CFAMH750 – Richard Thompson 1

Community Context Paper 2: Protest/Resistance

In examining my community for examples of resistance in musicking, I

realized I needed to expand upon the community I had previously chosen for my

writings on space. In that paper, I had written about my community of fellow

wedding musicians, and the accompanying audience present at each event.

Unfortunately, a wedding celebration is a difficult space to stage any so rt of protest,

as it is inherently unpolitical. As performers hired to provide celebratory music for

an important day in a couple’s life, it would be somewhat inappropriate to use that

stage for anything other than our client’s celebration. And as a polarizing force, any

injection of politics would defeat our goal of uniting the entire audience, potentially

damage our chance for referrals, and ultimately affect our livelihood. Due to these

circumstances, for us wedding musicians, protest and resistance musicking are

better situated outside of the wedding space.

As musicians, however, my bandmates and I are not limited to performing at

weddings. Many members of the band compose, produce, and perform with other

bands, other musicians, and in other spaces. These instances are much more

conducive to protest musicking than a wedding venue, and it is these areas in which

I will focus. Freed from the constraints of an employer’s requests, public

performances in my community of fellow Boston musicians have been filled with

songs of protest and resistance.

Recently, I attended a concert put on by one of my fellow bandmates. The

concert took place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston, a historic site

filled with classical art. The show was part of a weekly musical series, and featured
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my bandmates’ original music, as well as two opening acts. The band members and

audience were very diverse, in both age and ethnicities, running the gamut from

young to old, in all colors. After an opening set of pop music covers, a young woman

with a guitar began to quietly sing her original songs, covering standard apolitical

topics such as love and despair. Towards the end of her set, however, this young

woman decided to make a political statement. Making a reference to Harry Potter,

she compared President Trump to “he-who-must-not-be-named,” setting the stage

for her anti-Trump views. The subsequent song she performed derided Trump’s

anti-immigrant views and actions, and was met with shouts of approval from the

audience. Much like a chindon-ya protest performance in Japan, gathering people as

it progresses, this young woman gained support through the audience’s

participation, offering strength to her message, and uniting those diverse audience

members with similar views.1

Finally, my bandmates took the stage to perform the songs from their newest

album. Mostly instrumental jazz and funk, this music was not political in nature.

However, midway through their set, they brought some singers up on stage to

perform. Beginning an afrobeat groove, the singers sang a song of resistance titled

“Threatening Black Male.” Written by the bass player, a black male, this song speaks

to the recent rise in unwarranted murders of black males by American police

officers.

In her 2016 article about Japanese chindon-ya performers, Abe writes about

what anthropologist Marc Abeles calls the politics of survival. This concept
1
Abe, Marieé . “Sounding Against Nuclear Power in Post-3.11 Japan: Resonances of
Silence and Chindon-ya.” Ethnomusicology 60, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2016): 239.
CFAMH750 – Richard Thompson 3

“captures the political orientation toward preservation of life in the face of

environmental, economic, and biological threats.”2 While Abe uses this concept in

relation to Japanese protests of a nuclear fallout, the performance and composition

by my bandmate concerns and reflects his own insecurity of survival, and the

survival of people of similar race in our country.

Beyond the lyrical content, the song’s use of afrobeat musical stylings adds to

the layers of resistance contained within. Historically, afrobeat as a genre was

created by Fela Kuti in Nigeria, Africa, to speak out against the corruption of the

Nigerian government, and the oppression of the Nigerian people. 3 Embued with this

sense of historical resistance, my bandmates choice of afrobeat is very fitting to help

convey the message of police corruption, and racial oppression that he and fellow

black males feel. This particular musical usage is similar to Tamer Nafar’s choice to

use hip-hop due to its historical association with occupation and resistance, 4 and

Pussy Riot’s choice to use punk music based on its confrontational and rebellious

image.5

While I did not attend this concert expecting to participate in a political

event, the performers’ choice to sing songs of resistance at that time speaks to the

direness of the situation we find ourselves in as a country. Unable to hold back their

2
Marieé Abe, “Sounding Against Nuclear Power in Post-3.11 Japan: Resonances of
Silence and Chindon-ya,” Ethnomusicology 60, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2016): 251.
3
Michael Veal, Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2000).
4
David McDonald, “The Stones We Throw are Rhymes: Imagining America in
Palestinian Hip-Hop,” in Practicing Transnationalism: American Studies in the Middle
East, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016): 144.
5
Janus C Currie, “Like a Prayer: The Dissensual Aesthetics of Pussy Riot,” Rock Music
Studies (Feb. 2016): 5.
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feelings, both my bandmate’s group and the young woman who opened for them felt

compelled to offer their own forms of protest, in the most natural way they knew

how, through music. By explicitly using music to connect with the audience and

convey their resistance against current issues, these musicians embody a 21 st

century aesthetic of resistance musicking.

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Bibliography

Abe, Marieé . "Sounding against Nuclear Power in Post-3.11 Japan: Resonances of

Silence and Chindon-ya." Ethnomusicology 60, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2016):

233-62.

Currie, Janus C. "Like a Prayer: The Dissensual Aesthetics of Pussy Riot." Rock Music

Studies (Feb. 2016): 1-13.

McDonald, David. "The Stones We Throw are Rhymes: Imagining America in

Palestinian Hip-Hop." In Practicing Transnationalism: American Studies in the

Middle East, 141-68, edited by Eileen Lundy and Edward Lundy. Austin:

University of Texas Press, 2016.

Teitelbaum, Benjamin. "White Pride/Black Music: Nordic Nationalist Rap and

Reggae. In Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism,

61-88. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Veal, Michael. Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon. Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 2000.