Edited collections, like compilation albums of old, are not a source of reliable pleasures. They can be arbitrarily assembled, and contain a few, sparse gems, buried amid the fillers. But they can also be a delight, a mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar, with different approaches and perspectives producing more than the sum of the parts. Music and Protest in 1968 is much closer to the second model than the first. The editors have done an excellent job, not just in the choice of contributors, but in encouraging them to develop themes and ideas that play off each other in intriguing and insightful ways.
One caveat, though: this book is only occasionally about 1968. Often 1968 appears in scare quotes, indicating that the date is not to be taken too seriously. Indeed the author of the first substantial chapter, Robert Adlington, begins by announcing that ‘there never was a Dutch “1968”’ (p. 12). This does not stop Adlington, or any of the contributors who follow him, from exploring the relationship between protest and music. It is just that the exploration is not confined to one year – or one place.
As well as The Netherlands, the book visits Italy, South Africa, the USA, Japan, Vietnam, Germany, Britain, France, China, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Latin America and Scandinavia. And in doing so, the chapters do not simply recount the music and politics of the late 1960s. They draw our attention to the interplay of social, political and cultural contexts and musical forms and styles. So it is that Adlington reveals a theme that recurs throughout the book: that protest rarely issues in protest songs, or at least not ones that capture the imagination of more than a few diehards. For him, it was the very lack of ‘politicisation’ of youth culture that enabled it to develop its distinctive expressive form, a form that was to emerge ultimately in a music that sustained, rather than undermined capitalism and the state.
A corollary of this is that the politics is rarely, if ever, in the lyrics. ‘The message’, as Sarah Hill notes in writing about the USA, is in the ‘musical style’ (p. 54). What the music represented – or spoke to – was ‘a new freedom for corporeal enjoyment and intellectual stimulation’ (p. 63). A different sound – that of jazz – had a similar role in South Africa. According to Carol Muller, the improvisations of South African musicians ‘constituted a parallel discourse of personal and collective freedom’ (p. 66).
Music acquires these expressive possibilities through its context. Barley Norton's fascinating account of popular song in Vietnam (and during the Vietnam War) describes how the Communist Party used music for propaganda and military motivation. There were few ‘protest songs’ as such; instead it was the genre carried the ‘message’ of protest. Norton writes of songs that operated with ‘a musical aesthetics of love that implicitly reject[ed] the formulaic realism of revolutionary song’ (p. 110). Beate Kutschke's portrait of music in East Germany also highlights the way in which the formal ‘politicisation’ of music created possibilities for other, oppositional forms of political musical expression. Rejection of politics was itself a profoundly political gesture.
Political meaning emerged in the confluence of style and context. This is exemplified in the contrast that Virginia Anderson draws between the avant-garde and experimentalists in late-1960s Britain and which Eric Drott finds in France. ‘Free jazz and the new forms of politics on display during May’, writes Drott (p. 270), ‘mirrored one another, both adumbrating new, “non-established” forms of social interaction.’
For Alf Bjornberg, the legacy of ‘1968’ in Scandinavia is not the songs or the sounds; it is the ‘politically radical music movements’. These helped shape the political economy of music, opening up new spaces for, and forms of, popular music. Not that this took a common form in countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Bjornberg notes how in Denmark and Sweden the politics of folk and ‘progressive’ adopted different guises.
The politics of progressive music is a theme of Allan Moore's chapter on Britain's ‘short “1968”’. Like Bjornberg, he is wary of attributing the narrow political significance of the sentiments associated with the period. Rather it was the larger cultural effect that was important, the linking of music to visions of alternative societies.
In some societies, these visions were lived as well as imagined. In others, they were the focus of bitter struggle. The music of 1960s Latin America was, according to Jan Fairley, a form of ‘participative social action’ (p. 124); it was ‘political in one way or another’ (p. 125). She reminds us that musicians were ‘banned, imprisoned, killed or driven into exile’ because ‘their music mattered so much’ (p. 135). Drott's account of France in 1968 speaks of how, in the events of May of that year, musicians engaged in ‘refashioning themselves as political agents, those of vanguard artist and trade unionist’ (p. 258). Music and political activism were – if only briefly – bound together.
There are 15 case studies in Music and Protest in 1968. I have not referred to them all, and have only hinted at the content of a few. I hope, however, that I have done enough to convey the richness of the material compiled by the editors and contributed by the authors. For anyone interested in the relationship between music and political thought and action, whether in 1968, ‘1968’ or today, this is an invaluable collection.
