This morning I read a very funny rant about Sainsburys’ decision to rename tiger bread giraffe bread on the advice of a three-and-half-old girl. One Lily Robinson wrote a letter, complete with “adorable” typos, to head office, who responded thus: “I think renaming tiger bread giraffe bread is a brilliant idea – it looks much more like the blotches on a giraffe than the stripes on a tiger, doesn’t it? It is called tiger bread because the first baker who made it a looong time ago thought it looked stripey (sic) like a tiger. Maybe they were a bit silly. Chris King (age 27 & 3/4).” The bread was swiftly renamed, providing a nice bit of feelgood publicity.

Surely rechristening a product to appease someone not long out of nappies marks some kind of turning point in the infantilisation of branding: a seemingly interminable trend which makes grown men think it’s OK to give their age as “27 & 3/4” without being shoved into a canal. Maybe I should ask my five-year-old daughter to rebrand the Jerusalem artichoke, which is neither an artichoke nor from Jerusalem, and we can all start cooking with Goblinhead instead. Or would that be “a bit silly”?

The first time I saw a bottle of Innocent smoothie, back in 1999, I hated the faux-naif guff on the label, but I had no idea that said guff would still be proliferating over a decade later. Customers of Anglian Water last year received a bill with the following blurb on the envelope. (There are more hilariously horrific examples collected on Becca Nicholson’s Wackaging website.)

According to an article in the Times this is the most requested brand identity of all and you can see what’s in it for the brands: both chummy and childlike, Innocentese poses as an authentic voice in a world of corporate liars. We’re not like them. We’re your best mate inexplicably treating you as if you’re a 10-year-old girl. Making pre-adulthood synonymous with sincerity, it appeals to the Holden Caulfield in us, the part that thinks that kids are sacrosanct while grown-ups lie.

This is, of course, a very old idea. In the story of the emperor’s new clothes, tediously referenced by every internet commenter who wants to pretend that not liking something popular is somehow ennobling, the lone truth-teller is a little boy. Rousseau lionised childhood as an all-too-brief sanctuary from the big bad world. Wordsworth, much like Chris King (27 & 3/4), believed the child was “Might prophet! Seer blest!” He, too, might have allowed a three-year-old to rename his bread. But Innocentese didn’t appear in the late 90s out of a vacuum and I think the ground was laid, at least in part, by indie culture.

In the mid-80s, indie bands like Beat Happening in the US and the C86 scene in the UK employed a childlike aesthetic as a form of resistance to dominant cultural trends. In place of slick professionalism and expensive overproduction, chaotic amateurism. In place of exaggerated sexuality, puritanical sexlessness. In place of glossy “lies”, painful sincerity. In place of adulthood, essentially, a magically extended childhood. One could note with some discomfort that the pop culture being opposed, though identified with corporate America, was driven by working-class black people, but in the heyday of Thatcherism and Reaganomics the “twee” approach was still a valid form of rejection. I thought of this when I read Eva Wiseman’s Observer column about the Innocent aesthetic last autumn:

These brands are the opposite of sexy. They’re anti-sex; they stand on the other side of the brand motorway to perfumes or Nuts magazine. Is this cuteness the consequence of sex-sells branding, the answer song to all those oily boob ads? If you feed in a lorryload of thighs and innuendo at the start of a decade, does it excrete cupcakes and baby voices at the end?

When, a decade later, alternative rock had come to resemble the things it had once opposed, via Britpop and corporate grunge, key indie bands once again reached for the satchels. Belle & Sebastian named themselves after a children’s book and wrote some of their best songs about school, while Neutral Milk Hotel recorded an album inspired by Anne Frank and the lo-fi, pots-and-pans amateurism of a particularly enthusiastic summer camp. These were gifted songwriters creating idiosyncratic private worlds born of refusal and I don’t blame them for what followed anymore than I blame Nirvana for Nickelback, but over the following decade this cult of childhood became part of indie’s schtick. Writing about Pitchfork in n+1 recently, Richard Beck examined the language with which the website praised Animal Collective:

Pitchfork’s writers immediately latched onto the band’s blend of sonic eccentricity and emotional innocence. An early review referred to the group’s work as “fairy-tale music.” Another imagined the band’s members “dancing like children around the crackling fire among the pines.” Another: “It’s a child’s lack of self-conscience and ‘common sense’ that makes them holy. . . . Wisdom is wasted on the old.” Another: “There’s a romantic sense of longing, an air of celebration, but also tinges of doubt, loss, and acceptance.

Animal Collective at least have a sound all their own. Indie’s fetishisation of naivete reached its giraffe bread moment with the reprehensible YouTube sensations Pomplamoose, specifically their bloodless covers of R&B hits.

Around the same point in the late 90s as Belle & Sebastian and Neutral Milk Hotel were emerging, the chillout scene offered a safe haven to ageing ravers alienated by the superclubs, and toyed with ideas of childhood in records such as Lemon Jelly’s Nice Weather for Ducks and Mr Scruff’s Fish — ideas which, like indie twee, were fresh and unusual before they became appropriated and caricatured  by brands. The original, pre-takeover Big Chill was the first truly child-friendly festival so it was inevitable that Innocent would later mount its own festival, appealing to many of the same people.

