The enduring culture and limits of political song

The connection between song and politics is well documented, but in recent years is said to be severed. This is not the case. The relationship between politics and song endures, reflecting and revivifying a culture of political struggle. In this essay, I survey political song, outlining how it is approached, before arguing for a tighter definition after working through the claim that all song is political. In doing so, I build a platform for discussion of songs by English singer-songwriter Leon Rosselson. For over 50 years, Rosselson’s songwriting has illuminated historical and topical events from a left-wing perspective, but he is also clear a song converts noone and changes nothing. To think otherwise misunderstands that songs are neither mobilisers or opiates, but an idiom for people to express their everyday lives and struggles. The essay concludes by assessing Rosselson’s insights on the power and limits of song

Blood-Thirsty Blues. The Sonic Politics of American Murder Ballads

Contains fulltext : 230028pub.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)How can music reframe, remediate, and communicate the experience of death, crime, and murder? The use and function of murder ballads in popular music has not been addressed in an interdisciplinary fashion and remains a desiderata to gain insight into the human condition. In the most general sense, murder ballads can be described as narratives about crimes—both real and imagined. In poetic fashion, we learn about a killing in grisly details from the perspective of the perpetrator. This chapter will approach murder ballads from a three-fold perspective: First, remediating oral history of murder in bluegrass music, second, blues songs about hate crimes and murder as early black feminist statements, and third, murder ballads as political protest songs for the cause of minorities. I will argue that murder ballads with their inherently intermedial powers penetrate both public and political spheres offering creative and self-reflexive responses to social realities. Considering the evolution of murder ballads from seventeenth-century Europe to a staple in American pop and rap, the sonic politics of murder ballads deserve more attention within and beyond the realm of music history