This Summer I Hear the Drumming

Sometimes protest songs announce themselves *as* protest songs. “I wrote this song last night,” LUKAS NELSON Insta-announced over the weekend, and you insta-knew exactly why he wrote this song last night—this old-timey folk song with three verses sketching three tragic stories of women who weren’t allowed abortions, one a rape victim, one an incest victim, one whose baby is stillborn. “For she,” as he sings in each chorus with a hint of his father WILLIE’s Texas twang, “must carry the seed.”

REINA DEL CID, a Minneapolis singer/songwriter now living in Los Angeles, quickly rewrote “AMERICA (MY COUNTRY, ‘TIS OF THEE)” as a “land of dystopia/religious myopia,” which she tweet-released in a cappella form Sunday with the text “Speak out. Donate. March. Vote.” CYNDI LAUPER was ready with a new version of her 1993 “SALLY’S PIGEONS,” a song about what happens when abortions are performed in back alleys—a dystopian warning that, 29 years later, has caught up to its own future. REN ALDRIDGE of the British punk band PETROL GIRLS, who released their third album, featuring the anthemic “BABY, I HAD AN ABORTION,” just hours before the US Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson on Friday, was ready with an editorial—and suggestions for action—in KERRANG! magazine on Monday.

We need protest songs right now as much as we’ve ever needed them, and artists are delivering them every which way. (Shoutout ANN POWERS and NISHA VENKAT at NPR for this invaluable roundup of artist responses to the court’s abortion ruling that includes all of these and much more.)

Sometimes protest songs don’t announce themselves so much as they emerge, almost organically, from the ether of the radio or the dancefloor or the pop music zeitgeist. The protest is entwined within, rather than toplined over, the beat. You may not notice it at first.

There are numerous ways you might hear BEYONCÉ’s “BREAK MY SOUL.” A Black woman reminding the world whose house (music) this is. A billionaire exhorting you to quit your job. A reflection of pop culture’s great resignation era. A gospel-like declaration of faith in something deeper than the material and the mundane. A Pride anthem. Or was that last week? “Somehow,” QUESTLOVE tweeted Saturday afternoon, “I feel like ‘You Won’t Break My Soul’ is gonna hit different for people in light of the last 24.” The landmine buried within had exploded. The Trojan Horse had opened.

There’s so much to be said—that will be said—about this perfect summer 2022 pop song (Questlove in a later tweet thread, explaining *why* these things will be said: “to have a song define a moment & burn the dancefloor is rare), but maybe all that needs to be said right now is we need protest songs as much as we’ve ever needed them, and pop music understands.

Programming Note

We're taking an extended July 4 holiday. The next issue of MusicREDEF will arrive Wednesday July 6. We'll continue to update our Twitter in the meantime, as always.

Rest in Peace

Western swing singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist BOBBY FLORES, who played with Ray Price and Johnny Bush and was a longtime staple of the Texas country scene... England’s “Singing Winger,” COLIN GRAINGER, who maintained simultaneous careers in the 1950s and ‘60s as a pop crooner and soccer player for clubs including Sheffield United and Sunderland.