During the same period Hollywood has also become fluent in Innocentese. Its Belle & Sebastian was Wes Anderson, whose whimsical movies feature children who talk like adults and adults who act like children. Again, this distinctive vision became a much-copied trope. Witness the poster to Sam Mendes’ Away We Go with it’s shambling not-quite-adults and hand-drawn artwork, or the new adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close which sentimentalises 9/11 through the eyes of an aggravatingly precocious nine-year-old boy who lost his dad in the Twin Towers. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis caustically noted: “In real life he would be one of those children who inspire some adults to coo and cluck while reminding others of how grateful they are to be child-free. This being a movie, however, almost everyone reacts to Oskar with the same warm indulgence.” The book and movie act as if 9/11 would somehow be insufficiently moving if it were just about boring old adults with their lies and compromises and inauthenticity and their sex.

The perceived underdog status of indie music and movies, which depends on having big-bucks monoliths as a point of contrast, is appropriated by brands who want to seem like plucky outsiders who are on your side. So I can understand why so many people are selling Innocentese but why are so many people buying it? On some level consumers of Innocent or Ella’s Kitchen must know that their wacky, “hey guys” friendliness is a lie like any other branding exercise. They understand that when the CEO of Innocent lays of staff or talks to 58% shareholders Coca-Cola that he doesn’t call them on the Banana Phone. Surely they clock that it’s essentially bullshit. Yet they play along because it satisfies a need.

I think it’s partly related to the Cult of the Child, defined by one blogger as “the brainwashing some parents undergo that convinces them their children are innately, infallibly wise, untainted by worldly prejudices, and therefore their opinions and pronouncements should be heeded as if they were handed down from the heavens, and their every wish should be indulged”. Parenthood, instead of marking the point at which one irrevocably becomes an adult, is often presented as a second go-around, with the parent eager to shrink the age gap. The packaging of Little Me Organics (“Lots of mummys got together to create a range that was carefully selected to be the best for their little ones…”) and Ella’s Kitchen baby food bizarrely addresses parents as if they were babies themselves, making childhood synonymous with those sacred concepts in upmarket food branding, “natural” and “pure”. Handwritten, obviously, because fonts are for phonies.

And that’s the thing. The brand’s voice is “childlike” but it’s not actually like a child at all, because real children are complicated and tempestuous and say all kinds of stuff: it’s the voice of a parent trying to get a child to do something by approximating their outlook. Innocentese is relentlessly chirpy and nice, in a profoundly white and middle-class way which connects with its affluent customer base.

Copywriter and blogger Tom Albrighton, who calls Innocentese “wackywriting”, shrewdly notes: “In my view, wackywriting has its roots in the sort of language used by some middle-class parents to their young children: jolly, zany and childlike, but with a colder undercurrent of authority, judgement and passive aggression.” Hence the ubiquity of Keep Calm and Carry On merchandise — a slogan conceived for a possible Nazi invasion of Britain which is now only slightly less annoying than an actual Nazi invasion of Britain — which wraps the desire to keep smiling and chill out and cheer yourself up with a cupcake in the voice of authority. Albrighton again:

What if you’re a parent who wants to be liberal, or a brand that wants to be human? How can you control people without getting all heavy on them? Wackywriting is the answer. When direct instruction is culturally inderdicted or deprecated, you can still get the same result by smothering your command in playfulness, cosiness and niceness.…

Wackywriting embodies the dilemma of the liberal middle classes: material privilege, and unease over that privilege, glossed over with affected bohemianism and faux-naïveté. Hopelessly compromised by power and possessions, we long to return to the garden, but can’t pass through the eye of the needle. We’re guilty, but we wish we were, yes, innocent.

I thought perhaps that the whole down-the-shitcan vibe of the world at the moment would puncture the whimsy bubble. If anything it seems to have intensified the need to escape to a wuvly innocent world where nobody’s heard of the Euro crisis or Iranian nukes. But I suspect that just as indie music and cinema laid the groundwork for Innocentese, the growing revulsion towards twee art is the first sign of a backlash against it among consumers. As the language becomes more common, more widely mocked, less trusted, it becomes less useful for brands and one day soon — I hope and pray — we will see the end of the Innocents.

Note: This started with a question on Twitter this morning and perhaps it’s not so much an essay as a quick way to get some thoughts down and collect some useful links in one place. As well as the ones mentioned and linked in the piece, I recommend Lucy Sweet’s hilarious polemic and Nick Asbury’s thoughtful insider view. Other ideas came from Twitter followers who responded to my tweet this morning, especially @zone_styx, @richard_king and @mattleys. The pun in the title was kicked off by @gargarin.

I like the sound of this lot:

Eight women stood in a line opposite the Kremlin, neon balaclavas hiding their faces, fists pounding the air in rugged defiance. Before police carted them off, the members of Pussy Riot managed to shout their way through a minute-long punk anthem: “Revolt in Russia – the charisma of protest / Revolt in Russia, Putin’s got scared!”

Formed days after Vladimir Putin’s announcement in September that he intended to return to the presidency, Pussy Riot have become the latest symbol of young Russian discontent.

“A lot of us couldn’t sleep after this announcement,” said “Tyurya”, one of the founding members of a punk collective that has grown, since October, to roughly 30 people, including crew. “So we decided, damn it, we need to do something. We always went to protests and things, but it seemed to us we needed to do something more.”

With baleful timing a court ruling that kettling during the G20 protests was lawful swiftly followed one that ruled the Occupy encampment at St Paul’s wasn’t. At least we know where we stand. As Occupy’s lawyer, John Cooper QC, remarked: “This is an important judgment. It marks the start of a legal analysis as to the extent of protest in this country. What Occupy have done is push the boundaries of public law on protest.”

