The culture matters. Film, song, artworks, fiction and polemics are all means of galvanizing change, whether through creating a shared experience among different communities, educating people on others’ struggle or simply telling the stories of other human beings. And while we might know the facts about an issue thanks to the news, we understand and empathise better through specific stories.
With that in mind, here’s a selection of great works of creative thought born out of struggle and conflict. Take some time to engage with them and learn a little more about the circumstances in which they were created.
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
David Levesley, News And Features Editor, GQ.co.uk
When Citizen was released in 2014, it became an instant classic: a New York Times bestseller, a book discussed at length in every publication and a beautiful example of how one artist was trying to render the black experience visible. It is, you’ll be pleased to hear, as good as the praise suggested: a study of microaggressions in Rankine’s own life, the press’ racist treatment of Serena Williams, YouTube characters, Trayvon Martin, Hurricane Katrina, the riots in England in 2011… the list goes on, because the world has provided Rankine with an endless feed of traumas from which to draw melancholy, beauty and a searing re-evaluation of how we talk about racism. It is an incredibly concise, economical and yet haunting study of how “because white men can’t police their imagination, black men are dying”. You can read it in an afternoon and it will change every day afterwards.
A Seat At The Table by Solange
Olive Pometsey, Junior Digital Editor
When things feel too much, I always turn to Solange’s seminal 2016 album, A Seat At The Table. Not only does her angelic voice and delicate neo-psychedelic sound soothe the senses, but, lyrically, Solange’s words on the black experience, particularly black womanhood, are a place of refuge when it feels as though there’s no one else to turn to. “Don’t Touch My Hair” gave me the confidence to wear my heritage with pride, “Cranes In The Sky” taught me that it’s OK to feel pain, while interlude after interlude filled my soul with hope. This is a piece of art that is made by and for black people, but everyone will learn something from listening to it.
But its impact goes beyond the music. In her music videos and stage shows, Solange has consistently put black people at the forefront, showcasing our diverse beauty in a way that is seldom seen in mainstream media. Last year, at Lovebox Festival, my heart swelled as I saw a troupe of black dancers take to the stage to support her headlining spot. I often think about how different my childhood might have been had this album come out a decade or two earlier. At least now I know that my children will benefit from its power.
Hunger (2008)
Thomas Barrie, Features Assistant
Director Steve McQueen is far better known for 12 Years A Slave, which is potentially a little closer to home for those taking to the streets in Minneapolis and other US cities every night. But it’s Hunger, his 2008 biopic of IRA hunger striker and MP Bobby Sands, that every British person should watch to understand the nature of our own fraught colonial history. If you occasionally catch yourself (as I do) complacently looking across the Atlantic and thinking, “Thank God I don’t live there,” watching Hunger made me realise that, actually, our own police forces have carried out just as brutal acts within living memory. The film also features one of the great considerations of the legitimacy of violent protest, in the form of a 24-minute conversation between Sands and a Catholic priest as he prepares to starve himself to death. Everybody should know what happened in Long Kesh; it can, and does, happen here.
Nelson Mandela by The Special AKA
Dylan Jones, Editor-In-Chief
This classic protest song is not so much a response to conflict as a response to three decades of unacceptable attrition and incarceration. By the time Jerry Dammers’ group released this song, in March 1984, he had already been responsible for the ska revival, instigating the launch of the 2-Tone record label as well as encouraging the likes of Madness, The Selecter and The Beat, along with marshalling his own band, The Specials, and being the architect behind one of the greatest British singles of all time, “Ghost Town”, a record which mirrored the infamous riots that occurred in the UK in the spring and summer of 1981 (it is impossible to think back to those times without the swirling organ of the song bouncing around your head). If Dammers had retired then, he would have already secured himself a hefty chunk of any pop encyclopedia.
But, no, he wasn't content with that.
Having been to an anti-apartheid concert in London in 1983, Dammers felt inspired to write the song, although he had no idea of the huge impact it would have. It became a massive global hit and was played constantly at sporting events and at ANC rallies, becoming something of an anthem.
Far more importantly, it contributed to the groundswell of support that was building around Mandela’s possible release, and when he was eventually released, in 1990, after 27 years in captivity, Dammers’ record was acknowledged as one of the catalysts. It remains one of the best and obviously most effective protest songs of all time.
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
Kathleen Johnston, Social Content Editor
If you’re serious about educating yourself on the Black British experience then you really should read The Lonely Londoners, Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel about the Windrush generation. It’s widely hailed as to have signalled the birth of modern black British writing, offering a vision of London’s immigrant community and their struggles with racism, poverty, prejudice and alienation in a way that feels as timely today as it did in the 1950s.
