Right notes for the left

"If I had a hammer, there would be no more folk singers." (Billy Connolly).

33 REVOLUTIONS per Minute is a triumph. What could have been sprawling and unfocused is tight and compelling.

True, some people can't abide protest music. "Smug, preachy, self-righteous!" they scoff. "Bombastic, hypocritical and careerist!" they mock.

Not Dorian Lynskey, author of this superbly titled book. Lynskey loves his topic. His massive history of protest songs weighs in at two kilograms and rests in your hand like a house brick. The perfect size, in fact, to lob through a police car windscreen.

Trouble is, these days most people prefer to lobby, not lob. In the well-fed West, street fightin' men and women are thin on the ground. And even when they were fightin', did their protest songs achieve any lasting benefit for mankind?

Lynskey puts both cases. On the one hand, his book is 700 pages of one dud revolution-after-another, a sobering list of promising musical messiahs who turn out to be nothing more than naughty boys with killer haircuts. Near the end, Lynskey's sighing, fatalistic exasperation about the hopelessness of real change begins to engulf both author and reader. He blames post-boomer apathy, fear of risk, and distaste for what Naomi Klein calls the "Bono-isation of protest". Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Paul Morley summed it up: ". . . we get to number one (Two Tribes) for nine weeks with an explicit, extravagant anti-war thing . . . and the next week it's George Michael".

Then there's the human toll, the dire consequences for loud-mouth musicians who stick their guitar necks out too far. In 1982 UK anarchist band Crass spat bucket-loads of bile at prime minister Margaret Thatcher — her cynical Falklands war, and her antipathy to striking miners providing plenty of ammunition. Two years later Crass were finished, Lynskey naming their musical activism "perhaps the saddest and noblest failure in this book . . . They lived the ideals that they expressed in their songs, and never gave an inch, and still they fell apart with an overwhelming sense of depression and defeat".

Of course, the gloom makes the occasional triumph appear even more brilliant. According to Lynskey, The Special AKA's Free Nelson Mandela "helped make apartheid one of the defining causes of the 1980s". And while it may have been ephemeral, "for thousands of young listeners (Two Tribes) was an unforgettable introduction to the whole concept of nuclear war".

33 Revolutions per Minute is a major undertaking. Most books about protest songs and political music divide up the world as the Pope did in the 15th century: into East and West; or like the European colonial powers in Africa, country by country. Lynskey's gaze spans four continents (with the glaring omission of our own).

He is a chronic list-maker. An obsessed pop music tragic, he's like a character out of Nick Hornby's Hi-Fidelity. He's the author of The Guardian Book of Playl-ists, and in 33 Revolu-tions the sources, references and footnotes could occupy a work of their own.

He's also funny. He refers to Bruce Springsteen as "perhaps the only rock icon you would trust to fix your car or build you a toolshed". And he recalls how folk activist Pete Seeger once threatened the McCarthy-era House of Un-American Activities Committee with his banjo playing.

And Lynskey seems to love his politics almost as much as his music. He's on the side of the angels, but he's also armed with a finely-tuned bullshit detector that exposes the frauds and the fools: "If you had to isolate one moment as the absolute nadir of the protest song, it would be the Thompson Twins and Madonna blundering through the Beatles' Revolu-tion at Live Aid."

Each chapter in 33 Revolutions per Minute revolves around a key song, and the shockwaves it creates. These songs are then gift-wrapped in a concise history of the life of the artists, and the zeitgeist in which they were written, recorded and performed.

The journey begins with the still chilling Strange Fruit — a haunting account of a Southern lynching sung by the then 23-year-old Billie Holiday. ("The song of the century," Time magazine called it. Some century!) As Lynskey points out, Strange Fruit was "not by any means the first protest song, but it was the first to shoulder an explicit political message into the arena of entertainment".

Then come Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan (a protest singer for about five minutes), Nina Simone, James Brown, John Lennon, The Clash, The Dead Kennedys and many more, right up to Steve Earle and Green Day. The early '70s were a particularly lean patch for breakthrough protest songs, with the exception of Gil Scott-Heron's spoken-word The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and Stevie Wonder's portrait of ghetto poverty, Living for the City. It's as if a giant banner had been draped over the new decade: "Absolutely No Complaint Rock Played Here."

33 Revolutions per Minute reminds us that some of our best known, most respected and dearly loved musicians were also some of the most courageous, and lived and worked in an atmosphere of serious personal threats and danger. Black actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson suffered threats of lynching by the Ku Klux Klan and had his passport revoked by the US State Department. Chilean folksinger Victor Jara scribbled his final, unfinished song in the Santiago Stadium shortly before being tortured and murdered by Pinochet's soldiers. Fela Kuti in Nigeria, and Max Romeo, Lee "Scratch" Perry and Bob Marley in Jamaica, managed to make biting protest music and survive in an extreme environment of "firefights, raids and executions".

The future of protest music? As northern Africa self-detonates, Chinese artists disappear and the American empire crumbles you'd have to say that there's no current shortage of source material.

And as for Australia's musical contribution to the international pantheon of protest? We're invisible! So no Eric The Band Played Waltzing Matilda Bogle or John I Was Only 19 Schumann, no Archie Roach, Kev Carmody, Warumpi Band or Yothu Yindi, no Shane Howard, John Butler or The Herd.

There's definitely another book there somewhere.

Rob Hirst's new band is The Break. He played the drums, sang and wrote for Midnight Oil, who had some pretty good protest songs in their repertoire. His memoir, Willie's Bar & Grill, is published by Picador.

MUSIC

33 REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE: A HISTORY OF PROTEST SONGS

By Dorian Lynskey

Faber & Faber, $36.99