OLSX is appealing the eviction but it’s unclear what happens next. Yesterday the tireless activist tweeter @heardinlondon (who’s well worth following) reported that the protesters played the following songs to mark the eviction ruling — a small gesture but one which displayed the mixture of wit and defiance that has made this occupation so inspiring.

Update: two terrific blog posts about the importance of OLSX. One from the aforementioned heardinlondon: “The strongest fault I can find with Occupy is that it has arrived too soon. That rumble that is growing is the sound of malcontent. Over the next six months, as more people lose their jobs, their houses and their sense of being able to provide for their families, I suspect there are going to be a lot of people jig-sawing ‘Oh, that is what they were on about.’” And one from Steve Maclean, editor of the Occupied Times: “Either we – the people – do something about the neoliberal agenda adopted by both political parties, or it will make no difference whatsoever who wins the next general election. Occupy is an acceptance of our predicament and an attempt – however naive and imperfect – to do something about it.”

I can imagine a world in which Diane Abbott’s tweet that “White people love playing ‘divide and rule’ We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism” would be racist. In this parallel universe Britain is dominated, politically and economically, by an unshakeable clique of black, working-class women and two black men have just been convicted, several years too late thanks to an institutionally racist black police force, of the murder of white teenager Stephen Lawrence. But in this world? Not really.

I don’t want to get into the ridiculous mob mechanics of Twitter outrage, which can be as bad on the left (witness pandagate) as it is on the right, except to note that the “gotcha” strategy is a surefire way to ensure that no politician ever expresses themselves on social media except in the bloodlessly inoffensive style of Ed Milibot’s feed. It seems we desperately want politicians to drop the platitudes and speak openly, except when they do, in which case they need to apologise and resign.

What this absurd flap demonstrates is the desperate longing of some privileged people to wear the rags of victimhood. Any whiff of black-on-white racism, like misandry and heterophobia, is an excuse for these delicate souls to downplay the dominant prejudice and argue that there is a level playing field of bigotry or, on the crazier fringes, that there is a “war” on white people/men/straight people/motorists, etc. Coming so soon after the Lawrence verdict, Abbottgate is a nasty attempt to pretend that, hey, there’s racism on both sides now. A black man gets knifed to death by a white mob; a black MP writes a carelessly worded tweet about white people. It all evens out.

Predictably Abbott has felt compelled to delete the tweet, though not the rest of the conversation which produced it. But apart from the careless oversimplification — she should have said “white people in power” or “certain white people” — she was right. In her initial qualified apology she clarified that she was referring to 19th century colonialism when, to take just one example, the Belgians colonising modern-day Rwanda strategically favoured the Tutsis over the Hutus and sowed the seeds of attempted genocide a century later. But you don’t need to go back that far. The US government’s efforts to disrupt the civil rights and Black Power movements are a textbook example of divide-and-rule. It is what dominant powers do. To read her tweet as an indictment of every single white person in the world requires either paranoia or malice. Most of all it means denying that power matters.

One common response was “Imagine if a white person had said something like this.” Well we’re back in the parallel universe. “If this was a white MP saying black people like dividing white people they’d be out in five minutes,” claimed the opportunistically quick-on-his-feet Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi. It would also make no sense whatsoever, because such a thing doesn’t happen in the real world. The meaning of a comment depends on the power dynamic that underpins it. If a black comedian makes a joke about white people, or a gay comedian about straight people, the audience knows that (a) they don’t mean everybody and (b) they are coming from an underdog position. They are punching up instead of down.

When I was a teenager getting into hip hop in the late 80s and early 90s, I came up against the Nation of Islam’s fruity theory (nothing to with mainstream Islamic teaching by the way) that white people are all “devils” created millennia ago by the renegade black eugenicist Yakub. It is, strictly speaking, racist in that it insisted on one race’s superiority over another. It’s also nuts, and if Diane Abbott came up with anything like that then she’d be looking for a new job. But it had zero bearing on the way America actually worked. It was a fantasy of empowerment embraced by some inner-city black people who had very little power in their everyday lives. It wasn’t cheering stuff for a lefty liberal like me but it bore no comparison to actual, systemic white-on-black racism. There was no equivalency.

That’s an extreme example. Abbott’s comment is both reasonable and historically accurate. One group that her oversimplification did ignore, unfortunately, is the large number of white working-class people who are at the bottom of the social heap and don’t have the power to divide and rule anything. But they’re not the people falling over themselves to express their outrage. Well-positioned commentators like Guido Fawkes and Toby Young are, and they are deliberately misinterpreting her comment in order to score political points, with the (hopefully inadvertent) by-product of fostering racial tension among those who will only encounter it second- or third-hand. Because when a white person gets a chance to brand a black person racist, especially in the wake of the Lawrence verdict, they give themselves permission to pretend that privilege and power and the kind of deep-seated racism that ruins people’s lives are things that don’t exist anymore.

Maura Johnston at the Village Voice explains why Jessie J’s Price Tag was the most infuriating song of 2011. Jessie J is an appalling pop star on every level. Like Katy Perry without the sense of humour or Lady Gaga without the imagination, she combines bulldozering crassness with the delusion that she has Something Important to Say. On Price Tag sanctimony collides with zero self-awareness and rampant hypocrisy to create something truly noxious. As Maura writes: “In the context of other artists, the slightly ignorant ‘screw money, let’s party’ sentiment espoused by the lyrics might seem merely misguided, a tone-deaf attempt to capitalize on the bubbling anxiety about the world’s problems carried out by someone who hasn’t had to worry about what happens when ‘the money, money, money’ runs out in quite a while. But in the context of Jessie J’s prolonged multimedia assault, it’s downright offensive.” File under: Problem Mistakes Self For Solution.

