2021: the year of the worst protest songs ever written
The sentiment of nostalgia for 2020 has become surprisingly common, as if the global pandemic that upended life for years was merely a quirky, prosecco-fuelled interlude of Zoom quizzes and extra time off work. Personally, I’d sooner dive headfirst into a Glastonbury toilet after a festival catered entirely with Vindaloo than revisit the nightmare that was 2020. Yet, occasionally, a thought creeps in: “Was 2021 even stranger?”
After all, it’s one thing to live through it, but it’s quite another actually to reckon with it…and reckon we did. We got the first records released reckoning with the pandemic, albums like Hayley Williams’ Flowers for Vases / Descansos, Turnstile’s Glow On and Tyler, The Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost all taking on a whole new meaning after 18 months indoors, intentional or not. On the other end of the spectrum of taste, quality, and relevancy, we got the music unmistakably reckoning with 2020.
We had a bunch of multi-millionaires who probably wouldn’t have even noticed the pandemic if they weren’t rotting in front of the TV all day in palatial estates. That’s right, ever with their fingers on the pulse of culture, we got pandemic protest music. The likes of Eric Clapton, Van Morrison and the most darkly poetic case of falling to the dark side since JK Rowling and Morrissey all put their two cents in.
These rich, entitled failures, bored with their lives of ludicrous comfort and fulfilment, decided that this was just the hill to die on. Not literally, unfortunately. In desperate need to feel wronged by something for the first time since they got their pocket money in shillings, they flexed their long, atrophied musical muscles. In doing so, they excreted some of the most embarrassing nonsense ever inflicted on the listening public in the name of “activism”.
Clapton and Morrison’s effort ‘Stand And Deliver’ is one of the most pathetic things either man put to record. Considering Clapton once made an album about wanting to fuck his best mate’s wife, that’s a damning statement. Liam Gallagher’s evolutionary predecessor, Ian Brown, also got in on the act, with his ‘Little Seed, Big Tree’ stating his anti-vaccine stance with all the grace you’d expect from a man who charged £40 to watch him gibbon-dancing alone on stage to backing tracks on his last tour.
The list goes on. Its legacy continues today as an era of witless, tuneless, pointless right-wing “protest music” climbs its way up the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. I could point and sneer at them more. Tell you all about how ‘Rich Men North Of Richmond’, ‘Try That In A Small Town’, and the like are poisonous perversions of the very idea of counter-culture. Propping up the very governments that are trying and mostly succeeding in legislating the erasure of other humans by dressing up as the radical non-conformists of yesteryear, but I’m just so tired of it all. I know you probably are, too.
So instead, a record that actually reckoned with the pandemic in a very real way. Charli XCX’s masterful How I’m Feeling Now was actively written in the first weeks of lockdown, sometimes over Zoom with contributions from her fanbase. It’s an artful, empathetic study of how it feels to live in “interesting times.” Give it a spin now instead of anything else mentioned here.
