Will Blue Rodeo’s protest song get people to the polls?

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This article was published 29/09/2015 (3673 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On Monday, veteran Canadian roots-rock band Blue Rodeo dropped an anti-Harper protest song called Stealin’ All My Dreams. I guess they’ll have to change their name to Orange Rodeo, har har.

It’s a capital-P Protest song in the tradition of Seeger or Dylan. It’s a smart, pointed critique that manages to shoehorn in everything from the Conservative government’s general apathy toward missing and murdered indigenous women and the environment to the Anti-terrorism Act — all in three minutes and 45 seconds. Unfortunately, it also rhymes, which doesn’t do much to dispel the widely held theory that topical protest songs are inherently uncool.

That’s not to say it’s a bad song. It’s a pretty good song. In fact, it’s the song that some have been waiting for.

On the day before its release, the Toronto Star ran a piece questioning why Canadian musicians don’t write about Stephen Harper the same way that, say, U.K. punks skewered Margaret Thatcher. “It’s hard to think of a recent political figure who has inspired so much angst and so little art.” It’s a fair point.

A few unsatisfying theories as to why that is were floated by several Canadian indie rock musicians — including, again, that explicit protest songs are uncool, and that Harper isn’t that compelling a character to write about. No one brought up fear of reprisal or pushback from Conservative fans (hey, it’s possible!). Curiously, there’s also no mention of Ottawa singer-songwriter Tony Turner, whose song Harperman got him suspended with pay from his day job as a scientist at Environment Canada.

To that end, Stealin’ All My Dreams feels gutsy. The band doesn’t care about what’s cool or, for that matter, convenient — one assumes that a commercially successful band with a large fan base will have some Tory listeners. It cares about standing up for what it believes in.

Blue Rodeo isn’t the only act resurrecting the protest song — far from it. It’s happening across all genres. Buffy Sainte-Marie just won the 2015 Polaris Music Prize for this year’s Power in the Blood, a record that is packed with environmental calls to action. Nobody Knows, a stark, confronting 2015 single from Toronto-via-Winnipeg electro-soul songstress IsKwé, is about Canada’s missing and murdered Aboriginal women. Miniskirt, the single from Montreal-based art-rock band Braids — whose 2015 album Deep in the Iris was also up for this year’s Polaris — takes a stand against rape culture: “For us it’s just a stamp to the head/For them another notch in the bed/It’s like I’m wearing red, and if I am/You feel you’ve the right to touch me/Cause I asked for it.” Lest you think this is obscure music, I know of someone who recently heard Miniskirt in an H&M.

Miniskirt calls to mind another song: The Body Electric, a feminist reimagining of a traditional murder ballad by New Orleans-based Americana act Hurray for the Riff Raff that reached many ears via a haunting performance on Late Night with David Letterman and later on the mainstage at the Winnipeg Folk Festival.

And if folk music is simply the music of the people, handed down from generation to generation, then hip hop is most certainly folk music. Stateside, cultural commentators have heralded the return of the protest song, thanks to the many hip hop artists who have returned to the genre’s political roots and are standing up and speaking out in the wake of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner — two young American black men who were killed by white police officers, and for whom justice never came. Artists such as J. Cole, as just one example, whose chilling Be Free is roundly regarded as an anthem for the Black Lives Matter movement. And yes, it’s a protest song.

In late 2014, The Roots’ Questlove issued a powerful and widely quoted challenge to his fellow musicians on Instagram, urging them to “push themselves to be a voice of the times that we live in.”

“Protest songs don’t have to be boring or non danceable or ready made for the next Olympics,” he wrote. “They just have to speak truth.”

Yes, speaking the truth can have consequences. We all remember what happened to the Dixie Chicks in 2003, when they were pulled off radio stations all over the United States for criticizing the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq.

But music has the power to galvanize and inspire people. Musicians can push concepts such as rape culture, Black Lives Matter and missing and murdered indigenous women out into the mainstream. Conversations can be started. Perhaps solutions can be found. Who knows, maybe Blue Rodeo’s latest will get people to the polls.

From where I’m sitting, that’s pretty cool.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti

Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.

Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.