Sonic Politics

Music and Social Movements in the Americas

Olaf Kaltmeier, Wilfried Raussert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429753480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Cultural Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume analyses the narration of the social through music and the seismographic function of music to detect social problems and envision alternatives.

Beyond state-driven attempts to link musical production to the official narrative of the nation, mass musical movements emerged during the 20th century that provided countercultural and alternative narratives of the prevailing social context. The Americas contain numerous examples of the strong connection between music and politics; Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" envisioned a socialist transformation of the U.S., the Chilean Nueva Canción created a narrative and affective frame for the recognition of popular culture as a central element of the cultural politics of the Chilean way to socialism, and Reggae emerged as a response to British colonialism, drawing inspiration and guidance from the pan-Africanist visions of Marcus Garvey.

Providing a significant contribution to the study of music and politics/social movements from an inter-American perspective, this book will appeal to students and scholars of U.S. and Latin American Cultural Studies, Transnational Studies, History and Political Studies, Area Studies, and Music Studies.

For additional information, please see the authors' Sonic Politics webpage: https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/cias/sonicpolitics/index.html

1 Singing resistance, rebellion, and revolution into being

Collective political action and song

Helen Cordes and Eric Selbin

This chapter is inspired and guided by the Australian Aboriginal people’s notion that they “sing their world into existence” (Smith 499, citing Chatwin 1987), by Mattern’s compelling formulation of music and musicians enabling people “acting in concert” (1998), and by the everyday practices of “ordinary” people for whom song serves as many purposes as we can imagine – articulation, organization, healing, aspiration, inspiration, emotional, spiritual – and more we may not yet. For as long as we have known, song has been a crucial form people use to (re)make their world(s), but during and after the U.S. civil rights movement and the attendant movements it motivated throughout the hemisphere, music received broader critical attention as a means and method of community and action. Bomba, calypso, corridos, disco, folk, funk, punk, reggae, rock, salsa, and soul provided powerful and pervasive links within communities and help(ed) them articulate their vision(s), their struggle(s), and their story/ies to the wider world. Dissolving boundaries and borders (real and imagined), crossing zones of awkward engagement, and thus enabling the creation of spaces and places for action, songs as stories, symbols, and shared experiences allow people to collectively, powerfully, purposively, and persistently sing their hopes, dreams, and desires into being.

For as long as we have known, people have created stories and sung songs. Indeed, people came into a world of song, sung by animals, plants, wind, rocks, and fire (Barras n. pag.). People quickly began to associate these songs with stories they heard told by the wind, the birds, the wheat, and more (Miyagawa et al. n. pag.). Thus, story and song have been with us as long as we have been us, inseparable from our trajectory. Song may have even come first, enabling the language we rely on to make and manufacture meaning (cf. Hamilton). Jespersen argues that people “sang out their feelings long before they were able to speak their thoughts” (435), a perspective which resonates with many.¹ Songs have literally and figuratively been our guides and companions, enabling and ennobling us as we build, maintain, and extend community, producing and forming a kind of collectivity and connection(s) that can be found in every society and culture that we know. Songs, like stories, tell us much about who we were and where we came from, who and where we are now, and who we hope to become and where we want to go. As a result, songs and singing are a powerful lens into and about society, offering us rich material; they connect us and tell us a story.

Australia’s First Peoples believe that people “sing their world into existence” (Smith 499, citing Chatwin; Bree). Similarly, some 9,500 miles (15,000 kilometers) away in the United States of America (U.S.A.), the Pawnee people’s creation stories explain that the world was produced through the song of the stars (Walker 131). Songs certainly seem both basic building blocks of society and culture as well as a tool, even a weapon; this is not lost on states or those who challenge them (cf., e.g., the Baltic States 1987–91 “Singing Revolution” and the torture of singing activists such as the Chilean Víctor Jara, whose vocal chords were cut and fingers broken before his murder by the military regime in Chile in 1973). If this seems a thing of the past, consider the fate of the Syrian protest singer Ibraheim Qualosh, who performed a song at an anti-government demonstration with a chorus calling on Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, to leave; “a few days later, Ibraheim’s body was pulled out of the Orontes River. His vocal chords had been cut out” (Adamson, “Singing” 22). Meanwhile, Islamist militants in Syria spent three years working to silence a street pianist who performed for children (“Ayham Ahmed” 21). Sung, hummed, or played, songs provide sustenance, meaning, and context. As a result, they help to develop, inculcate, maintain, and valorize history and memory, both popular and personal, and hence politics.

