Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements Essay

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Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements by Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks explores how music can be a tool for social movement. Despite the fragmentation and chaos of social movements, the authors identify music’s main tasks in forming public consciousness: education, conversion and recruitment, mobilization, and service to the devotees (Rosenthal and Flacks 123). Rosenthal and Flacks discuss how music influences movements and the social context of its creation and perception. By itself, popular music is neither emancipatory nor revolutionary. However, it can become such within the framework of a social movement when endowed with such properties.

Defined by a range of complex uses, functions, and effects, the music-movement bond is the bond in which music helps to create, maintain, change and reflect social reality, sometimes in a single act. Rosenthal and Flacks emphasize the theoretical transmission-reception-context triad: scholars must first study transmission, which entails how an artist expresses their message lyrically, musically, aesthetically, and through various other modes of performance and identity. Secondly, it is necessary to study perception, which examines how audience members perceive and understand the distributed genre, artist, and content. Lyrics are only one of the elements of conveying meaning and establishing a connection between music and movement (Rosenthal and Flacks 124). It is not only the artist’s intention that is important, but also how the music affects those who listen to it. The authors establish important dialogic relationships between the music creator and the listeners, which endow the music with certain specific properties.

As an example of such perception, the song of the American labor unions is mentioned. “A Miner’s Life Is Like a Sailor’s Life” is a parody of the 1890s Life is Like a Mountain Railway. Dick Gaughan sang “A Miner’s Life Is Like a Sailor’s Life” on his 1986 True and Bold album of Scottish miners’ songs. He notes that he changed several lines to make them specific to NUM Strike in his song archive. Originally written to support and rally trade unions, the song became one of the symbols of the protest movement against the weakening of the power of trade unions in 1984. When analyzing this song, not only the original author’s message is important, but the image of influence transferred through generations on the thoughts and feelings of people belonging to a certain profession (Rosenthal and Flacks 146). This song meets the goals and objectives of a suitable song for a social movement. First, it educates by insisting on the growing strength of the unions. Secondly, it serves the purpose of recruitment: it calls on all those involved to unite against the oppressor. Thirdly, indirectly, it calls for mobilization and an end to the oppression of free people. Finally, it promises a peaceful ending for the people involved in the protest, fulfilling the purpose of serving the devotees.

When listening to this song, one feels the mood and the desire for change for the oppressed. There is a desire to plunge into the history of the miners’ union movement, to learn more about their goals and objectives, successes and defeats. In general, the mechanism of influence on the public consciousness of this particular song is clear: there is harsh criticism of the existing order, a call for unity against the oppressor, and promises of a brighter future. The question that arises in connection with the study can be formulated as follows: what conditions must a song meet to become a symbol of a social movement?

Work Cited

Rosenthal, Rob, and Richard Flacks. Playing For Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements. Routledge, 2016. pp. 123-179.

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