21st Century Protest Music: What is the music of Occupy Wall Street?

Amplify’d from www.npr.org

As a veteran of many street protests and an amateur historian of popular music rabble rousing, I've been waiting for someone to grab center stage in Zuccoti Square and emerge as a new Bob Dylan or Joan Baez. This political movement gone viral, which some identify as the leftist version of what the Tea Party wrought a couple of years earlier, has no leading musical voice. Who will emerge to take up the challenge, to write the 21st-century version of the great hymn of the labor and civil rights movements, "We Shall Overcome"?

Mostly, though, the music of Occupy Wall Street has been generated not by known performers or even people who necessarily call themselves "artists." It's emerged from the cloud that's spread on the ground. The same 21st-century style organizers who've been holding twice-daily meetings to come to consensus, privileging process over a set of clear objectives, are engaging in the kind of culture-making that dominates the Tumblr-loving, home recording-making, music industry-scorning future thinkers taking pop into its next phase.

At the Occupy protests from New York to San Francisco, people do their own thing and find themselves coming together. Read more at www.npr.org

 

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