toward new modes of protest—say, an old Baptist hymn turned into a radical IWW Wobbly criticism of the capitalist system, or then a labor song turned into a civil rights movement protest anthem, or the CBC taking American rock music and making it speak for them and their situation and needs—and when is appropriation more problematic, exploitative, and dangerous?
- Moreover, music is not just spatial, it is also temporal. Music happens in time. It can be timely, and it can take one out of time. Sometimes we even say music is timeless! But what do we mean when we say this, exactly? How does music’s temporal nature relate to its capacities to mount protest?
A few last questions that I think bring us to the heart of the matter:
- In what ways is music affirmational? How is it a way of agreeing, of controlling, of establishing rules and boundaries and limits, of creating kinship through agreements, whether tacit or overt? Or, to put affirmation in a positive framework of inclusivity, how do we recognize music as protest when it is a way of saying, as the jazz classicist Wynton Marsalis noted of swing music, “come on in.”
- At the same time, how has music also negated things? How has it expressed refusal, or asserted dissent and resistance? Or to quote a song by the radical folk singer Utah Phillips, how do we hear and understand music better when it does not say yes, but rather declares ”I will not obey!”
These are meant to be generative questions, intended to keep us thinking, to keep the song of music and protest going, not close the ongoing composition with some kind of triumphant crescendo of an answer. Music sustains, even in silence. So should our attention to its historical relationship to protest. Then we can better understand the ways in which, as another giant who left us recently, the civil rights activist and singer Bernice Johnson Reagon, put it, music has allowed people to “charge the air with our power.”