Josh Hall at The Line of Best Fit gives the “commodified authenticity” of the Mumford-led faux-folk revival a good going over. Worth reading the whole thing, and I plan to investigate Alex Niven’s book Folk Opposition, but in a nutshell: “As Niven says, the lionisation of this painfully upper middle class clique is indicative of the fact that we apparently care neither about the creative industries being dominated by the offensively moneyed, nor about the fact that they are currently amusing themselves by siphoning through the rubble of English heritage in order to find something marketable.”

Alexander Billet at SociArts names “the nine most important songs of 2011″, including El Général, Arabian Knightz, Tom Morello, Lethal Bizzle, Lady Gaga and Lupe Fiasco. Not sure what the Amy Winehouse and Tony Bennett duet is doing there but it’s a good list with some songs that I either left out of my 11 for 2011 or completely missed last year.

After 15 years of being the interviewer rather than the interviewee, promoting 33 Revolutions Per Minute gave me an insight into how musicians come to dread certain questions. For me it was the inevitable: “Where are the protest songs of today?” It was a reasonable question but I could never find a satisfactory answer, because they certainly exist but you have to look hard for them. I wanted to be positive and celebratory, especially because most readers of the book seemed to take the ambivalent phrase “wondering if I had composed an eulogy” to mean “I have definitely composed a eulogy”. But I couldn’t pretend we were witnessing the dawn of a new golden age of the protest song.

Of course people wouldn’t have kept interviewing me if the book had been published a year or two earlier. I could never have imagined when I finished it, let alone started it, that 2011 would be a year of political upheaval to rank alongside 1968 or 1989, that Time’s person of the year would be “The Protester”, or that the most acclaimed album of the year would be PJ Harvey’s stunning song cycle about war and national identity. As an author I lucked out. As a citizen I was as concerned, bewildered and inspired as anyone else.

But I struggled to find music that spoke to what I spent most of my time thinking, talking and reading about. I didn’t expect much from the desperately conservative Top 40, which is currently dominated by an oligopoly of Simon Cowell, Bruno Mars, David Guetta, Pitbull and Rihanna with an iron grip that would impress the Russian Mafia. But it’s almost as hard to find sociopolitical traces in the more leftfield music celebrated by critics and bloggers, myself included. (Spotify users, here’s my four-hour 2011 playlist)

A pair of 20th anniversary reissues underlined what was missing: big records with the impatient, data-hungry modernity of Achtung Baby or the raging discontent of Nevermind (honourable exception: Fucked Up’s berserk, Thatcher-era, activist rock opera David Comes to Life). Most critically acclaimed records converged on what Kurt Cobain once called “the comfort in being sad”. They were a series of gorgeous cocoons, from the wintry solitude of Bon Iver, Kate Bush and James Blake to the sadface R&B of Drake, Frank Ocean and The Weeknd to the luscious blur of chillwave and cloud rap. Only tUnE-yArDs’ whokill reflected the motley communal energy of the street in 2011. The song of the year was Lana Del Rey’s Video Games, which, particularly if you discovered it via the original, copyright-flaunting Adam Curtis-style montage video, conveyed a profound sense of loss and disconnection.

How much does it matter? Whenever I’m posed the persistent question about The State of Protest Songs Today, I try to make clear that they matter to pop far more than they matter to politics. As Tom Morello told me when talking about music at Occupy Wall Street: “There aren’t enough musicians making songs? Who the fuck cares?” Activists, or indeed rioters, aren’t crying out for protest songs. But pop should be alert to what’s happening around it, as all art should, and music across the genres seemed blithely removed from the world outside. Escapism’s fine — I love escapism — but not to the exclusion of everything else.

So anyway, here is an entirely subjective, chronological, kind of scrapbooky list of 11 protest songs which seemed to me to capture the flavour of this extraordinary year.

Note: the live versions mentioned are the ones which I witnessed, not necessarily the versions in the YouTube clips.

JANUARY
1. Ramy Essam: Irhal (Leave)

With all due respect to Tunisian MC El Général’s revolutionary rap, if there’s one protest song that could be said to have made a tangible difference to the shape of 2011 it’s this. Unknown singer-songwriter Ramy Essam joined the curfew-defying encampment in Tahrir Square, listened to the chants, and shaped them into a song which he performed the following day. Inspired by western rock more than Egyptian music, it’s a striking, stirring tune which caught light immediately and made him an icon of the Arab Spring. It also proved very flexible. Ramy was about to perform it on February 11 just as news broke that Mubarak stepped down, so he hastily amended the lyrics to express his hopes for the future. In subsequent months, as the interim military regime proved almost as bad as Mubarak, he pointed the lyrics in the generals’ direction. In March he was arrested and beaten for his role in the ongoing protests. While protest music is a mere sideshow in the west, in North Africa it is exploding into life after years of censorship, both formal and self-imposed. It’s similar to what happened to African-American music in the late 60s: the lid comes off and all that pent-up frustration erupts in a thrilling and inspiring burst.

