Asklemmy

43833 readers

846 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Protest Songs: why do I feel like there were many more (and many more that were popular) in the 60’s and 70’s? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by phase_change@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I’m a guy approaching 60, so I’ll start by saying my perception may be wrong. That could be because the protest songs from the late 60’s and early 70’s weren’t the songs I heard live on the radio but because they were the successful ones that got replayed. More likely, it’s because music is much more fractured than what I was exposed to on the radio growing up. Thus, today, I’m simply not exposed to the same type of protest songs that still exist.

Whatever the reason, I feel that the zeitgeist of protest music is very different from the first decade of my life compared to the last.

I’m curious to know why. My conspiratorial thoughts say that it’s down to the money behind music promotion being very different over those intervening decades, but I suspect it’s much more nuanced.

So, why are there fewer protest songs? Alternatively, why I am not aware of recent ones?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm guessing but maybe music was less industrialised 50 years ago.

My understanding is that a lot of money goes into producing the music we hear on popular media.

Protest songs can't be commercialised.

[–] PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately, protest songs could absolutely be commercialised.

While not exactly protest songs, the grunge movement of the 90s was a reaction to what was seen as shallow, packaged pop music of the late 80s.

Once their snouts smelled profit, the usual middlemen rushed in to wrap that discontent in plastic and sell it to kids at Walmart, chewing up musicians along the way.

I think it's simply that protest songs are more difficult to wring profit from compared to creating pop music using the formula that sold the most last time.