WHAT WE'RE READING: What Do We Want From A Protest Song?
Harold Phillips | Published on 3/23/2026
"The protest song is threatening a comeback, as it tends to do during episodes of national turmoil. The “return of the protest song” has been hailed—to take a quick sampling from this millennium—in 2004... in 2017... and in 2020... Even the topical songs of the sixties folk movement constituted a revival, a reinvention of the Popular Front-style political art of the thirties and forties, for the waning years of McCarthyism. At its best, protest music could channel and focus public feelings, and clarify the stakes of the moment—“Which Side Are You On?” asked a 1931 song by Florence Reece, written for the United Mine Workers on strike in Harlan County, Kentucky.
"What do we want from a protest song today?"
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