I was meant to meet Ramy when he played in London in the summer but his visa was denied at the last minute so I interviewed him for the Guardian via Skype. When he did finally make it to London I went to see him but was too ill to hang around and say hello. Then last month I was invited to speak about music and politics at a conference in Sweden where Ramy was being given the Freemuse award. He dedicated it to those killed and injured in Tahrir during the latest protests against the military, and the souring of the Egyptian revolution seemed to colour his performance of Irhal in the bar afterwards (the one in the YouTube clip). The triumphant optimism of February seemed a very long time ago. Coming out of the lift at the hotel later, somewhat drunk, I finally met him face to face and blurted out a few words of praise. He looked taken aback and very sober. “I hope we meet again some day,” he said politely as he backed away. We were both in the same hotel for one night but the countries we were flying back to the next morning were immeasurably different. I hope he stays safe.

FEBRUARY
2. PJ Harvey: The Words That Maketh Murder (Live at the Troxy, London)

It is extraordinary that the most celebrated album of 2011 (and my own favourite) is also the best example of political songwriting in years. I said what I had to say about Let England Shake in a blog post and an Observer interview with Harvey but the moment that sticks with me is her performance of The Words That Maketh Murder at the Troxy on February 27. This was just as Gaddafi had threatened to take bloody revenge on the revolutionaries in Benghazi and the Libyan rebels were beseeching the UN to intervene. At that point the UN resolution was still a couple of weeks away and it was anyone’s guess how the uprising would end. And Harvey sang the line she took from Eddy Cochran, turning a goofy joke into a deadly serious question: “What if I take my problem to the United Nations?”

I supported the UN intervention; many people I admire did not. When Harvey sang that line it seemed to accommodate both points of view, reminding me that Let England Shake is an album about the horror of war but not a straightforward anti-war album, and that her own views on the Libyan situation (which she characteristically kept to herself) could not be assumed based on the songs. I asked her later if the relevance of the line had struck her that night. “It strikes me every time we play that song,” she said. “Or indeed any of the songs on the record – how you can apply them to different situations. Certainly that night at the Troxy it had a different meaning because of what was happening at the time, and I’m sure it did for many people in the room as well.”

If Let England Shake had a clear message it would not be the complex work of art it is: a record that speaks of war, history and nationhood in many different voices, and consists of stories rather than slogans. To anybody wondering if political songwriting can still be rewarding to both the artist and the listener, it’s a beacon of inspiration.

APRIL
3. tUnE-yArDs: My Country

When doing interviews about the book I’ve tried (not always successfully) to emphasise that the absence of huge, agreed-upon anthems in the classic mould does not mean there aren’t any compelling political voices in music. In one of the articles I contributed to, a New York Times piece on the music of Occupy Wall Street, the writer cited the first track on Merrill Garbus’s whokills as an example, and it’s a brilliant one. In the long tradition of left-wing musicians adapting or referencing patriotic anthems to put forward a different vision of America, Garbus hijacks My Country ‘Tis of Thee from a globalist, feminist perspective: “My country ‘tis of thee/Sweet land of liberty/How come I cannot see my future within your arms?” It reminds me of the best Huggy Bear or MIA songs: fresh and joyous and combative and complicated — an activist party song for the 99%. There’s some great in-depth analysis of the album’s politics here.

MAY
4. DELS, Joe Goddard and Roots Manuva: Capsize

Whisper it but far too much modern political hip hop feels like homework to me. I politely approve of it but I listen to something else. Hence my pure joy at this three-pronged attack on the coalition. I love the come-together tenderness of Goddard’s chorus; the berserk brass fanfare — part marching band, part free-jazz outfit; the rhythm romping like a cartoon robot; the chaotic laser-gun finale; and the ideal blend of anger and wit from the MCs. Trust Roots Manuva to find very British language for hard-knock times. “Hey Del Boy, it’s Rodney here: no fools, no horses.”

JULY
5. The Decemberists: This Is Why We Fight (live at Newport Folk Festival)

I’m not the biggest Decemberists fan and The King Is Dead is not their best album, but This Is Why We Fight resonated with me as a battle song with real emotional heft. In July I went to the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island to interview Gillian Welch. Despite the well-heeled crowd and the marina full of yachts, it felt important to attend the festival that was the crucible of the early 60s folk revival and, in 1965, the battleground between the old leftist folk ideal and the rude insurgent energy of folk-rock. Seeger was on site, apparently, but I missed him. So all this was on my mind when Colin Meloy dedicated this to Seeger and to “the S-word: socialism”. That’s a pretty bold move in America, even at Newport — the applause was scattered. And he attacked the song with a passion that he hadn’t displayed anywhere else in the set. And in that setting, where so many old songs had been made new in difficult times, the lyrics had a strong and ageless glow. And it felt very much like an anthem after all.

AUGUST
6. Roots Manuva: Skid Valley (not on YouTube – Spotify link here)

Him again. For anyone living in London the week of the riots was a bizarre time. I live in Finsbury Park, just a few tube stops down the line from Tottenham, where the riots started on Saturday. On Monday evening there was an eerie sense of impending disaster in Finsbury Park — empty streets, shuttered shops — although it turned out the violence passed my neighbourhood by. Commentators struggled to explain what was happening, based on limited information and no clear idea of the motive. I wrote a blog about “crisis music” — songs like Ghost Town which captured a mood rather than a message and flailed around for recent examples. Fortunately one had arrived in the post a few days later on an advance review copy of Roots Manuva’s 4everevolution album. Skid Valley is the sound of despair — economic inequality eating away the soul: “Cost of life’s so cheap round here but the cost of living ain’t cheap round here.” Instead of the self-improving, aspirational spirit of, say, Stevie Wonder’s ghetto songs it offers weary fatalism and clotted rage. A few musical responses to the riots materialised on YouTube (my favourite being 2Kolderz’ homicidally fierce, Muse-sampling They Will Not Control Us) but Skid Valley was the song I kept returning to. In light of the riots it sounded to me like the bonfire before the flame is lit.

