Introduction: Cultures of Protest in American Music

This special issue, with its focus on Cultures of Protest in American Music, is anchored in the investigation, from various diverging perspectives, of a set of core questions. What possibilities of protest can be found in music? How does music, as a form of artistic expression and cultural communication, facilitate – or even articulate in itself – the act of protest? What changes, in measurable societal and political terms, can the production and reception of music in the contemporary world in general, and in the Americas in particular, engender and create? As the articles within this special issue demonstrate, across their very different specific contexts, the possibilities of musical protest are, indeed, considerable; the forms rich, flexible, and highly effective; and the capacity for political change substantial. The connection between music and protest – as I outline more fully below, and as the articles within this special issue all amply demonstrate – is an intimate, and longestablished, one. Even within the specific confines of US and broader North American cultural history, the geo-political focus of this special issue, its manifestations have been considerable. Music in its broadest sense has served, across centuries and cultures and in a recurrent manner, as a source of revolutionary inspiration; as an expression of selfidentity and collective power, especially for culturally, politically, and racially marginalised groups; as an insistent voice of resistance against dominant narratives and agendas. Music has been a vital vehicle in the pursuit of positive social change, of expression for the disenfranchised, of resistance or self-determination in the face of forces of oppression or assimilation. As Dillane, Power, Haynes, and Devereux suggest: ‘in the end all songs of social protest seek to do one thing – bring our attention to an issue that needs redress, which ultimately challenges the status quo’ (2018, 3). But this is also, as James Garratt emphasises, something performed by all music: ‘Music’s seemingly inherent politicality has led to it being idealised in many cultures as a symbol, prefiguration and catalyst of as yet unrealised forms of human freedom and social harmony’ (2019, 31). In considering the political force of music, however, it is important to emphasise from the beginning – and to reiterate a point made with greater force and eloquence in several of the articles within this special issue – that neither ‘music’ nor ‘songs’ should be understood purely in the specific frameworks of Western classical or popular music. Rather, this special issue takes a broader approach, echoing the understanding that Berglund, Johnson, and Lee discuss, in the specific address of Indigenous North American music: that ‘songs were not mere entertainment, or a distraction from the mundane everyday world – nor were they considered as “high art” or composed to be