33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs from Billie Holiday to Green Day
By Dorian Lynkskey. Harper Collins/Ecco, 2011.

This is a tremendous, if unwieldy book about music making a difference.

It’s full of lively scholarship, done up in the style of Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train, where a central topic is allowed to grow into a garden of related strands of useful tangential subtopics. A chapter on, say, The Clash’s “White Riot” covers the birth of British punk in the mid-70s and the social irrelevance of the prevailing pop genre of the era, disco. The following chapter gives disco its due concerning the gay rights struggle, centering on Carl Bean’s “I Was Born This Way.” Which leads, in turn, to chapters anchored by Linton Kwesi Johnson, The Dead Kennedys (with useful material on the creation of MAXIMUMROCKNROLL magazine), Grandmaster Flah, Crass, Frankie Goes to Hollywood (yes! and justified beautifully!), U2 (the “Pride” period), The Special AKA’s “Nelson Mandela”, Billy Bragg (introduced thus: “If you ask someone to name a British protest singer, there is invariably only one response”) and REM (“Exhuming McCarthy,” though who knows what other trenchant politically conscious insights lie in Michael Stipe’s mumbled lyrics of that time?).

The secondary arguments and also-ran artists explored in this deeply annotated study (660 pages, of which 60 are source notes, 23 are the index and 30 are appendices listing songs listed in the text, important songs lying outside the book’s already broad boundaries and some recommendations for further listening.

The whole book also suffers from that maddening frame of mind which maintains that art which is more “important” when it pertains to real-life events. Plenty of perfectly progressive and protest-fomenting songs are dismissed or ignored because they’re too generally or don’t fit a newsy framework. Many which do make the cut are called out for not being specific enough.

Ultimately, his treatise is undone by the lack of workable definitions for what a protest song is or could be. Lynkskey rightfully wants to make room for genre-breakers such as “What’s Going On,” so he throws occasional wrenches into his own organizational methods. But as a cultural history and as music criticism, 33 Revolutions Per Minute is exceptional.

Still, what Lynkskey, an arts journalist for the UK Guardian, has collected here is remarkable on its own terms. Lynkskey could limited himself any way he damn pleased and still have a heck of a book. He went for a research-intensive approach that also allows for a lot of criticial analysis. One of my favorite bits is this hyper-qualified, hilariously disdainful appreciation of “Eve of Destruction”:

It was a somewhat gauche shopping list of reasons to be fearful: segregation, nuclear war, Vietnam, Red China, the JFK assassination, all conspiring to sweep humanity into an early grave. It had none of the judgemnet-day terror of Dylan’s apocalyptic songs, and none of their agility (the third verse has no fewer than seven rhymes for “frustratin’”), but a gripping momentum nonetheless. The hoarse-throated Barry McGuire, who had just left folk revisionists the New Christy Minstrels and was looking for solo material, deigned to record it.

We need more pop-music books like this.