OCTOBER

7. Michael Piffington & Joey Ax: I Need a Dollar (Aloe Blacc cover)

I can’t really feature Aloe Blacc’s hit because it came out in March 2010 but it’s still the go-to song for TV news packages about the economic crisis and rightly so. It’s an unusually successful attempt at marrying the sorrowing ache of Gil Scott-Heron or Bobby Womack in the 70s with the crisp, hard rhythms of hip hop, and the lyric is universally applicable without being too vague: “Well I don’t know if I’m walking on solid ground/Cause everything around me is falling down.” It was inevitable that somebody would adapt it for Occupy Wall Street. The diverse, horizontal nature of OWS meant it was never likely to spawn a big, unifying anthem but it inspired dozens of songs on YouTube and this is a solid, timely example.

8. Grace Petrie: They Shall Not Pass (live at UCL)

I interviewed Grace for an article in the Guardian about young political musicians and found her breathtakingly eloquent and self-aware. She told me how she played this song on a guerrilla tour with comedian Josie Long on the day the House of Lords approved the NHS reform bill:

After we found that out we were all really down. Then we went out in Biddeford in Devon and it was absolutely pissing it down and these kids came out in the rain and sat with us and listened to us under a bus shelter and I played this song called They Shall Not Pass. I wrote it to mark the anniversary of the Spanish Civil War but it became about what we’re trying to do and what we’re trying to make. My girlfriend says to me a lot that you have to find a way to write something positive. You can’t just have sad songs. You have to write something rallying. It doesn’t come naturally to me. And I played that song at the end of the night and it did feel like they really got it. I think music is a very important thing. A lot of the most active people I know were in a fog of despair. The harsh truth is we were naïve to expect anything else from the Lords. They’re not the hearts and minds that we’re ever going to change but there are hearts and minds that we can change if we try and take it to them. That’s what we need to focus on.

Because of the Spanish Civil War theme and the socialist romanticism, this song reminds me of both Between the Wars and If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next. It has the same sense of endurance in the face of enormous obstacles, and of coping with defeat in the hope of something better. As I described in the Guardian piece, I saw her end her set at UCL with this and had the whole bar singing the refrain, “Save tomorrow!” Reader, I blubbed.

9. Tom Waits: Talking At the Same Time

A pessimistic reading of the history of protest songs suggests an irreversible decline since the early 90s. An optimistic one says that they will rise again and there has simply been a missing generation of political musicians. With a few exceptions (credit to Lupe Fiasco for sticking his hand in his pocket and donating 50 tents to OWS) musicians aged between 25 and 35 have been invisible this year. Most high-profile Occupy supporters — Tom Morello, Thom Yorke, Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja — are in their 40s, as are other politically astute artists like Nicky Wire, Damon Albarn and PJ Harvey. Some of the angriest songwriters are older still. Ry Cooder released a whole album of Woody Guthrie-style recession songs, Pull Up Some Dirt and Sit Down, and Tom Waits slipped a brilliant example onto Bad As Me. He doesn’t write many political songs but when he does they’re among his best. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) is arguably the greatest song about the Iraq War and Talking at the Same Time is a scourging, doom-sodden number about economic inequality: “Well we bailed out all the millionaires/They’ve got the fruit/We’ve got the rind.”

NOVEMBER

10. The Nightwatchman: World Wide Rebel Songs (live at OLSX)

To be honest I don’t think Tom Morello’s Nightwatchman songs work terribly well on record. Just as no studio version of a civil rights anthem can capture how those songs must have sounded out on the streets, sung by multitudes, the Nightwatchman songs seem too basic and obvious until you hear them in action. I was commissioned to write about Occupy for Q and arranged to travel down to St Paul’s with Morello on the afternoon of November 9, the same day as a large student demonstration. Because of the march the taxi stalled in traffic so we grabbed Morello’s gear and ran through streets lined with police, listening to the heavy whirr of the helicopters overhead. When we got there, Billy Bragg hugged Morello and told him he’d missed the performance on the cathedral steps and now couldn’t play because of OLSX’s agreement with the cathedral not to play amplified music during five o’clock evensong. Morello shrugged and said he didn’t need amplification. He ended up playing a three-song set next to the recycling bins. “Everybody cooperates and pitches in,” he told me. “I’m a musician so I employ my skills to help this movement. The thing that music does is it helps put wind in the sails of movements like this. There’s nothing like people marching in solidarity and singing rebel songs.”

I recorded some of the set on my phone but somehow, idiotically, cut off before this song. To give you a flavour of the event and Morello’s use of Occupy’s “mic check” tactic here’s a clip of him performing Rage Against the Machine’s Guerrilla Radio. The light was terrible but the sound’s OK. He starts by talking about Rage Against the Machine’s anti-X-Factor Christmas number one in 2009.

11. Chic: Good Times (Live at the London Forum)

While writing the book I pursued an interview with Nile Rodgers for two years to no avail, so it was an overdue pleasure to finally speak to him for The Word magazine when his excellent memoir Le Freak came out. We talked about his pet idea of the DHM (Deep Hidden Meaning) and why so many people overlooked Chic’s politics in the disco era:

Do you think people missed the politics because you were black and made apparently escapist pop music?

