Protest Music Research Paper

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Music is an indispensable part of human life. Like the other arts, with a powerful expression, music shows with all that pertains to human life: joy and sorrow, struggle and survival, aspiration and dreams of happiness, ethnic pride and the desire to find the rights. Since it was the primitive, music has constantly been developed and perfected through the years. Therefore, it has been created and divided into many kinds, such as labor music, festival music, and exhort music, etc. The most especial one of above is protest music that is concerned by many politicians with a lot of debates in a long period. So, what is protest music? When did it start? How does it development and affect politics?
As we all know, music is parallel with human …show more content…

And no exception for protest music, it is constituted at the time when people cannot give their voice about some things that affect their benefits. In the article Protest Music, Cohen R. states that protest music is created to challenge the status quo, such as civil rights, communism, peace and justice, women rights, or gay rights (2007). Moreover, protest song is defined as using music to reflect political issues, likes segregation, criticism of a liberal president, or anti-socialism (Cohen, 2007). In other words, “the music has evolved over the years as new voices have found the right to share their thought” (Hill, 2016). Protest songs may be boring, but they just speak truth (Tillet, 2015).
The greatest time of protest music was the 20th century that was related to World War, Black Lives Matter, and Vietnam Wars. In the time, the music spread widely and strongly developed in genres and contents. During World War I, some first anti-war songs were composed and performed, such as “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier”, which was the first songs to protest war (Hill, 2016). Also, in his article, Hill F.(2016) Pointed out that the songs did not really direct to authors’ purposes, but they often used patriotism and homesickness in order to persuade stop wars such as “Lorena” and

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