Can Protest Art Get Its Mojo Back?
In the days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Brooklyn punk rocker Jeff Rosenstock retreated to the Catskill Mountains to do what liberals everywhere were doing—mourn—and what many artists were doing, create work about what had just happened. The resulting songs, released on New Year’s Day 2018, bore titles such as “Powerlessness,” “All This Useless Energy,” “Beating My Head Against a Wall,” and “Yr Throat” (as in, “What’s the point of having a voice / when it gets stuck inside your throat?”). In jittery, epic-scale shout-alongs, he described his neighbors taking shots and moaning, “There’s nothing left we can do right now.” He told of joining a demonstration that shut down an interstate, and then realizing that “after a couple of days / the fire that I thought would burn it down was gone.” He reported withdrawing from regular life to channel his discontent into action, but finding it impossible to do so.
He sang, in other words, about impotence. About complicity. About his inability to effectively rage against the machine.
Rosenstock’s Post-, one of the best-reviewed albums of this year, embodies a prominent strain in recent pop culture. No one could argue that American musicians and other artists have been indifferent to Trump. On the contrary, the entertainment world is undergoing, as a recent piece in New York magazine put it, “the Great Awokening.” Even public figures known for their detachment have become walking Daily Kos comments sections, and when hundreds of thousands of women and other voters marched in protest after Trump’s inauguration, celebrities added oomph with speeches and songs. “Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House,” Madonna confessed to the crowd in Washington, D.C.
Yet while the self-proclaimed Resistance debuted with vibrant-pink mass action, the most-distinctive cultural creations that have accompanied it so far—at least in the rapid-response popular mediums of music and TV—haven’t been so fired up. Nor have they been, to use the clichéd dismissals that plenty of political art readily invites, shrill or didactic. Instead, the general drift has been in the spirit of Rosenstock’s album: self-questioning, tentative, conciliatory, emotional. It is, for better or worse, the art not of a revolution but of a failed revolution.
In music, the watchword has been , applied even to escapist fare. “,” read the headline on a year-end wrap-up in , referring in large part to a trend of morose, drugged-out hip-hop. The notion of an “apocalyptic dance party” has become pervasive, describing works in pop (Justin), and rap (Gorillaz) that reference Trump and imagine the fall of civilization.
