music

British songwriter and musician Adrian Renton decided it was time to confront the outrages of our time by resurrecting a classic form – folk protest music. Inspired by a 1960s album, “Moving On,” by Scottish musician Nigel Denver, Renton pulled together some friends from Essex, Berkshire and London to re-record some very old English songs. They also wrote some new songs in the same spirit of protest. 

The result is the Wicca Men's recent album Albion’s Darkness, a moving history lesson and contemporary political commentary wrapped in some haunting music. The album draws a straight line from the peasants’ revolt in Essex in 1381 to contemporary struggles against neoliberal capitalism and Boris Johnson. The dynamics of enclosure are brutally similar then and now, even if the means used today – international trade law, intellectual property law -- are sometimes different. 

One song, “Goblins,” is particularly timely even though it was inspired by a Piers Plowman song, “a complex and satirical allegory written by William Langland around 1370, which denounces the greed, falsehood and hypocrisy of the Church and State in England, and also gives the first recorded mention of Robin Hood.” In the new lyrics, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and several Cabinet members are ridiculed as “this troupe of clowns, dressed in friars and wise men gowns / Lying to people to profit to themselves and to keep…/ The Bumpkins down.”

In a time when pop stars are most known for their silly haircuts, salacious outfits and fleeting half-lives, it is almost impossible to comprehend Pete Seeger, the legendary folk icon who died yesterday at age 94.  Seeger was a giant of a human being, a man who insisted upon living humbly but with conviction and courage. 

His commitment to the public good was aching to behold.  When Congress asked him to name names in the 1950s, he refused and was blacklisted.  Undeterred, he toured colleges and coffee houses around the country to make a living.  When his beleaguered former singing partners the Weavers endorsed Lucky Strike cigarettes, presumably to pick up a few bucks, he refused.  When he returned to network television in the late 1960s to sing on the “Smothers’ Brothers” variety show, he choose to sing a provocative song, “The Big Muddy,” lambasting the Vietnam War and LBJ – hardly the kind of song to revive his career.

And yet, Seeger was no dour nay-sayer or small-minded zealot.  He was joyful, generous and optimistic.  He lived his confidence in the power of song to bring people together, beyond politics.  Through his person and the songs he wrote, Seeger’s music came to define the American experience during the civil rights era, the Vietnam War, the environmental movement, and beyond.  It’s hard to imagine the past fifty years without If  I Had a Hammer; Where Have All the Flowers Gone?; Turn, Turn, Turn; The Lion Sleeps Tonight; We Shall Overcome; and many other Seeger songs. 

His determination to nurture wholesome action in the face of abusive power was also a wonder.  From fighting fascism and the Klan to empowering ordinary people to become active citizens, Seeger did not let up.  One of his great inspirations was the Hudson River Clearwater Sloop, which exposed thousands of people to the joys of that river – and the pollution that was endangering it.  He showed up at protests and strikes and at community centers and schools.  How many performers and activists keep at it for more than 70 years without stopping?

It is time to pause and celebrate the improbable, wonderful life and career of Woody Guthrie, born a century ago today.  Could such a voice of ordinary people ever make it as a songwriter/performer today?  It’s remarkable how the “Oklahoma cowboy” drew together the strands of American folk music, hillbilly lyrics, cowboy songs and countless other regional influences to create songs that sound as if they had existed from time immemorial.  In a way, they had.  He was often renovating folk tunes that had already endured for generations and giving them more timely, politically inflected lyrics:  derivation as original creativity.  He sang about dignity and social justice; he sang about hard personal truths and political struggle.

Guthrie himself said, “A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it or it could be who’s hungry and where their mouth is or who’s out of work and where the job is or who’s broke and where the money is or who’s carrying a gun and where the peace is.”  In today’s media-saturated world, in which posturing and PR optics drive talent to become facsimiles of the authentic (but never the real thing, lest it be caught by surprise in an unflattering light being all-too-human), Guthrie was the unvarnished, plain-spoken real thing. 

Out of that stubborn authenticity came a raw eloquence that could not be suppressed.  When Irving Berlin wrote the sanctimonious “God Bless America,” which went on to become a hit, especially as sung by pious conservatives like Kate Smith, Guthrie set out to write a song that would not be so darn complacent about America.

I was on a panel, “Artists and Advocacy,” at the National Conference for Media Reform Conference the other week.  The other panelists focused on innovative tactics to gain visibility and influence for pushing a policy agenda.  That's an essential task, but I decided to focus on a different way to advance our interests in a way that is arguably more durable.  Why not build our own commons-based markets and commons infrastructures? 

The existing policy process is systemically corrupted by corporate money and influence, making it a Herculean task for public-interest advocates to prevail.  Just look at the fate of net neutrality to date.  And even if you do prevail, the political winds may blow the other way and erase those gains later. 

Mind you, I am not making an either/or argument, but rather a both/and argument.  We obviously still need to persevere in conventional policy advocacy, particularly on net neutrality.  But with the Internet providing a easily accessible platform for wide-open creativity and the viral amassing of audience/participants, we should find ways to bypass policy altogether and develop our own enterprises to advance our interests.  

Those antic law professors who gave us Bound by Law – a glorious superhero-comic treatment of the fair use doctrine in filmmaking -- are at it again!  Forget DC Comics.  I want my IP Comics!  Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins are apparently out to build a franchise by translating the arcane monstrosities of copyright law into clever, hilarious and downright educational comic books. 

Their latest offering, due out in the spring or summer of 2011, is Theft!  A History of Music -- Musical Borrowing from Plato to Hip-Hop. Aoki, a professor of law at the UC-Davis School of Law, is the graphic artist for the comic book.  Boyle and Jenkins  -- both professors at Duke Law School – researched, wrote and designed it.  Boyle is the former Chairman of Creative Commons and co-founder of its spinoff project, Science Commons.  Jenkins heads the Center for the Study of the Public Domain.