Scourge of all masters of war

The Guardian, 25 October, 2003

A new wave of political protest has unleashed a new wave of protest music. On Bomb the World, rap artist turned lyrical funkster Michael Franti sings: “We can chase down all our enemies/bring them to their knees/we can bomb the world to pieces/but we can’t bomb the world to peace.” Country rebel Steve Earle offered the uncompromising John Walker’s Blues, in which the California-born Taliban, “just an American boy raised on MTV”, recounts his tale: “Now they’re dragging me back with my head in a sack to the land of the infidel.”

Apart from its dissident brio, the new protest music is characterised by stylistic diversity, invading hip-hop, folk, country and techno. The Peace Not War compilation CD boasts tracks from artists ranging from Alabama 3 to Ani DiFranco, Fundamental and Chuck D.

In the US, anti-war songs are largely barred from the commercial airwaves. Undaunted, musicians have posted hundreds of dissident songs on the web. Some, like Franti, have turned to independent production and distribution.

It’s not the first time a political upsurge has sparked a challenge to the music industry. And it’s not surprising that with the new activism has come a revived interest in the protest music of the past. No decade is more closely linked with that genre than the 1960s, and no single artist more than the young Bob Dylan. But as Dylan’s frantic evolution through the 1960s demonstrates, the relationship between artists and movements is often a troubled one.

After the political somnolence of the McCarthy era, the ban the bomb and civil rights movements awakened a new generation of young activists. Dylan was touched by that ferment, which gave him his first subjects and his first audience.

The protest songs that made him famous, and with which he continues to be associated, were written in a brief period, from January 1962 to November 1963. In these songs, Dylan engaged with racism, jingoism, poverty, prison and the nuclear arms race. In Masters of War he jabbed an accusatory finger at the military-industrial complex. In With God on Our Side he deconstructed American nationalist fundamentalism. In North Country Blues he penned one of the earliest musical protests against globalisation.

On October 26 1963, Dylan premiered The Times They Are A-Changin, his generational anthem, to a packed Carnegie Hall in New York. The song is founded on a conviction that the movement for social change is unstoppable, that history will conform to morality. In its second verse, Dylan issues a brash challenge: “Come writers and critics/Who prophesise with your pen… And don’t speak too soon/For the wheel’s still in spin.”

Thanks to his sharp-edged radicalism and unique poetic gifts, Dylan refreshed the protest genre and helped it reach a new mass audience. As a result, the 22-year-old from Minnesota was crowned as the laureate of a social movement, hailed as “the voice of a generation”.

This, however, was not what Dylan wanted to be. The bard of protest was mutating into something else – something that made his early acolytes uncomfortable. For Dylan is not only the most renowned protest singer of his era but also its most notorious renegade. In mid-1964, he explained to critic Nat Hentoff: “Me, I don’t want to write for people any more – you know, be a spokesman… I’m not part of no movement… I just can’t make it with any organisation.”

He was in the midst of recording My Back Pages, an image-crammed critique of the movement he had celebrated in The Times They Are A-Changin. Here he sneers at “corpse evangelists” who use “ideas” as “maps”, who spout “lies that life is black and white”. He rebels against the left’s self-righteousness: “Equality, I spoke the word, as if a wedding vow/But I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

This refrain must be one of the most lyrical expressions of political apostasy ever written. Ex-radicals usually ascribe their evolution to the inevitable giving way of idealistic youth to responsible maturity. Dylan reversed the polarity. For him, the retreat from politics was (among other things) a retreat from stale categories and second-hand attitudes.

Dylan’s break with the movement unleashed his poetic and musical genius; it freed him to explore an inner landscape. His lyrics became more obscure; coherent narrative was jettisoned in favour of a procession of bizarre and cryptic happenings. Much to the chagrin of folk purists at the 1965 Newport festival, he abandoned the austerity of the acoustic troubadour and embraced the hedonistic extravagance of an electrified rock ‘n’ roll ensemble. At the time, this deliberate blurring of the accepted demarcations was daring and risky; today it’s intrinsic to popular music – including the new protest music.

Dylan’s songs of the mid-60s depict a private universe, but one forged in response to tumultuous public events. It’s remarkable that so many of his left critics failed to see the politics that infuse these works. Maggie’s Farm – booed at Newport – combines class and generational rage in a renunciation of wage labour. Here the power of the employers is propped up by ideology (”She talks to all the servants about man and God and law”) and the state (”the National Guard stands around his door”).

The allegedly apolitical Dylan wrote It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), an epic indictment of a social order built on hypocrisy and greed (”money doesn’t talk it swears”). Its lacerating depiction of an individual marooned in a society ruled by commodities seems more up-to-date now than when first written. As does the final verse of the mordant Highway 61 Revisited, in which the military-industrial complex has mutated into a military-industrial-entertainment complex.

Far from having jettisoned politics, Dylan was redefining its scope. In Visions of Johanna and Desolation Row, great social themes jostle with intimate grievances. When a disappointed punter at the Albert Hall called out for “protest songs”, a frustrated Dylan replied: “Oh, come on, these are all protest songs.”

“To live outside the law you must be honest,” Dylan wrote in 1966. This prophetic warning – to a generation, a movement, himself – leaps out of Absolutely Sweet Marie, a silly, swaggering song of sexual frustration. The next line is less well known, but telling: “And I know you always say that you agree.” For the left, Dylan is sometimes a bitter medicine, but also a salutary tonic.

Of course, today’s anti-war and global justice movements are no mere replays of the 60s – as Dylan would be the first to remind us. But if the new movements learn from history, not least from the magnificent contradictions of 60s Dylan, they will be able to stand on their forebears’ shoulders, see further and achieve more. In any case, they have already given Dylan’s music a new home and a new resonance. One reason his songs endure is that their targets are still with us. When George Bush visits the UK next month, protesters will aim to fulfil Dylan’s prophecy of 1964: “Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”