Our interest here is in a particular aspect of these societies and cultures: how people in the Americas “acting in concert” (in Mattern’s 1998 felicitous formulation) use song to make known their concerns, cares, grievances, and vision(s) of the world they live in and the dreams and desires of the world they wish for. In particular, we are drawn to the everyday practices of “ordinary” people for whom song serves as many purposes as we can imagine – articulation, organization, healing, aspiration, inspiration, emotion, and spirituality. Songs have been, still are, and can be a primary form of both resistance and action for social change and justice.

The very act of singing empowers people physically and mentally. Numerous studies document that singing increases levels of “feel-good” brain chemicals such as endorphins, oxytocin, and dopamine, while the increased oxygen intake raises energy (cf. Boso et al.; Chanda and Levitin; Dunbar et al.; Freeman; Fukui and Toyoshima; Gangrade; Grape et al.). An equally striking piece of literature attests that singing improves conditions such as depression, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and many more (cf. Fattorini et al.; Kenny and Faunce; Kumar et al.). Singing with others, expressing similar emotions and goals, turbocharges the effects, while the heart rate and breathing patterns of singers in groups typically synchronize (Vickhoff et al.), increasing a molecular sense of community. The group articulation of the same words and sentiment deepens each individual’s courage and resolve, as well. The physical and emotional boost to the individual contributes to the collective strength of the singing group.

In addition, songs can be a stealth tactic for organizers. Catchy songs (typically, protest songs use existing popular songs and change the lyrics so it is easy to join in) can “get stuck” in a listener’s head, subconsciously reinforcing the social change message (Schimmel; she is a social change songwriter/singer and daughter of folk activist Malvina Reynolds). The ability of sung messages, to effectively inculcate information, is well-documented (cf. Aroraa; Benedict et al.; Gfeller) for its use in helping children and illiterate adults to read and spreading messages to often illiterate people, such as educating women about human trafficking in Nepal (Playing for Change Foundation) and teaching about birth control use in Belize (Leach).

In an effort to address some matters worth far more attention than we can devote here, a few caveats are in order. First, “American” here refers to everyone in the western hemisphere, “the Americas”; when referring to the United States of America, we use U.S.A. Second, the myriad forms of music could fill a book (or several); we will limit ourselves primarily to three – the various musics in the U.S.A. that flourished during the late 1960s/early 1970s, Latin America’s New Song Movement (NSM), and the Caribbean’s musical mélange – that allow us to capture many of the relevant issues and matters. Third, defining the time frame is daunting – the 1960s? The U.S. civil rights movement necessarily means pushing this back into the 1950s and, as suggested above, to the earliest days of slavery in the U.S.A., songs and singing traditions themselves connected to the traditions of the enslaved peoples’ African societies and cultures. We briefly note some of the many current uses of singing and songs to further social change.

We also want to give particular attention to the often overlooked role of women in singing change. Despite the (sadly) predictable academic predilection for male actors, women sing – a lot. That women were the backbone (and more) of the U.S. civil rights movement, is now a verity; yet, throughout the Americas, women have been critical yet largely neglected actors. Women’s role in the creation and maintenance of community, vision and leadership, and passion and commitment, has been as legendary as it has been consistently and pervasively diminished. Prior to Europe’s invasion, there was an:

Andean tradition, specifically female, which conceives of history as a woven cloth; it consists in recognizing the warp and weft, the texture, the forms of relationships, in knowing the back from the front, the value and significance of the detailed pattern, and so on. In other words, we are trying to read in the book of life that has never been recorded in written form.

(Andean Oral History Workshop/Rivera Cusicanqui 180)²

In Georgia, the perpetuation of the national epic is entrusted only to women (Jones 156).³ At least since the creation of depictions of the Bastille being stormed under the leadership of a bare-breasted Liberty, modern conceptions of struggle are often female, and the Americas embraced a similar symbolism of (attractive) women leading men in the struggle.⁴ In a related context, Tatar credibly argues that fairy tales represent a long line of folk (and particularly feminine) stories told forever by generations of women that happened to land in the opportunistic lap of male compilers to be tweaked and retold.

