The question of why Trump’s Iran war hasn’t sparked a wave of anti-war protest music is actually very simple.
The overall American left has been stuck when it comes to effective anti-war activism. The way the US does war nowadays isn’t Vietnam but El Salvador: instead of sending in a bajillion troops to invade/occupy the US just funds proxy armies and now uses drone/aerial warfare. That’s what Obama did in Syria last decade, for instance.
The anti-war music we’re all used to was very much a product of the 60s New Left, and there was no 60s New Left without the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War. The youth were afraid of being drafted into a bullshit war that the U.S. couldn’t win. But we don’t see mass boots on the ground today, and because of that, we don’t see a mass response to war in the cultural realm. In order for Billie Eilish to be “John Lennon”, Iran needs to be Vietnam (Gd forbid). In order for Kehlani to make a “What’s Going On?” or a “Someday We’ll All Be Free” Iran needs to be Vietnam. The war needs to conform to a method of warfare that the left knows how to effectively oppose. It’s morbid and disgusting but that’s sadly the case.
And assuming the “woke” pop stars make music in response to this conflict, what will it contain? It won’t be universalist anti-war or anti-imperialist anthems but centre entirely on “I hate Trump, this war is about Epstein, AIPAC bad”. Will be highly dated in three years once Trump and his goons leave office.
Or maybe it's because virtually all record music labels and music platforms are ownedby zionist billionaires now.
>>2782020Kehlani went against her label by speaking up for Palestine and still came out unscathed.
>>2782009The main reason “Middle America” (Trump’s supporter base) opposes the Iran War isn’t because they’re afraid of their 20-something sons and daughters being sent to war but because they’re concerned about the price of gas going up. That’s it. They voted for Trump because they wanted him to lower the cost of living. How do you make anti-war music when the message isn’t “we’re being sent to die for empire” but “I can’t afford to fill up my car at the pump”?
>>2782009I would more or less agree. The only exception I can think of is Holiday for the Iraq War. Interestingly though for after Iraq I can't think of a single song. Nothing for Afghanistan, Syria, nothing for Venezuela (not a war but similar type of aggression), and now nothing for Iran.
>>2782009The gaza genocide has sparked some music, hinds hall by macklmore comes to mind. Iran has also been pushing their own music using their A.I lego videos. Instead of laminating about being sent to die for empire people sit at home and root for empire to die. So you thats a very good development and great opportunity. So I don't think we need good songs, we need to create a concrete post U.S empire foreign policy to give to propagate among the masses. For once uncheck imperialisms is not just a given anymore. The U.S isn't able to export the domestic cost of imperialisms through drones and special forces. A draft would just accelerate this
>>2782024Why would they care about brown people getting bombed? Americans only care about wars when wars affect them directly.
>>2782009much like protest, protest music is useless. the people need correct theory and correct practice. lenin never put any of his works to song.
>>2782146One is the superior Metallica Anti-War song and I'm pretty sure it's based on Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
Zoomers are cucks and do their anti-war messaging on xitter, that's it. Doing something publicly might be "cringe" so zoomers don't do it. Some here talk all the time about materialism and changing the tide of history, the "real movement" blahblahblah all day, and then they just sit around and wait.
>>2782154Exactly what I'm talking, the "correct practice" that never comes.
>>2782143ESL, what does he man by this?
Lumpens have completely seized the "protest music" world and turned it into angry rap, hardcore anti-social noise, punk, drill music about killing the rich, and guttural death metal. It's basically all nihilistic, anarchistic, and adventurist now. There's hardly any anti-capitalist modern music that isn't. Marxists lost the art marketplace first to capitalists, and then in the underground to nihilists and anarchists.
>>2782172Means that it did fuck all.
I think USanians don't consider themself at war until they see boots on the ground.
>>2782009YOU don't listen to protest music anymore because you rely on Spotify's algorithm to find new music.
>>2782187This is true and what OP was getting at.
Wasn't the 60s new left a CIA creation?
>>2782181symphonic music
> decrepit and outdated> elitist, unrelatable, dying dead culture> only exists as an outlet for wealthy patrons to flex their moneyEDM
> accessible and relatable> part of a living social culture of garage shows, gigs, and raves> created by and for the working classyour meme sucks and you're retarded for posting it over and over and over and over.
>>2782215no, it was a dead left, the cia and fbi wrecked it further just for the thrill of it
>>2782177I agree, it's honestly sad how anarchism, nihilism, liberalism and even nationalism just prevail among retards in various music scenes.
There's hardly any Marxists/Socialists who make any music, and it's not because they're bad or uninterested in music but because most of retards in these music scenes just follow anarchist, nihilist or nationalistic ideologies just because of popularity of said ideologies among the scenes.
Most of these people don't even understand anarchism, nihilism or nationalism and they don't even give a fuck about anything related to praxis of these ideologies.
If Marxism somehow got itself into some music scene then suddenly there would be thousand of self-proclaimed Marxists.
