Dorian Lynskey – 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History Of Protest Songs
Given how good this voluminous book on popular recorded protest song is, it feels almost churlish to draw attention to the fact that John Lennon’s sharp-featured profile takes up more space on the cover than Billie Holiday, Chuck D and James Brown in combination. But once you’re past considerations of graphic design and marketing, this is an intensely satisfying read.
Lynskey, a Guardian music journalist, has put in the hours at his local library doing the kind of job which is all too rare in this age of cut-and-paste atrocities. (Leaving aside the fact that no one needs a book on MGMT — how good can one be anyway, if it’s rushed out less than four months after an album?) The fact that the appendices, sources and epilogue run to 120 pages should speak volumes alone.
Any trepidation you have before diving in is forgotten almost immediately. (200 pages on folk music? Sweet baby Jesus save me!) This reader probably enjoyed the sections on the singers and acts he cannot abide more than the rest. The author’s trick is to convincingly win back important musical figures — some of them genuine revolutionaries —from jabbering talking-head, TV filler shows and their songs from the defanged and whimsical soundtracks in which they have been used as signifiers for years. His knowledgeable, hard-boiled prose is slashed through occasionally with fine razor cuts of vivid description which jolt you out of any reverie you may have slipped into: it’s a good read but it’s not an easy read.
The chapter on Nina Simone reveals how she was unable to keep on ignoring the burgeoning civil rights movement, after the KKK bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed and injured 14 black kids. The author describes it: “As the bomb detonated and rafters buckled the teacher shrieked: ‘Lie on the floor! Lie on the floor!’ [One of the children who died] Cynthia’s father Claude would recall, ‘Even as she screamed, the faces of Jesus in the church’s prized stained-glass window shattered into fragments.’”
And then we are left with Simone, who is almost tipped over the edge by the event, angrily trying to build a zip gun from household items so she can go into the street and kill a stranger. Instead we got the shocking ‘Mississippi Goddam’. And shocking it becomes again when rescued by the context. John Doran
