“Where are all the protest songs?” (Part I)

The unshakeable legacy of the music and politics of the 1960s

Contemporary musicians are often accused of being apolitical. Most people who actually listen to contemporary popular music know that’s nonsense. So where does this view come from?

The exploration of this question was the driving force for the initial stage of my PhD thesis – which began life as a loose set of ideas about the links between politics and popular music and finished up as Politics in a different key: Popular music and changing modes of political participation.