In the late 70s reading Black and Captain Mark (the former operating in the woods of Maine and the latter having Lake Ontario as his base against the soldiers of the British Empire) we began to suspect that nothing, much less freedom, comes without a fight.
The War of Independence (1775-1783), or rather the American Revolution, was the armed conflict in which the 13 British colonies in North America shook off British rule and founded the United States of America. It may be that in the above two Italian comics the Revolution is depicted with romance, but it wasn’t just that.
Even from those years, music and singing played a decisive role. And they clashed with authority. During the war, red-shirted soldiers of the once-Empire had created the song “Yankee Doodle” to taunt the settlers. Through it they derided Americans as uncouth and cowards (“Yankee” was a pejorative for rebel and “Doodle” for dumb). But the American revolutionaries appropriated it, changed the lyrics, turned it into a pride anthem and sang it as the British surrendered at Yorktown.
Americans may have gained their freedom, but not all were free on American soil. Abolitionism, in the 19th century, found an outlet in Spirituals (religious songs).
African-American slaves on Southern plantations created songs that contained hidden messages of escape to the free North. “Go Down, Moses” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” used biblical or coded instructions to escape via the Underground Railroad (a secret network of safe houses, routes, and abolitionists that helped African-American slaves escape slavery in free states and Canada). Louis Armstrong included the above two songs in 1958 on the album ‘Louis and the Good Book’.
American society, marching down the road to capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century, experienced both the realization of workers as a class and rapid industrialization to reach the Great Depression of 1929. The social protest of workers had as its interest the musical protest of labor unions through folk.
Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land Is Your Land” (1940) in response to the overly patriotic “God Bless America.” Lyrically he speaks of communal ownership and class equality. A year earlier, Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” is a jazz ballad-complaint about the lynching of blacks in the American South. Composition which is considered the beginning of the musical movement for civil rights.
After World War II, the tectonic changes it brought “create” the Civil Rights Movement (1950-1960). Folk, soul, blues and their creators are spearheading the fight against racial discrimination. Pete Seeger and Joan Baez performed “We Shall Overcome,” the historic protest anthem. The melody and lyrics are believed to be influenced by Reverend Charles Albert Tidley’s 1900 gospel hymn, “I’ll Overcome Some Day”. And the modern version was first popularized by tobacco workers, led by Lucille Simmons, during a cigar factory strike in South Carolina in 1945-1946. Martin Luther King was fascinated by the song and often hummed it, later publicly proclaiming the phrase as a rallying cry in his speeches.
Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” (1964), this iconic soul track, captured the hope and suffering of African Americans for equality. Nina Simone with ‘Mississippi Goddam’ gives her own angry response to activist Medgar Evers’ murder and Alabama church bombing.
Anti-war anthems
The Vietnam War did not unite American society. Youth opposition to conscription spawned the hippie movement (or did the hippies spawn youth opposition to the war?), a delicate balance, but it transformed rock. He made it a social term/movement – which doesn’t exist nowadays – but then everything had a different meaning.
Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1962), a song filled with rhetorical questions about war and freedom, defined an entire generation. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” (1969) complains that only the children of the poor were sent to war, while the sons of the rich (“fortunate sons”) were spared conscription. Jimi Hendrix sets conservative American society on fire with his live performance of the “Star-Spangled Banner” (Woodstock Festival, August 1969). In the distorted, electric rendition of the US national anthem, the guitar mimicked the sound of bombs as a protest against the violence of war. Rock at its best.
The music industry in the 60’s and 70’s found that music is much more than a “freak”. They saw in the youths a bright field of (financial) glory and did not let it go to waste. Musicians, singers and bands slowly began to lose their (artistic) autonomy and transform into dollar-making machines. This does not mean that masterpieces are not produced. But from cottage industry, from the 80s onwards we moved to industry.
The birth and growth of hip-hop as a fringe, yet urban (in the sense of homeless), music genre took the baton to denounce police brutality (1980-1990). The run-down ghettos of America’s big cities denounce poverty, drugs and police brutality. Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’ (1989) is a call to disobedience.
The time of punk
On the other side, white youth rejected commercial rock and created punk (Ramones). In the early 90s, youth isolation in the northwest (Seattle) gave birth to grunge (Nirvana), bringing raw rock back to the fore.
In the 2000s, the US invasion of Iraq sparked a wave of anti-war protests, which was expressed through the alternative rock scene. Green Day in “American Idiot” (2004) “attack” the government, the media and the paranoia of post-9/11 America.
Pop/Ballroom Culture, present in the LGBTQ+ rights of the trans community, has been massively supported by the pop industry. Lady Gaga with “Born This Way” (2011) was embraced by the queer community while Macklemore & Ryan Lewis with “Same Love” (2012) presented one of the first mainstream hip-hop tracks to openly support same-sex marriage. But let’s not laugh, music can’t change the world. She can relate to him, record him, beautify him, criticize him, but that’s it. The rest is up to the listeners.