Even women celebrated for their power or place in the struggle, as in the famous Mexican revolutionary corrido “La Adelita” about a brave soldadera, the lyrics remain depressingly stereotypical (cf., e.g., Arrizón; Herrera-Sobek). Women are almost completely absent from calypso and reggae except as adornment and secondary (even tertiary) players. The landmark protests at Selma, the heart of the U.S. civil rights movement, is commonly rendered as all-male, but it would likely not have happened without the daily sustenance of women.⁵ Having been universally oppressed for millennia – as much within struggles of resistance, rebellion, and revolution as within daily life – art, storytelling, and singing by women have had a special urgency as they have expressed centuries of anger, frustration, commitment, and passion.

For women, singing can open the floodgates for honoring the pain and feats of ancestors and strengthening their sense of self-worth (cf. McAfee). Protests over the past 25 years about the hundreds of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada and the U.S.A. (the latest chapter in a history of oppression to indigenous people, particularly females) often include singing the Women’s Warrior song from the Lil’wat Nation (Women Warrior). When women, girls, and supporters in 200 countries sing “Break the Chain” to call for an end to violence against females as part of the annual February 14 V-Day and other actions (One Billion Rising), the group singing helps break the chain of long-enforced cultural norms of gender violence still prevalent globally.

“People Get Ready” (Mayfield 1965)

Since the beginning of time, song has been a crucial form people use to (re)make their world(s); think of how many societies, movements, and even states have songs associated with them. But, beginning in the 19th century, and especially the 20th century, songs and singing have become more consciously and intentionally a part of efforts for social change. One of the most obvious undertakings was around labor movements, most notably the International Workers of World (I.W.W., the Wobblies), who were active throughout the Americas,⁶ and their famous Little Red Songbook. First published in 1909 (and now in its 38th edition), this compilation of songs – whose lyrics were often set to religious hymns, popular songs of the day, or familiar folk standards – was intended as a way for workers to build solidarity, keep up morale, make grievances clear, and provide a vision of a better world to come. With a somewhat peripatetic socioeconomic political philosophy and lively debates over strategies and tactics, one of the things that bound its far-flung and disparate membership was the songs and singing. As the early 20th century witnessed the rise of various sociopolitical movements, songs and singing played important symbolic roles in revolutions in Mexico (“La Adelita” and “La Cucaracha”), Russia (France’s “La Marseillaise” and “The Internationale”), and a number of the post-World War I revolutionary uprisings (perhaps most notably Germany). These are precursors to later ubiquitous songs such as “Blowing in the Wind” and “We Shall Overcome.”

The U.S. civil rights movement (usually dated 1954–68)⁷ is most closely and commonly associated with the connection between music and social movements, protest, and various forms of struggle for global sociopolitical change. Singing and the civil rights movement were inseparable. The connections to the U.S.A.’s (and that of much of the western hemisphere) slave era, the U.S.A.’s post-Civil War p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Sonic politics: music and the narration of the social in the Americas from the 1960s to the present
• 1. Singing resistance, rebellion, and revolution into being: collective political action and song
• 2. African American music in the Americas: slavery, sounds, and forms of “knowledge”
• 3. “Only a Pawn in their game?” Civil rights sounding signatures in the summer of 1963
• 4. Inter-public-agenda-setting effect through political activism: the role of hip-hop music in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election1
• 5. “Calling out around the world”: how soul music transnationalized the African American freedom struggle in the black power era (1965–1975)
• 6. “Si Una Vez”: chicana sensibilities and Xicanista soundscapes
• 7. Hip-hop in Ciudad Juarez: a form of political participation
• 8. The Fandango Sin Fronteras movement and sonic migrations: Performing community across borders
• 9. The search for a new collective epic in Nicaraguan post-revolutionary music
• 10. Rockin’ for Pachamama: political struggle and the narration of history in Ecuadorian rock music
• 11. Punk is dead. Or is it? Strategies of subcultural positioning in the (re-)making of the punk movement
• 12. Political pie-throwing: Dead Kennedys and the Yippie-Punk continuum1
• Index