Right! You hit the nail on the head. How many times have you engaged in conversations with your friends about some big rock band and you’re sitting there deciphering the hidden code? I remember sitting with Bruce Springsteen one night and everybody in the studio was trying to decipher the deep hidden meaning of his song, going on and on and on about what it meant and Bruce was like, yeah, something like that. [laughs] No one ever sits around like that with Chic.… When we did Good Times we were ripping off everything we could think of. At the time we did Good Times the Daily News would report that we’re in the midst of the greatest recession since the Great Depression. And we thought, well, that’s how Chic started – Dance Dance Dance [1977 hit which pointedly references the Depression-set movie They Shoot Horses Don’t They?]. This focussed us, so we did our latest version of escapist music: our Great Recession song.

Would Chic have been more blatantly political without the restraining influence of [bassist] Bernard Edwards?

If I look at the music of the bands I had prior to Bernard, I would have to say probably yes. I had a band called New World Rising and we were playing with the Stooges and the MC5 and Elephant’s Memory and that was the norm. It was political. It was what we call movement music: gay rights movement, women’s movement, the Black Power movement. I would probably have never been a Gil Scott-Heron or a Leroi Jones because I never looked at myself as a philosopher or a star. They have this charismatic thing where they walk into a room and say, ‘Today I’d like to discuss so-and-so, brothers and sisters!’ I’m not that dude.

Chic’s concert at the Forum a few weeks later was the most joyous show I saw all year. During Le Freak, Rodgers invited the crowd on stage. Knowing that it had been written in a furious flurry after Rodgers and Edwards were turned away from the door of Studio 54 (it was initially called Fuck Off) made that gesture of inclusiveness seem more significant than mere stagecraft. The throng remained up there during the next number, Good Times: an ecstatic, celebratory song with a hard centre (“You silly fool/You can’t change your fate”); an escapist song which knows exactly what is being escaped; a party anthem for hard times; a stroke of genius.

This being an unapologetically personal list, I’d welcome any further suggestions in the comments.

On Tuesday the veteran commentator Simon Jenkins published an opinion piece in the Evening Standard which helpfully embodied the many varieties of condescension with which commentators have approached the Occupy movement. Jenkins, some of whose columns I agree with, is not the worst offender but his article demonstrates one thing loud and clear: he doesn’t understand how protest works.

“I regard myself as a card-carrying liberal on most things,” he writes (paging Phil Ochs), “but I am depressed when liberalism loses its moral backbone and appeases student idiocy.” He counters with it his own brand of idiocy, or at least blindness. He praises the law-abiding dignity of the 2003 Iraq war march as if unaware that the failure of that march to change government policy in the slightest damaged belief in the power of protest for years afterwards. He insists that protesters use the standard democratic channels as if oblivious to the growing sense that those channels are failing to address the problem. He blusters about the “nuisance” of the St Paul’s encampment as if oblivious that virtually every successful protest in history has been a nuisance to somebody. Nuisance is rather the point. But establishment figures like Jenkins regard protest as at best a novelty, at worst a threat and usually just an annoyance. The headline claims “This camp is not a proper protest.” Well yes it is, just not the one the Evening Standard would like.

What Jenkins appears to understand least of all is that there is an imbalance in mainstream political debate. To most of the media the language of power is smooth and acceptable; that of the powerless is messy and foolish. The well-spoken think tank wonk pushing free-market dogma is presented as the norm; the woolly-jumpered student arguing the opposite is an oddball extremist. When the left, which has far fewer newspapers and lavishly funded think tanks with deceptively bland names than the right, finds alternative outlets it is scolded for breaching etiquette.

Even the language of broadcasters like the BBC, which to the kind of tormented souls who haunt the Telegraph blogs is some kind of Marxist conspiracy, is skewed in one direction. The occupiers are reductively tagged as “anti-capitalist”, opening the door for glib attacks from the likes of Louise Mensch on any protester who has an iPhone or dares to use the local Starbucks. (Full disclosure: I typed the first draft of this blog on an Apple laptop in Starbucks before visiting St Paul’s yesterday. What a bastard.)

And there is little acknowledgment that the current system is faulty. Credit downgrades are solemnly reported as if the credit rating agencies hadn’t thoroughly disgraced themselves by letting reckless banking habits flourish unregulated in the years before the Lehmans collapse. Political decisions are judged on whether they appease or unsettle the markets. Had Jenkins listened to Radio 4’s World at One on Tuesday he would have heard ministers wringing their hands over their powerlessness to moderate unjustifiably high executive pay. Their excuse, heard so often these days, is that the markets run the game. The news actually enhances the sense that if you want things to change then you don’t turn to your government — you attack the all-powerful markets.

Hence the Occupy movement, which exists because of the sense that playing nicely doesn’t work. For decades we have been fed the line that the free market is a marvellous self-regulating machine that fosters competition and generates rewards for all. But the concept of “wealth creators” rings hollow when the only wealth they seem to be creating is their own. Competition, supposed to drive down prices, drives top-level salaries ever upwards. The idea that high pay is simply a fair reward for hard work, and that it benefits society as a whole, increasingly feels like a con job: a stick-up.

Due to age and temperament, I’m of the marching-and-voting tendency but I understand why for some people that’s not enough. Jenkins mentions the scale of popular anger towards the banks as if it erodes Occupy’s case rather than enhances it. He thinks that because it’s well-known that the executive class is running a racket where failure is rewarded at the top while ordinary employees and pension-holders take the punishment, then there’s no need to make the case on the cobbles of St Paul’s. He gives away his lack of understanding by accusing the occupiers of treating it as “fun”. They may be enjoying the experience but that’s not merely fun: it’s empowerment.