The plot follows Trinidadian Moses Aloetta, a veteran émigré who, after ten years spent in London, feels he’s failed at getting anywhere despite the dreams of social mobility that brought him across the ocean. He and the other immigrants – most of whom are West Indian – band together in their isolation, forming a community by way of segregation, mythologising London through their own multicultural perspectives. The sense of self-hate, struggle, stagnancy and disappointment the characters feel shapes the book, but it’s not a depressing story. Resilience, humour and community shine through, as does the immigrant’s excitement at being in London at all, the city that, to them, was the “centre of the world”.
The novel is semi-autobiographical – Trinidadian Selvon moved to London in 1950 – and is perhaps best known for its game-changing use of Creolised English: this was the first time anyone had taken the language of West Indian people and made it accessible to a wide readership. What has always stuck most with me, however, is how Selvon shines a light on this piece of British history, contextualising how Britain’s West Indian community came to be. They didn’t just show up: they were invited to come by the empire. They were sold false promises and dreams about the city at the centre of Britain’s colonies, only for their hope to be crushed by scorn and indifference. Selvon captures the loneliness, the oppressive greyness of London – particularly for those who grew up in the tropical climes of the Caribbean – and the hurdles that black community have been up against since they arrived here: a life lived against the backdrop of racism, horrendous housing, exploitation and awful jobs.
It’s a stark reminder of what an atrocity the Windrush scandal really is. These immigrants came from former British slave colonies – most of which didn’t achieve independence until the 1960s – and yet white, native Brits dare to tell them they aren’t welcome, that they don’t belong here? To feel resentful about their presence is to be oblivious of our country’s violent history. It’s impossible to read this and not feel the shame of modern British politics. So much has changed, but so much remains the same.
I read The Lonely Londoners more than six years ago and I still think about it all the time. I think of Selvon’s characters when I pass through Bayswater (AKA the “water”), through Westbourne Grove and Brixton. I think of their London when, each year, I go to Notting Hill Carnival to celebrate the presence and contributions of the Caribbean community. I think of them when I’m in Victoria Station, where hopeful settlers would pass through immigration, and at Waterloo, where they’d arrive via boat-train, just like the friend Moses Aloetta goes to meet at the start of Selvon’s story.
Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos) by Woody Guthrie
Charlie Burton, Senior Commissioning Editor
On 28 January 1948, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service chartered an airliner to send 28 Mexican citizens to California’s El Centro Deportation Center. At around 10.30am the wing tore away from the fuselage and the plane slammed into Los Gatos Canyon, exploding on impact. Everybody on board perished.
When the singer Woody Guthrie learned about this disaster he was outraged by its racist contours. Not only was it unjust that America should benefit from the agricultural labour of these workers and then chase them home like outlaws, but the media didn’t mention any of the dead by name. They were referred to merely as “deportees”.
Guthrie was moved to write a poem about the tragedy that was later set to music and popularised by folk singers such as Pete Seeger. It’s an affecting work that provides the deceased with symbolic names to stand in for those that the radio hosts and newspapers refused them. It asks insistent questions: Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards? Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
Although it is about a single, specific event – one that occurred decades ago – this is as much a song for our times as it is for the 1940s. I saw Joan Baez perform it at the Royal Albert Hall in 2018 and she imbued it with universality, relevance and urgency. It made me reflect on just how long the cultural conflict of which those 28 Mexican people were victims has endured. Immigrants are still treated appallingly, they are still denied their humanity and Guthrie’s questions still have not been answered.
What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye
George Chesterton, Managing Editor
Though a thoroughly obvious choice in the circumstances, what marks What’s Going On out from the work of Marvin Gaye’s very best contemporaries (Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin and a host of other soul artists who confronted civil rights head on) is the perfect unity and consistency of its art. In many ways, the familiarity of the title song overshadows the rest of the album in popular consciousness, and the work must be judged from its first to last note, at which point you can recognise it is peerless.
Although it begins with songs that explore the alienation of the African-American experience in the early 1970s, especially in the context of the assassination of Martin Luther King and the Vietnam War, the album keeps reaching up and outwards – almost beyond belief considering the magnificence of that famous opening sentiment – until it finds a climax in “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”, a peak of sublime melancholy that is sustained on a plateau until the final moment of “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)”. There is some thrilling musicianship and Gaye’s voice is unique in its ability to convey pain, but that pain is transfigured through the consolation and joy or creation itself.
Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell
George Chesterton, Managing Editor
George Orwell’s record of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War is among the most honest and ambivalent accounts of any conflict, exploring the various and rival ideals on the Republican Left who resisted Franco’s fascists. Orwell writes of the ennui, the filth, the fellowship and hypocrisies of war in all its complexity, recounting his time in 1937 among one of the smaller foreign anti-Stalinist militias serving in Catalonia and Aragon.
Orwell describes the internecine rutting between groups such as his and the larger communist brigades that were guided – and often controlled – by Stalin’s Soviet Union, something that led to the book’s repudiation by much of Europe’s Left at the time and for decades after. Somehow, almost despite Orwell’s best interests, the memoir retains its romanticism: partly as a record of the lost cause and partly thanks to the author’s disarming insight into humanity’s best and worst qualities. As if that wasn’t enough, we owe so much of Animal Farm and 1984 to these formative experiences.
