Sez you.
But I'm not sure I see
> what's the problem with
> recycling. Why should anti-war sentiment be
> expressed mainly in songs?
> We've produced tons of anti-war movies much sooner
> than they ever had in
> Vietnam. Isn't that a more sensible form for
> expressing that sentiment?
Antiwar movies, videos, You-tube clips, etc., are all great. But what Singing together does is unify a group of people, build solidarity and strength, enhance that common bond, make you more than a passive spectator. If you never experienced it, watch the scene in Harlan County USA where Florence Reece herself (I think) starts Which Side Are You On? at a miner's rally, and one by ten, by dozens, these voices join in. From the inside it is far more powerful. I'm now old enough to remember singing The Internationale among a crowd of reds too large to see (from where I was) the edges of and meaning it.
It did something passively watching a movie or video clip done by someone else (even Harlan County USA) couldn't do, or that could be done by somebody else's performance of a good but singable antiwar song, or even indeed, a performance, such as Billy Bragg used to do, of The Internationale itself. It has something with doing it yourself together with others. It is a sort of collective action. And heartily sick as I am of We Shall Overcome and We Shall Not Be moved, and other updated civil rights era songs, themselves updated spirituals, they bind a crowd together when you can get someone to get the crowd singing.
Nonetheless, we do not seem to be generating more of these and have not for some time. I think is is a subtle way of making the point in Dylan's Masked and Anonymous, where he has a mom bring in her lovely little (African American) daughter with a bell-like voice do a crystalline version of Blowin' In The Wind -- in the midst of the ruin and chaos which is the world of that movie -- in such a way that beautiful as the song and the cover is, you can't believe it and you sense that the girl has no idea of the meaning of the words, that, in fact, in the circumstances, no one could, they might as well be in Sanskrit. The cover does not appear on the excellent soundtrack for the movie, which includes a Japanese My Back Pages, Los Lobos and Dylan doing Like A Rolling Stone like you never hears it done, and a wonderful Turkish (I think) singer covering One More Cup Of Coffee.
>
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