This Week in Protest Music: Joan Baez, Kendrick Lamar and Seepeoples

Joan Baez, who was inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame this past weekend has released her first original music in 25 years, “Nasty Man.” The title is derived from the final presidential debate when President Trump called Hillary Clinton ‘a nasty woman.’

On April 15, singers and songwriters will converge at Nyack’s First Reformed Church for a benefit performance of “Songs of Protest: Music That Changed the World.” Headliners include Grammy-winning singer-songwriters Tom Chapin and Michael Mark, The Chapin Sisters, satirist John Forster, Rex Fowler of Aztec Two-Step, jazz vocalist Shirley Crabbe and Mikhail Svetlov, a bass from the Metropolitan Opera. More info can be found here.

African American tradition in protest music is highlighted in the new Linda Tillery album.

Jussie Smollett, an openly gay singer-actor takes the administration to task in his new video, “F.U.W. (F**ked Up World).” Featuring various injustices surrounding racial prejudice and the fight for religious, human and LGBTQ rights, Smollett says, “This is not a single. It’s not a song to promote the series. It’s an artistic expression, my view of this sick cycle, an era in which we must fight our way out of before it’s too late.”

 

SeepeopleS video for “New American Dream” was created and directed by Pete List of Celebrity Death Match fame and dedicated to all those who worship at the altar of power.

The Los Angeles based Quetzals have been around for 20 years and have embraced protest music in their latest album The Eternal Getdown.

The Arctic tradition of throat singing is alive and well with Tanya Tagaq taking the indigenous musical style and sings in protest of the rape of the Earth by heavy industry, and the threats posed to traditional culture and to the environment by Westernization and climate change.

Kendrick Lamar released “The Heart Part 4,” rapping about ‘Chump’ Donald Trump.

New Orleans born jazz star Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah spoke to Yahoo about jazz as protest music

And throughout the media, what has been an expected trend are articles criticizing or praising the resurgence of protest music, giving more credence to the rising movement of protest music in 2017.

Protest music proliferates under Trump administration.

Protest music helped save 20th-century America. But are today’s pop artists up to the task?

Pepsi’s Idiotic Kendall Jenner Ad Highlights Pop Music’s Protest Problem

Post-Brexit punk and austerity anthems – 2017’s political rock resurgence

joan baez music

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