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What good is a song?

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Stand up and Shout (Rouseabout Records RRR43) and Turning the Tide: Voices for a Living Planet (UM records TTT001)

What good is a song? There is a commonsense idea, perhaps part of the identification of the musician as social outsider, that popular musical forms are natural languages of social opposition. Rob Hirst, of Midnight Oil, when accepting his group's installation in the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2006, lamented that there was almost no 'complaint rock' being heard in Australia, excepting the voice of neo-roots hippie John Butler.

Two recent issues of CD compilations from anti-conservative lobby groups suggest that politically inspired and politically interpreted popular music is still being produced. These CDs display a range of genres, the associations of which are at least as important as overt content in constructing the political stance of these releases. Genre creates the space in which musicians perform, a place for the construction of a persona, of heightened communication, as well as a language of recognised and conventional sounds, the locus through which audiences identify with a music.

Much of modern Western political song derives from the sounds and ideologies of radical populist folk. This was first developed by The Almanac Singers in the early 1940s, committed east coast radicals coming out of the American Popular Front left-wing. When singers of this group, like Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and others found a way to turn agit-prop...

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