The problem for anyone trying to make what Bob Marley once called “rebel music” today is not that there’s too little rebellion out there but, by Western pop culture’s liberal definition, that there’s way too much. Since the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll, popular music has been de facto rebellious, at least insofar as the term is defined by record labels and soft-drink ads. All it takes to be a rebel in America, it seems, is to be young and loud. In a music culture where a rebel is the Backstreet Boy with a goatee or the rapper with a lifestyle like a CEO’s–where being political means playing party music at the odd benefit for Tibet–the mantle hardly seems worth fighting for. The angry rockers and folkies of the ’60s and ’70s had it easy: How hard was it, really, to denounce war and societal repression to an audience of kids who had less than selfless motives to want to get high, laid and not shot? Today Western popular music is aimed at largely comfortable, unrestricted youth in a country at peace. The political battlefields, more and more, are economic–class conflict, globalism, the environment. So making rebel music in some sense means attacking the pillars of your Nike-clad audience’s own comfort. How, in other words, do you convince listeners with high-tech jobs and PlayStations that they’re working on Maggie’s farm? Through the ’90s, that was essentially the mission of Rage Against the Machine, which covered that Dylan classic on its last album, Renegades . Apropos of another of its Renegades covers, Kick Out the Jams, Rage aimed to be a modern-day MC5, using hard-edged music to ram through a hard-nosed message that was less about peace and love than about old-fashioned, a-pink-slip-and-a-six-pack populist anger. But they were also one of the few acts in recent years to crack the charts with an unfiltered political message. They were, in their words, “calm like a bomb.” Even higher-profile, socially conscious artists like Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen have seemed increasingly like museum docents in their recent work, curating the legacy of ’30s-era populism. But step outside the borders of the world’s hegemon–to Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America–and you find a different scene: namely, musicians and an audience who really have something to bitch about. Protest music in other parts of the world is complicated by a dynamic unfamiliar to Western listeners. American political music is traditionally an individual’s complaint about the surrounding society. Standing on a street in Lagos or on a beach in Brazil, or staring down an invading army of Pokemon and Britneys, however, it can be equally as radical to speak out for your society. To a protest singer in Mali or Haiti, is the target a government that stifles personal freedoms or a global juggernaut that threatens local traditions and economic autonomy? Is the oppressor the state, which might jail you for playing your music, or Western entertainment conglomerates, which can so thoroughly marginalize your music that you might as well be in jail?