Also notice how almost all of music scenes are in some way anti-communist and even harass communists.
Joe Hill and Víctor Jara were literally martyred for making protest songs.
What will happen to Billie and Kehlani when they do the same? Right, they’ll get called “stunning” and “brave” by white liberals. Maybe they’ll get a bit of criticism from the right but nothing close to outright persecution. Not a single musician has ever been killed for speaking out against Israel.
>>2782181It's such a terrible /pol/-convert-tier meme, the kind of guy who runs around and scream "MUH USSR WAS SOCIALLY CONSERVATIVE"
>>2782752Victor Jara was the real shit, RIP.
Because the left has been a massive failure since 2020 when it liquidated itself into the Democratic Party in the name of fighting Trumpism and covid. Your average American “anarchist” or “Marxist” is merely a Democrat in a keffiyeh.
>>2782229>wasn't it mostly stuff like "sugar sugar" and all that?I thought the red flags in the background of this video probably drove some conservatives into schizo paranoia.
>>2782987>Because the left has been a massive failure since 2020 when it liquidated itself into the Democratic PartyThe left didn't fail "when" it liquidated itself into the Democratic Party, the liquidation happened as a result of its failure.
>>2783828Why would academic elites hold entire workshops on Guthrie of his music is so threatening to said elites?
>>2783810NYU also bans all criticism of Zionism. Anyone who cares about Palestine should boycott that institution fully.
>>2782235i like orchestral music and EDM
>>2783810During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!).
>>2783810>>2783988How about attending the NYU workshop and tell them this?
Or, you’re free to comment on their posts:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXMoISAkRoO/ >>2783988Was Guthrie an actual hero to the working-class? Seems like his music was only rediscovered sone time later.
Any anti-war music made in 2026 will simply be a campaign tool for the Democrats.
>libtard muh music will be le revolution
>>2784036Culture is an important aspect of revolution. Read Gramsci.
>>2784127
you just described literally every kind of music that requires instruments or training. might as well kill all humans because creativity is bourgeois idealism or something. go masturbate and chill out you absolute dweeb.
trying to tie anything back to a 'culture war' in the sense of focusing criticism and action on 'art' and 'artists' in the abstract is the opposite of productive. there are based and unbased artists and subcommunities in nearly every single genre of art, there is the coveted by white boys 'heavy metal' music made by communists and fascists alike. the EDM played at wealthy and exclusive high end clubs is going to be vastly different to the EDM played at underground illegal raves. The wealthiest child raping human flesh eating war criminals of the world listen to punk, rap, metal, everything under the sun - because they own culture generally, not just specific subcultures and genres.
what should be analyzed, discussed, criticized, is the bourgeois capitalist stranglehold on essentially every form of popular and elite culture. they control or own the entire media industry.
reducing the actual realistic discussion of the material reality of the maintenance of capitalist cultural domination to 'culture war' is idiotic enough, but reducing even 'culture war' down to 'genre war' is fucking absolutely braindead.
if you said something this stupid to my face in real life i would slap you.
>>2783810Tweet this to Caleb and see what he says.
I think a much better question we should be asking is: why is every leftoid (and even liberal) so desperate for protest music now? What would the appeal of protest music be? Why does everyone want pop stars to be political?
OP is correct that the material conditions that gave rise to the protest music of the 60s and 70s don't exist today and will never exist again. Warfare isn't waged with troops on the ground but through technological advancement. If anything, if Billie Eilish or whomever wanted to make "profound" anti-war music she would release a song lambasting the evils of technology and the death machine it creates (of course, she is functionally retarded so I don't know how that would go).
The American left has been obsessed with reviving the 60s New Left for decades now. I was at Occupy Wall St. and remember people there saying Occupy would revive the militant left of the 60s. Boy were they wrong. But the question that needs asking is: why were they wrong?
>>2782009Makes sense if you’re talking about war.
Makes no sense if you’re talking about why we don’t see protest music about police brutality, racism, sexism, the destruction of abortion rights, class inequality getting considerably worse, ICE terrorism, and so on.
>>2785046Okay. Go off-topic all you want.
>>2785997What? Anon is correct and didnt even disagree with your post
>>2782235>art vs sloppa<art is rare and unaffordable, therefore it's bourgeois>sloppa is a plenty and cheap therefore it's proletarian Vs. bolsheviks:
>We must eradicate sloppa and bring art to the massesYou are a reactionary.
>>2786108how about we just let people listen to whatever music they want to. radical idea i know
>>2786108Attacks on sampling are thinly-veiled anti-Blackness.
>>2782155I thought Disposable Heros was the best overall but One is okay, the jam version of the video is better than the one with movie inserts for MTV.
Why is it the job of pop stars to sing about political issues anyway?
There's plenty tho
>>2786483sampling isn't inherently black, but I'll tell you what it is, it's a rejection of intellectual property which is what nearly all anti-sampling attitude is a thinly veiled defense of: intellectual property.
