Most so-called “protest music” or “political music” is similar to the majority of “Christian rock” in my mind - there is a lot of didacticism, evangelizing, preaching to the choir, and a cloud of self-satisfaction that fills up all the air and obscures anything compelling going on. In the first place, I get the sense that I already know what you’re going for before I even start listening, that I already have a scope of the thematic content, boundaries, and depth. Both protest music and Christian rock have their uses, mind you - primarily as rallying anthems for bringing a group of like-minded people closer together, to give them a glue of purpose and sustained passion when interests flag or things get tough. (Y.G.'s “Fuck Donald Trump” is quite shallow lyrically but was really great for this at just about every protest I’ve attended around Oakland, lending a cathartic party energy and release to very justifiably angry people.) But with a few exceptions, I hardly ever hear anything approaching genuine incisive perspective on either of their chosen subjects.
The real value I’m seeking in our current era of rising global nationalism/fascism/autocracy is music that explores the psychological effects of those things on people, what it’s like to live under it day to day, the insidious ways in which it inoculates itself and makes you accept as banal things which are inexcusable and inhumane. How people struggle to get out of those psychological traps. Challenging and implicating establishment liberalism / neoliberalism and its damaging effects, which always gets a free pass when the other side presents itself as cartoon villiainy. The ways silence, reservedness, and passiveness do the work of the outspoken, bold terrorizers. The ways we justify unjustifiable things to ourselves. Etc. There’s a huge amount of not-overtly-political music that can slide in between the spaces and disorients, reorients, reframes, shifts windows, worms its way into your thoughts and makes a home somewhere.
Compare the films of someone like Michael Moore (didactic, prosaic, essayistic, bludgeoning) to someone like Agnieszka Holland, who never overtly alludes to anything in contemporary politics but presents very nuanced and incisive snapshots of the psychological frameworks of people going through, e.g., historical autocracies in a way that ends up extremely relevant, even if you have to do the hard work of drawing out connections on your own. (I recently saw her television miniseries Burning Bush and highly recommend it if you’re interested)