Born In The USA by Bruce Springsteen
Robert Leedham, Audience Manager
If the American Dream is as old as the Washington Monument, then so is the idea that it is in imminent and unprecedented peril. Only a Nazi or a communist or Fake News would disavow its existence in the first place. And yet Bruce Springsteen took that concept, draped it in the rabble-rousing facade of a thunderous synth line and blue-collar hollering and made it the centrepiece of his best-selling album.
How? “Born In The USA” was a phenomenally catchy pop song with a killer chorus and that’s all that a lot of people listened to. So much so that Ronald Reagan famously mistook its rebuke of the Vietnam War for populist fervour, proclaiming, “America’s future rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire – New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.”
Of course, The Boss’ riotous anthem is not about blind patriotism or working-class heroics. It’s the story of a man who came from nothing, fought for… something and came back home to even less than he had before. And he was one of the lucky ones: “I had a brother at Khe Sanh fighting off the Viet Cong / They’re still there, he’s all gone.”
Today, Bruce Springsteen stands as an American icon because of 1984’s Born In The USA. It’s an ever-timely reminder that loving your country and castigating its greatest failings are one and the same thing. Also, no one can resist a singalong protest song.
One In Ten by UB40
Bill Prince, Deputy Editor
Eighties New Pop veteran Edwyn Collins may have sung “Too many protest singers, not enough protest songs” in 1994’s “A Girl Like You”, but a decade earlier, around the time his former band, Orange Juice, were entering their pomp, it didn’t feel that way. Punk had sown the seeds, turning something considered apolitical and nihilistic in the hands of its US forebears into a potent form of frustration here in the UK, and by 1979 topped up – just as punk itself was mutating into the more commercial “new wave” – by the frightening prospect of four years of “Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher!” when the country’s first female prime minister was returned to Number Ten. It turned out to be eleven years, by which time punk’s mannered disgust had long since morphed into a form of aural direct action. How else to account for the flood of urgent, political protest that sallied forth from the radio, even topping the charts (none more so successfully than The Specials’ “Ghost Town”).
Proto-punks had The Wailers’ “Get Up Stand Up” (“Stand up for your rights”), but by the time Babylon was actually burning, triggered by the Brixton riots of 1981, there was homegrown, Brummie-born UB40’s “One In Ten”, released that summer and named for the percentile of unemployed in their native West Midlands. There are those who will always find UB40’s loose-hipped, soulful skank a little too easy on the ear to be regarded as true agit-pop, but they came from unimpeachable stock: founders Robin and Ali Campbell’s father, Ian, was an important figure in the 1960s folk revival and “One In Ten” feeds into the same illustrious tradition of proletarian protest, albeit with a tuneful reggae beat.
In a few short years, that percentage started to look rather optimistic, even if the message did not (“Nobody knows me but I’m always there / A statistic a reminder of a world that doesn’t care”). But now, as we head into another economic winterlude, it serves as a reminder of why there is – and always will be – such a thing as society, whatever proponents for its abolition hope for.
Rage Against The Machine’s 1992 debut album cover
Paul Henderson, Associate Editor
“I just felt it applied in the kind of message we were trying to put at the forefront of our music,” explained vocalist Zach de la Rocha in 1992, when asked for the origin of the name of his band. “I wanted to think of something metaphorically that would describe my frustrations toward America, toward this capitalist system and how it has enslaved and exploited and created a very unjust situation for a lot of people.”
Nearly 30 years on, that message and mission statement is as depressingly relevant to the current political situation as it was when it was directed at the George Bush administration. RATM’s music was a fusion of rock, punk and hip hop that expressed so much anger, frustration and disappointment in their social landscape that it was impossible to ignore, but it was the cover of their eponymous debut album that helped communicate so much about what the band stood for and helped contribute to the cultural awareness seemingly lacking at the start of the 1990s.
The image, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Malcolm Browne, was taken in Saigon in 1963 as monk Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire in protest at President Ngo Dinh Diem’s treatment of Buddhists. Not only did it shock the world, but it also helped convince President John F Kennedy to withdraw support for the government in Vietnam, saying of the image, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”
And yet at the time it was considered too graphic for some. “The New York Times did not run it,” Browne told Time magazine shortly before his death. “They felt it was too grisly a picture that wasn’t suitable for a breakfast newspaper.” Nearly 60 years later, with the tragic images of George Floyd bringing new pain but an all-too-familiar feeling of injustice, it begs the question: why has nothing changed?
That responsibility now falls on all of us. We cannot turn away and ignore what is happening, no matter how hard it is to face the truth. Unlike Thich Quang Duc, George Floyd was not given a choice. Surely we don’t have one either… We must do better.
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