Sound and the fury

Think music has lost its passion for protest? Bernard Zuel looks at the artists who are still determined to make a difference.

Where are the modern protest songs? Where are the musical activists rousing a generation to take action? Doesn't anyone care any more?

You've heard this lament. You may have indulged in it yourself, especially if you're in your 40s, 50s or 60s and have in your head a golden period of protest music. Those would be the years that began with Dylan and Baez and civil rights, flowed through to moratorium marches and Springbok tour blockades and had their last blast in the anti-nukes, anti-Thatcher/Reagan, pro-land rights heyday of the 1980s.

Now, you say, it's all empty flash and sponsors' cash by Gen X and Y singers more concerned about counting Facebook friends than counting votes. In my day …

The problem with this obvious truth is you'd be wrong. Very wrong. Protest songs exist, they thrive, and they're not just being sung by a long-hair with an acoustic guitar in front of a sit-in. You'll get them in hip-hop and folk, dance music and reggae and, if you venture out of your house to any music festival, you'll see it flowering. Have a look at the crowds that funk-and-soul band Blue King Brown attract to concerts, chanting support for freedom for West Papua or education of young girls in Sierra Leone, or backing the ideals of the Occupy movement.

Listen to the songs written by John Butler or Xavier Rudd addressing gas plants in the Kimberley and strip mining, or the words of Kutcha Edwards and Yung Warriors about indigenous rights and redress. Peer into the underclass and the forgotten in the songs of Sydney rapper Urthboy and hear the song that summed up one part of the '80s protests, Solid Rock, being applied to the opposition to coal seam gas mining.

''I think a lot of people of the older generation, when they think of protest songs, they think Vietnam and it ended there. But it didn't,'' says Natalie Pa'apa'a, one of the charismatic duo, with Carlo Santone, at the heart of BKB.


''People are still singing out for peace and against war but also for other issues that are facing them locally and globally.

''That's what we do - we try and use music as a way to inspire people to remember that they are part of a global community.'' Sure, you may not be hearing these songs on the radio or reading about them in your daily newspaper but maybe that says more about the media than the message, Santone says.

''The Occupy movement was purposefully not given air time for a long time until it was too big to ignore,'' he says. ''When you get past the safe issues of peace, love and anti-war - which are very important - there are people targeting touchy issues, for example West Papua.''

Or refugees and asylum seekers, a topic that featured in one of the biggest hits of recent years, My People, an electronic dance song by Sydney duo the Presets, which asked that you think while you move and sing along to ''I'm here with all of my people/locked up with all of my people/so let me hear you scream if you're with me''.

''We felt it was important to write a song that would hopefully show our overseas fans that not all Australians necessarily shared the same views as the people running our country,'' Presets vocalist Julian Hamilton says. ''We have our own issues to kick and scream about, but we do it in our own way.''

And that way may mean obscuring the fact protests are happening alongside the beats. ''We write songs about our disaffection for the government; songs about gay rights; songs about the media's demonisation of youth - but I don't think anyone thinks of the Presets as a protest band,'' Hamilton says. ''We're a 'party band'.''

If you're still sceptical about youth culture's connection to issues, just ask one of those who was at the forefront of the 1980s wave of protest. Shane Howard, who wrote Solid Rock for his band Goanna 30 years ago, is lauded by Pa'apa'a and Santone for his continued involvement in local and international issues and he is equally effusive in his admiration.

''It may be hard to hear these voices in a world of vested interests but they are still out there,'' Howard says. ''Blue King Brown and Airi Ingram are fighting to shine a light on the West Papuans' struggle for recognition and independence; my own song, Kimberley Rain, and John Butler's song Kimberley give voice to the struggle against the gas plant north of Broome; Bliss N Eso's song Addicted, the work of Hilltop Hoods and others remind us that the resistance goes on.''

Some of the shared passion can be heard in almost identical expressions of optimism about the nature of protest songs in the face of ignorance or indifference. Pa'apa'a says art is one of the most effective ways to convey a message because ''a song has a different power about it than a petition''.

To which Howard adds that the alternative stories of this country are always being written because ''a song is still the most potent and transmissible form of human emotion and memory''.