"El mayor problema para un intérprete con la cuestión de las canciones protesta es que generan cierta autocomplacencia. El público de los conciertos suele mostrarse deseoso de ponerse del lado del cantante y una canción protesta agudiza esa adulación: sabe cuándo reír, cuándo vitorear y cuándo abuchear".

De los mejores libros que he leído. Un material muy preciso, largo, pero muy bien explicado, con una meta ambiciosa pero que se cumple, a mi entender: repasar una forma de expresión cultural y política en un lapso de varias décadas. La gracia, en todo caso, no está necesariamente en el repaso, sino que en la forma en cómo va ubicando cada una de las canciones escogidas por el autor en un contexto sociocultural, lo que permite entender mejor la razón de fondo de cada tema.

Salvo un par de imprecisiones en el capítulo dedicado a Víctor Jara, pero no quita la valiosa investigación de Lynskey. No es solo un repaso de temas, sino un modo de ir revisando, a través de ellos, cómo se va desarrollando el mundo y cómo estos cantantes o grupos toman y van interpretando esos cambios en sus canciones, plasmando en ellas gritos de auxilio, llamados de atención o declaraciones de principios. Si algunas de estas canciones, sueltas, ya son capaces de remecer o impactar, puestas en un entorno se vuelven elementos clave para comprender el mundo de los años donde aparecieron y ese es el principal valor de este libro. Un fijo para los amantes de la música, la sociedad, la cultura y la política mirada desde otros puntos de vista. ( )

For anyone interested in music and its function in the political and social realm, here's a useful compendium on western protest songs in the 20th century. For the most part, the information is very readable, despite each chapter being packed to the gills with references to specific people, places, events, and music.

Lynskey has taken an almost unmanageable amount of music history and pared it down to the most important protest music from each definable chunk of the last hundred years. Although the book is divided into chapters by song title, it could just as well have been organized by historical event; each chapter's title song is discussed within the context of the movement or event that was its impetus, the surrounding political and social climate, and other songs that spring from the same source. I appreciate that the author also offers a couple appendices at the end with additional lists and information, recognizing that his previous 500 pages are in no way exhaustive.

Towards the end, the book feels like it loses the wide-angle perspective it has taken for most chapters and begins to descend into a few rounds of opportunistic Bush-bashing (as opposed to simply writing about anti-Bush and anti-war music); then again, any kind of recent history - music or otherwise - is difficult to write objectively.

This is a great book for musicians to have around the house for reference or to pick up and read a chapter at a time between other reads. ( )

This may be the first time I've ever had a love/hate relationship with a non-fiction book.

It's safe to say that for nearly the first half of this 600+ page exploration of protest through song, I was enraptured. As a historian and a music-lover, I was in awe of the way Lynskey folded global historical events in with the chapter title songs. The first chapter, on Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" as well as the chapter on James Brown's "Say It Loud-I'm Black and Proud" are excellent examples of where the combination is done so almost flawlessly. By the time I had reached Part III of the book - a trio of chapters written about lesser-known songs and history (from an American point-of-view) from Chile, Nigeria, and Jamaica I had already begun thinking about a way to create a history class based around this idea. It seemed that introducing history via music and the protest song was a perfect way of illustrating historical ideas and ideals.

Something happened to the narrative of the book once it hit the mid 1970s, and it wasn't an improvement. Suddenly the chapters seemed disjointed and started feeling more like short essays on ideas and songs stitched together to create the larger chapters. The historical narrative, in itself simply a 100-level glossing of political events, was overtaking the musical narrative. The chapter on U2's "Pride (In the Name of Love)" has little to do with the title song, and instead describes U2's entire catalog and how it relates to the history of the years in which they were written. Chapter 20 on Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" is a neutered history of political hip-hop in the early 1980s and spends most of it's time forgetting to talk about "The Message".

By the time the book reaches the end of the 80s, into the 1990s and beyond, Lynskey becomes more interested in showing parallels and differences of then-vs-now protest songs than talking about the songs in question. (Excepting Chapter 27 on Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" which is a late book stand out.) Chapter 28 on Huggy Bear's "Her Jazz" says only about the song that it began as a 'zine article before becoming overshadowed by the history of Bikini Kill (much like in real life). In perhaps the most bizarre chapter, the story of Rage Against the Machine's "Sleep Now in the Fire" says absolutely nothing about the title song other than the fact it existed. It then interweaves the history or Radiohead as if there was some sort of connection between the two. Unsurprisingly, Lynskey dramatically fails at the attempt.

Chapter 32 (Steve Earle's "John Walker's Blues") spends more time talking about the Dixie Chicks than its supposed subject, and perhaps most disappointingly, the final chapter on Green Day's "American Idiot" spends three and a half pages discussing Green Day before peetering out in a weak history of the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina.

In the epilogue, Lynskey talks about the feeling he has had writing the book, that the era of the protest song may be over, buried under armchair internet activism and the flux music industry. This, perhaps, is his excuse the for floundering second half of his book, but it's not one I am ready to accept. For an author to so expertly move between and along with the racial history of the 60s and the war protests of Billy Bragg and Woody Guthrie, Lynskey has no excuse for being unable to transition into the new history or music and protest in the 2000s. Excepting, of course, for either laziness or his not-so-hidden anachronistic views of how protest songs should be. ( )

Dorian Lynskey, jornalista do Guardian, tenta traçar a história das canções de protesto no século XX, - ou pelo menos do cruzamento entre a música pop e a política. Focado na música do Ocidente (com algumas excepções que, contudo, tiveram repercussão no Ocidente), é muito mais do que um livro de música - sob o pretexto de apresentar 33 canções representativas (de Billie Holiday aos Green Day), Lynskey acaba por traçar um retrato das grandes alterações políticas e sociais do século passado e de como as mesmas afectaram a música popular. ( )

This book is subtitled "A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day" and Lynskey pretty much achieves that goal in a bit more than 500 pages. Perhaps not totally comprehensive--there's nothing in here about protest songs in, for example, Europe--but amazingly comprehensive when it comes to songwriters, singers and bands who've had some wider or lasting impact on music, society and the English speaking world. He covers Jamaican music, and while I wish he had said more about some Jamaican artists, that is a very informative and comprehensive chapter--it sent me to my collection of reggae recordings to listen again to Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff and, of course, Bob Marley. Lynskey is an astute judge of the songs, or at least of the songs I know well, and enthusiastic enough that he not only led me to listen to music I already knew again, but to seek out songs and artists I had not given much of a listen in the past. In the end, what better evaluation of a book about popular music is there? ( )