Extracts from the prologue: Are art and protest mutually exclusive?

Here are some elements of answer from the prologue of Dorian Lynskey' history of protest songs (1) No doubt some of the songwriters included here will wince at the label, but I am using the term [protest song] in its broadest sense, to describe a song which addresses a political issue in a way which aligns itself with the underdog. If it is a box, then it is a huge one, full of holes, and not something to be scared of. But there are good reasons why the term is regarded with suspicion. Protest songs are rendered a disservice as much by undiscerning fans as by their harshest critics. While detractors dismiss all examples as didactic, crass or plain boring, enthusiasts are prone to acting as if virtuous intent suspends the usual standards of musical quality, when any music lover knows that people make bad records for the right reasons and good records for the wrong ones. The purpose of this book is to treat protest songs first and foremost as pop music. Not every song in the following pages is artistically brilliant but many are, because pop thrives on contradiction and tension. Electricity crackles across the gap between ambition and achievement, sound and meaning, intention and reception. So the best protest songs are not dead artefacts, pinned to a particular place and time, but living conundrums. The essential, inevitable difficulty of contorting a serious message to meet the demands of entertainment is the grit that makes the pearl. In songs such as Strange Fruit, Ohio, A Change Is Gonna Come or Ghost Town, the political content is not an obstacle to greatness, but the source of it. They open a door and the world outside rushes in. (2) Its always a double-edged sword, says the former political songwriter Tom Robinson. If you mix politics and pop, one lot of criticism says youre exploiting peoples political needs and ideas and sympathies in order to peddle your second-rate pop music [and another says] youre peddling second-rate political ideals on the back of your pop career. Either way theyve got you. (3) For a while, in the dizzying rush of the 1960s, it was thought that pop music could change the world, and some people never recovered from the realisation that it could not. But the point of protest music, or indeed any art with a political dimension, is not to shift the world on its axis but to change opinions and perspectives, to say something about the times in which you live, and, sometimes, to find that what youve said speaks to another moment in history, which is how Barack Obama came to be standing in Grant Park paraphrasing the words of Sam Cooke. Most of these stories end in division, disillusionment, despair, even death. On one level, everything fails; on another, nothing does. Its all about what people leave behind: links in a chain of songs that extends across the decades.
Dorian Lynskey, 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, 2011