Microphones and Guitars are Political Communications Technologies. Let's use them!
Alex Kraieski
"Understanding the mechanisms which organize people prevents fatalism."
That quote is from Julia Torokhova's 2024 paper, "Information, Creativity, and Autocratic Stability." I think it's great, and this being a music website, I am naturally going to think about the extent to which music acts as a mechanism to organize people. Surely, it has some value, I figure, but we will get deeper into what Torokhova and others in the scholarly world have said about it.
America has fallen into a particularly dark strain of authoritarianism. Trump and ICE are out of control, and the judiciary is failing to meaningfully constrain executive power before it does permanent damage (something which is a very real concept in social sciences).
I've always been the most strongly attracted to music that tries to say something consequential about life or the world. And the funny part is that a lot of times, I didn't even realize how consequential. When you're 10, "Holiday" by Green Day sounds like it could conceivably be a song about going on a vacation that just happens to have a random edgy section with a bunch of swears to sell records to teenagers. And growing up in a suburban town where we didn't have to systematically fear the police, "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine was similar. I knew it was angry. I didn't quite know at whom or what it was directed or why. Eventually, a friend on my soccer team who was really into Rage gave me the rundown on what songs like that and "Township Rebellion" were all about. It would still be years until I swung around more ideologically, too.
In both cases, the song conveys the anger of its writers even before the listener digests the political meaning of the song more fully. And this delayed digestion is actually important to letting repetition happen. If Billie Joe Armstrong called Bush a Nazi directly in Holiday, then so many people would not have heard it as many times as they did because they wouldn't have been open to the message stated so bluntly. And it would have been a worse song too!
Music has some natural qualities to it that help it resist censorship. As I've hinted at, the poetic, indirect nature of most lyrics can help evade some censorship. Also, even if a government censors certain music online and on the radio, we can still perform it in-person.
To some, the notion of individual, non-famous musicians having any impact on authoritarian systems is going to seem laughable, especially given how heavily our history educations tend to focus on the actions of the elites over the lives of the common people. But the world is built up from the micro-actions of billions of people as well. If you believe in democracy, I think you have to believe that micro-influence matters.
At the same time, we have to be honest about the potential impact, risks, and limitations. Pussy Riot showed that musical protest can come with a cost of severe repression. That's why I think it's important to have an idea of what musicians' (and listeners') lives have been like under other authoritarian systems.
What does the academic literature have to say?
Lyndon C.S. Way (2016, then at Izmir University of Economics in Turkey) looked at music videos in Turkey's June 2013 protests to examine how subversive politics can be articulated by music, finding both potential and limitations. One such limitation was that music in the examined sample largely didn't actually engage with the political ideas of the protesters lyrically. But this also demonstrates a feature of music, approaches to instrumentation can be useful as protest imagery. I think this article could be worth a read if you are interested in using musicality of your instrumentation more to evoke protest. Way also is co-editor of a very-interesting looking book available on Amazon (link earns commission), Music as Multimodal Discourse: Semiotics, Power and Protest.
Torokhova (2024), whose work I mentioned in the intro (appears to be a masters thesis perhaps?), wrote about dissent in both the Soviet Union and modern Russia. The paper's analysis ties music to the collective action problems that are involved with resisting an authoritarian regime.
Non-violent movements which incentivize short-term mass participation are the most effective to cause changes. Music and other cultural products are the best way to mobilize many people, because they disseminate information, which damage regimes' monopolies
This isn't just hopium; rock music was an avenue for dissent that the Soviets struggled to control. And with Glastnost, they gave up. Protest was expensive to the Soviet system near the end.
Within Torokhova's analytical framework, Pussy Riot makes much more sense to me too:
Dissent must also work within the regime’s rules. Not only will illegal dissent immediately be overtly repressed, it can’t grow. Legal dissent, on the other hand, can have multi-class contagion effects, greatly increasing its efficacy.
Going outside the regime's rules (I think they knew their 2012 performance would be treated by the state as a crime against the church and Putin) earned Pussy Riot international notoriety, but within Russia, the illegality of their dissent denied them the opportunity to grow into a far bigger domestic movement. Indeed, the paper notes that they were quickly discredited domestically, and they didn't play within the system and highlight contradictions.
Leu (2006) examined Brazilian pop music and also found that music could express political dissent. Additionally, thought it was interesting how it was contextualized:
These forms of resistance should not be evaluated in terms of overall success or failure with regard to stated, or unstated aims. Much more interesting and revealing are the meanings of these struggles for listeners, and the continuous, complex processes of negotiation of political and social conditions
The battle to move the Overton Window (the range of political arguments with public acceptance) isn't sexy, but that is the fight we live in. And it's all the more important since Trump's superpower seems to be that he can move the Overton window at will to include whatever stupid shit he wants.