One of the most striking early insights into the August riots came from a rioter interviewed on Newsnight who said that it was the first time he felt truly empowered. For one night he wasn’t beaten down and impotent; the streets were his. Now looting’s a shitty form of empowerment but that desire to feel less like a victim of a system you cannot change is real and valid and surely even Jenkins would agree that camping outside St Paul’s is a more constructive way to express that desire than setting fire to cars, or indulging in the self-aggrandising antics of the black bloc. Jenkins, as a newspaper columnist, has no idea what it is like not to be heard. His opinions are aired and discussed. It’s surely not that much of a leap of the imagination to consider that in a time of crisis dissenters may want to have more of a voice than a vote every five years.

So when Jenkins tells the occupiers, with patrician hauteur, to “depart in good order” he is attempting to define the limits of protest from a position of power, as if the right to protest can be granted or withdrawn at any time, like a five-minute free swim in the school pool. Jenkins is writing for a paper which has made its position perfectly clear, warning on yesterday’s front page that the occupation might damage the Olympics, the Lord Mayor’s show and the Queen’s Jubilee. The implication is that the church, the royal family, the tourists — they matter. You’ve had your fun, now fuck off before the Queen gets here.

But protest is a human right and a British tradition every bit as important as the Lord Mayor’s show — maybe, whisper it, even more important. Instead of feeling like mugs forced to suck it up and tolerate Occupy, the public should be proud that such a thing can flourish. The fact that, despite persistent smears like the discredited heat-vision story which purported to show rows of tents left empty overnight, the public is so far broadly sympathetic is encouraging.

I went to St Paul’s yesterday afternoon and found a benign, creative, self-regulating community: Glastonbury on cobbles. There’s an information tent, a First Aid tent, a kitchen, an art gallery, a library, portaloos, recycling bins, messageboards, even a cinema. A girl was handing out copies of the Occupied Times newsletter. A circle of middle-aged men and women were singing The Times They Are a-Changin’. Everywhere I walked I overheard people engaged in political conversation, from full-time occupiers to curious passers-by to gents in suits with poppies on their lapels. What I didn’t see, despite what some would like you to think, were noisome drummers (who plagued Occupy Wall Street last week), anti-semitic conspiracy theorists, litter, vandalism, aggravation or Louise Mensch’s pernicious “fancy tents”.

If you enjoy taking cheap shots at hippies you’re in luck — a sign outside one tent pleaded, “Please donate incense!” – but it’s not just about the spirit of the 60s anymore than it’s just about the Anonymous contingent in V for Vendetta masks. Political action, from mainstream parties to marches, is about feeling less alone and this is an extreme example of a functioning community bonded by its ideals. The occupiers are striving to make their deeds match their words and create their own temporary society. Ideas are being thrown back and forth. Factional disputes have been held in check. In London, at least, it has been relentlessly civil and peaceful. The recent showdown with the drummers at Occupy Wall Street filled me with respect for those attempting to keep the occupations running smoothly without laying down hard rules. Yes, it’s inconvenient for some local traders and St Paul’s staff but you know what? The ongoing financial crisis for which nobody has been taken to task is pretty fucking inconvenient too, and at least Occupy has only cost two people their jobs.

The departure of church officials is something nobody at the camp wanted. If it were a protest against the Church of England it would already be acclaimed a triumph, but this was not the confrontation they were looking for. It’s a great shame that because of London’s geography and land ownership there is no more neutral site, equivalent to Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, for the occupation. Unfortunately, just as the media only tends to report on demonstrations when violence breaks out (not much has changed since police charged antiwar demonstrators in Grosvenor Square in 1968 and the next day’s papers fretted mainly about the welfare of the horses), it’s the method rather than the message that continues to dominate the coverage.

But news of a possible deal with the church and the Corporation of London proves that the occupiers are very far from being naïve troublemakers. To quote a “Dear General Public” letter taped to a fence at the site: “We are not some ‘special interest’ group. We are you.” Read the whole thing below. Not quite “student idiocy”, is it?

Certainly Occupy, in every city, faces many challenges. How long can it last without losing public goodwill? How long can it continue to duck demands for a clear agenda? How can it avoid dwindling to a whimper? But this is a brave and painstaking experiment in consensual democracy and part of an honourable, centuries-old tradition of British dissent. To tell them, as Jenkins does, to pack up and go home is to say that the experiment is unnecessary because the current system is working just fine. As many people know all too well, it isn’t.

Note: The Occupationalist is a remarkable unfiltered, real-time document of the progress of the Occupy movement worldwide.

Not a great quality clip but it’s really something for me to see this song led by 92-year-old Pete Seeger, not to mention Arlo Guthrie and Tom Paxton, 64 years after he first heard the song from Zilphia Horton at the Highlander Folk School. It’s a piece of living history.

Very excited to be interviewed in the New York Times today about – go on, guess – the current state of protest music in the context of OWS. And in such fine company: Tom Morello, Ry Cooder, Peter Yarrow and Anti-Flag.

The Guardian’s front page yesterday showed an Occupy protester wearing the mask that has become to current activists what Che’s face was to their parents’ generation, but missed a trick by calling it a mere Guy Fawkes mask. The crucial context – the one that shifts 100,000 masks a year and makes it the go-to emblem of anonymity and dissent – is Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s 1980s graphic novel V for Vendetta (or rather the 2006 film based on it). Here’s a nice Comics Alliance interview with David Lloyd about the politics of V and the ubiquity of the mask the artist designed.