Sing Out!

Only a pawn in their game?

Bush's taste in music runs more to Kenny Chesney than Pete Seeger, but El Presidente appears to have inspired a revival of the protest song. Will this be his great legacy to the arts?

Beginning with Woodie Guthrie in the Dustbowl '30s, the protest song reached its acme in the late-50s and early '60s, although folk singers were still getting killed on the charts by Frankie Avalon. Recent world events (and you know what I'm talking about) appear to have resuscitated the form, Lazarus-like, from the dead.

I first became aware of this phenomenon in early 2002, at a Dan Bern concert in Minneapolis. Bern performed a little ditty called "Talking Al Kida Blues." There has been a veritable flowering since then, Pearl Jam's "Bushleauger" being an apt example (also see The Decemberist's "16 Military Wives"). Though this particular art form has a shorter shelf-life than cottage cheese, when well done it can still be kind of rousing.

Thus we come to a laudable addition to the protest song canon, "When the President Talks to God," by Bright Eyes (a.k.a. Conor Oberst). A pretty scathing performance from "The Tonight Show"(!) can be found here. It's not quite "Only A Pawn In Their Game," but somewhere Phil Ochs is smiling.