>>2782009>protest musicI saw at least a few (low key and probably not very popular) tracks against ICE, if that counts as revolutionary music. that one guy, cyborg9k, did a song about luigi mangionie, and what about the song 'rich men north of richmond'? the rightoids claimed it as one of their cultural artifacts, but it was a very blue-collar-working-class-solidarity type of song. the point being that some contemporary music can be categorized as "protest music", though I guess none of these examples have anything to do with the iran war specifically, I just wanted to comment on the notion that 'revolutionary music never gets made anymore' as something I disagree with.
it's just that music has morphed into a sort of accessory to online content i.e. you 'blow up' and get noticed if your song is associated with some online personality or meme, which is to say that traditional music consumption habits (i.e. you buy an album and listen to the whole thing; you make a playlist on some streaming platform and listen to it intently) are likely to have declined in favor of a passive consumption that happens simultaneously with other forms of media. it's not that people no longer listen to music; it's more like music aficionados are a distinct subculture at this point, and music isn't consumed in isolation by the average person anymore most of the time.
>The war needs to conform to a method of warfare that the left knows how to effectively opposewhy can't we just oppose war in the abstract, or on principle? also why do we even need new protest music, when old protest music is still effective and classic at this point? the last 25 years have given us:
https://youtu.be/kqkGY9jsBOwhttps://youtu.be/vzQ3yjpYZishttps://youtu.be/q6GyTBVAF4whttps://youtu.be/MuZhnNR6vzchttps://youtu.be/c7RUeMCZL3Qand if you go back even farther you can find more examples of 'fuck war' type music. just look at the whole 'rock against bush' collaborative album that was made in the early-mid 2000s.
>>2789486>what about the song 'rich men north of richmond'? the rightoids claimed it as one of their cultural artifacts, but it was a very blue-collar-working-class-solidarity type of song.Yeah the lyric attacking fat people was totally in-line with class solidarity, as if there are no fat proles.
>>2789504>I wish politicians would look out for miners>And not just minors on an island somewherehe's effectively saying that the whole 'esptein's island' controversy isn't as important of a scandal that it should supersede the interests and concerns of actual working class people. people will object to this by saying that this line is meant to downplay the importance of such indecent behavior by the wealthy elites, but in my mind he's saying that, in an ideal society, such a scandal would either not have taken place at all, or wouldn't dominate the headlines and network airtime over more pressing issues, which supports the point that the dude has working class interests at heart, and considers them to be of the highest priority in political discourse.
>Lord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eat>And the obese milkin' welfare>Well, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 pounds>Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge roundsthe imagery conjured here may be slapstick or comical to some, or even blatantly offensive, but it serves as a juxtaposition between two different negative outcomes that are the result of poverty, which we know is a symptom of the fallibility of capitalism. whether you're starving in the street or subsisting on low quality pastries composed of bleached and enriched flour and high fructose corn syrup, you're a victim of the aforementioned impoverishment that arises when corporate interests are given more precedence than the needs of the populace.
>Young men are puttin' themselves six feet in the ground>'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin' them downand then he segues into some lines that acknowledge the hardships that men face in our contemporary society, without pressing on any particular issue aside from suicide, which is more a negative outcome for men who are unable to find their way as a result of said issues, than a cause of anything.
furthermore…
>These rich men north of Richmond>Lord knows they all just wanna have total control>Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do>And they don't think you know, but I know that you do>'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end>'Cause of rich men north of Richmond…he remarks on the desire of government and corporate interests to instate invasive surveillance into the private lives of citizens for the sake of control and manipulation more than for an upholding of the law or any noble endeavor, and then remarks on the devaluation of the dollar, which effectively renders the working class' labor progressively more worthless in comparison to the amount of value they receive as a result of said labor.
so, yes, it's a largely pro-working-class song, even if you want to argue that those lines about obesity are in poor taste or hamfisted, but it's not like they didn't serve a purpose within the greater context of the commentary he was presenting.
>>2789526All of this is reaching.
Besides, most of the American working-class isn't white, so why are we propping up a white guy as the "voice of American workers"?
>>2789527>it's reaching because…because it just is, okay!okay?
>Besides, most of the American working-class isn't whitewhat's race got to do with it? if you're working class in america to day, you're proletariat, regardless of race.
>so why are we propping up a white guy as the "voice of American workers"?nobody's doing anything, I merely explained how the song could be interpreted as a pro working class song. do you mean to tell me that you think a white guy could never be propped up as "the voice of american workers"?
>>2789526>he's effectively saying that the whole 'esptein's island' controversy isn't as important of a scandal that it should supersede the interests and concerns of actual working class peopleNo it's a double-entendre where he use multiple meaning of lookout to say "I wish they helped workers instead of diddling kids", he doesn't litterally means politicians shouldn't only look at that scandal
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