Leu also noted racial conditions in Brazil that parallel the US (like a majority black prison population), so Brazil might be a good model to examine how certain aspects of American society might behave in a progressively more authoritarian environment.
Finally, Google scholar also surfaced The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music (available on Amazon- link earns commission) which looks like an interesting survey of history in this area.
In general, this doesn't seem to be as well-studied in political science as I would hope, but various papers strongly support the notion that music can help organize against authoritarianism. And I think there's ample to learn from various case studies that I didn't touch on here. We can learn from artists all around the world that have struggled against authoritarian regimes.
Some lyrics of my own
When Trump had the East Wing torn down I was deeply angered and saddened.
I'm releasing these lyrics under cc0 license (public domain). If this resonates with anyone, feel free to use it however you want. While credit is always appreciated, I am using cc0 specifically because I care about giving others flexibility over taking credit with something like this. I took a stab at recording this on vocals and uke and it was missing something musically, so I will throw these lyrics out there in case they are useful to anyone:
Res Publica, the public things
a government for you and me, they say
By us? who knows,
but the law says we all get a vote
The East Wing is gone!
The East Wing is gone!
The East Wing is gone!
Demolished! By Whom?
The East Wing is gone!
Old Teddy busted the trusts
Franklin took the fight to Fascism
You can destroy a building
But not our memories of freedom and strength
The East Wing is gone!
The East Wing is gone!
The East Wing is gone!
Demolished! By Whom?
The East Wing is gone!
Looking back at this, there are 2 techniques I used that stick out to me
compression of historical/intellectual concepts in the verses
repetition of the emotion in the chorus (however you choose to deliver it, I think there are multiple ways you can go with it). RATM uses a lot of repetition to help make their points
If you like these lyrics, go ahead and run with them for something because I think it spreads information that's inconvenient to the regime.
Write, Share, Rage
Not all music has to be political, but if you're a musician who already has gear, I encourage you to think about its potential in terms of political/protest expression. And if you're a non-musician who is fired up by this, I encourage you to take some first steps to learn more about music and outfit yourself with some tools to help express your creativity.
The scholarly literature, while still somewhat sparse seems to suggest that music indeed has tremendous power in helping people overcome authoritarianism. Not only is music a good medium for political expression, it's exactly the kind of medium that can help motivate greater resistance.
However, uncomfortably, American musicians may have to adjust as Trump continues to change the rules. I do think we are fortunate to have the internet to spread our music. And shutting it down entirely, even if "necessary" to silence the people, would be unpalatable to corporations. I also see the idea of flak as an information filter, as expressed by Chomsky and Herman in Manfacturing Consent (link earns commission), as highly relevant here. Let's go back to my "East Wing" lyrics from earlier for a second. Let's imagine, instead of writing a song, I wrote up a script that goes into more detail about the actual history, court cases, people, etc. being referenced in those lyrics and then recorded it as a Youtube short. What do you think would happen? I think it is quite likely that the algorithm, in seeking maximum engagement, would send the video to a bunch of people who would react with comments like "Hey mentally ill liberal California moron, you don't know how buildings work or the constitution and Trump can do whatever he wants MAGA MAHA." That's flak, and it is as relevant as ever because platforms like Youtube, X, and Facebook are incredibly efficient flak routing machines. Music obviously isn't immune to flak, but it seems like it does have some degree of ability to help information get through the flak filter. People don't spend time listening to music they hate to prepare detailed responses to it, they just move on.
The purpose of making protest music is not to remove Trump from power, so don't let naysayers make that the bar you need to try jumping over. Indeed, multiple of the sources I analyzed here cautioned against that kind of thinking. Instead, the goal is to deny the Trump administration a monopoly over narrative and information.
Preventing a monopoly by default is exactly the goal I'm working towards with an environmentalist black metal project I am working on. Countless rivers in New England were destroyed by mill pollution, and yet the law gave them a free pass in ways that mines and other legacy polluting industries didn't get the benefit of when they fucked up rivers. I quite literally can't change anything, but I am passionate about getting this story out as I see it. And the medium of a black metal album gives me sonic tools to help enhance my storytelling. What stories of injustice do you think need to be heard?
Works Cited
Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass media. Pantheon Books.
Leu, L. (2006). Music and national culture: Pop music and resistance in Brazil. Portuguese Cultural Studies, (1).
Torokhova, J. (2024). Information, Creativity, and Autocratic Stability.
Way, L. C. (2016). Protest music, populism, politics and authenticity: The limits and potential of popular music’s articulation of subversive politics. Journal of Language and Politics, 15(4), 422-446.
