Leuk, ook De Volkskrant merkt op dat de protestsong niet dood is, maar leeft. In april dit jaar heb ik via Facebook een oproep gedaan voor favoriete protestliedjes. Daardoor is onder de naam #RockDisMay een mooie lijst ontstaan van 64 nummers. Ik was begonnen om die via de Facebook-pagina ‘Research or Die’ uit te zenden (zie de aankondiging hieronder), maar kreeg het druk of wilde liever aan het water chillen. Hoe dan ook en jammer genoeg, na de eerste 16 nummers werd het stil in ons protestliedjesland. En dat terwijl zoveel mensen hebben meegewerkt aan de samenstelling van de lijst. Ik ben dus afgelopen zaterdag aan het werk gegaan om de resterende 48 liedjes vooruit te programmeren, zodat vanaf die dag elke dag weer een nummer uit de lijst te horen is. Vandaag is als 19de op de lijst Henry Rollins met Disconnect voorbijgekomen. Als je de ‘Research or die’ pagina op Facebook een thumbs up geeft, blijf je automatisch op de hoogte, anders moet je zo af en toe maar eens langskomen.
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Don’t mix up politics with humanity. If you do, you might feel sad and pessimistic about the evolution of our kind. Rather, tap into the wealth of all human creativity, and you’ll see, hear and experience that we humans create a cacophony of viewpoints and philosophies, many of them challenging the powers that be and presenting alternative ways of looking.
We wanted to create a stage for these outbursts of challenging human power and chose the protest song as a medium. We did a small poll to create a list of 31 songs, which we wanted to present one on every day of May with the hash tag ‘RockDisMay’, an obvious wink wink nudge nudge to music, month and protest. However, we received a lot of entrees and we didn’t want to disregard our own favorites, so we decided to ignore our initial idea. Instead, we compiled a list of all 64 proposed artists. After all, wouldn’t it be dictatorial if form were to become so rigid it excluded songs about exclusion, oppressed songs about oppression, silenced the voices that were raised?
For that same reason, we chose not to use a definition of ‘protest’. If someone thought a song was protest, then that was good enough for us. We also disregarded whether or not an artist was honest about the protest or just commercializing the critical mind, neither did we care about whether the public adopted a song for protest even if it wasn’t intended as such. This lead to a very interesting list of issues, from ridiculing modern materialistic life to proclaiming love, from protesting against war to protesting for peace. We embrace that richness, but are aware that our public disagrees with our generosity. That’s fine, because it opens the floor for debate, as protest does so often.
Two final remarks about the list that follows. We chose not to order it in any other way than by alphabet, because we didn’t want to suggest an order from best to worst protest song. As competition also creates losers, this would contradict our idea of an open stage and a public that judges along its own differentiated taste. And we also abandoned the idea of ‘one every day’, since that might be too exhausting and we wouldn’t want you to give up before the end of the list.
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Below are the 19 numbers so far:
Anouk - Modern World
Armand - Ben ik te min
Artists United Against Apartheid - Sun City
Barry McGuire - Eve of Destruction
Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit
Billy Joel - Goodnight Saigon
Bob Dylan - Hurricane
Bob Geldof - Great Song Of Indifference
Bob Marley - Redemption Song
Body Count - Cop Killer
Boris Vian - Le déserteur
Boudewijn de Groot - Welterusten meneer de president
Buffalo Springfield - For What It’s Worth
Coldplay - Violet Hill
Donovan - Universal Soldier
Eddy Grant - Gimme Hope, Jo’anna
Edwin Starr - War
Family Stand - Education of Jamie
Henry Rollins - Disconnect
