Now that spring looks like it may be coming after all, I’m hoping the Resistance will get even more traction, especially at the No Kings protests planned for March 28.
I’m not casting any shade on Bruce Springsteen or Jesse Welles or any of the great anti-war songs of our youth but IMO, we need a good, rousing marching song specifically for our time. I’d like to nominate the Scottish ballad “500 Miles.” It’s the perfect antidote to Lee Greenwood and always makes me want to get up and egg an ICE facility.
Would any of you all who are songwriters like to generate some appropriate lyrics or should I just ask AI?
I’m attaching the video of the Imagine Dragons 2014 performance in Scotland. If anyone can sit still listening to this – well, you gotta be half dead!
500 Miles is a great song for serenading the London Marathon runners as they gasp past where I live, but as a protest song? What protester wants to fall down at the final hurdle?
I’m sorry, but while I love “500 Miles”, the thought of using the most upbeat feel-good track of the 1990s as a protest song seems kind of silly to me. What’s next - “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies?
If you want a song from that period, how about an old standby like Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name”? I’d say the lyrics are more pertinent, too.
I feel like another song set to the same music might be more appropriate…
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.
All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.
Or for something aspirational (if a bit vague) how about Parry’s setting of Blake’s Jerusalem (you could change the references to England to “this/these our” without affecting the scansion)
Of course there would need to be new lyrics – it’s the strong beat that holds the appeal. And what’s wrong with a “upbeat feel-good” protest song anyway?
I didn’t realize until I’d started the thread that there was already one for protest songs:
A question is if we want positive, upbeat songs, or songs that point out how fucked we all are. I’m prone to the latter, but seems like the thread is geared to the former, so I fear such would be a most minor threadshit.
We could start by changing the lyrics of “500 Miles” to “I would march 500 miles…”
Also shout-out to Ralph Chaplin, 1887-1961, IWW writer, cartoonist, poet who wrote “Solidarity Forever.” In addition to the verses Smapti quoted there are
When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.
It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;
Now we stand outcast and starving ’midst the wonders we have made;
But the union makes us strong.
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, multiplied a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.
‘Four dead in Ohio’ still makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. We need something that has that kind of impact on folks. Maybe that old csny anthem could still work.
