The end of the Vietnam War was also a turning point for protest songs
[April 26, 2025]
By HILLEL ITALIE and MARIA SHERMAN
NEW YORK (AP) — Out of the many Vietnam War protests she performed at in
the 1960s and 1970s, Judy Collins can never forget one in Washington,
D.C., where she stood before thousands and sang Bob Dylan's “Masters of
War.”
“It was just me, and Bruce Langhorne playing the guitar, for this huge
event. ... And everybody knows the words and very quickly they all start
singing along,” she says, remembering the “amazing” spirit of those
rallies. “It does trigger something in the brain to hear those songs.
They make you say, ‘I must be able to contribute something.’"
The end of the Vietnam War, 50 years ago, also helped wind down an
extraordinary era of protest music.
For Collins and such contemporaries as Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Peter,
Paul and Mary, bringing the troops home was a mission that carried them
around the country, and the world. The journey was shared with
like-minded audiences who joined in on “Masters of War,” “Give Peace a
Chance,” “Blowin' in the Wind” and other standards — as if to say the
songs belonged as much to the movement as they did to the singer.
The causes have endured, and proliferated: arms control and apartheid,
women’s rights and globalization, climate change and police violence.
And protest songs have been written for them, from Kendrick Lamar's
“Alright” to Steve Van Zandt's “Sun City.” But few, if any, have entered
the collective cultural memory like the music of decades ago: Protest
songs are as common as ever, protest anthems are rare.
“These days you have all these genres and all of these identities, and
things are more decentralized,” says Ginny Suss, who helped organize the
2017 Women’s March in Washington and helped found the Resistance Revival
Chorus, a collective of dozens of singers who specialize in protest
music.
Ronald Eyerman, a professor of sociology at Yale University and
co-author of the 1998 book “Youth and Social Movements,” says that it's
been a long time since a song like “We Shall Overcome” has emerged, one
so universal in its message that it can be adapted to any number of
issues. “Protest songs tend to be very specific to an issue and a time
and place,” he observes, adding that he can't think of “any anthem
related to mobilization about climate change or gay rights.”
The rise of protest songs
The rise of protest music in the 1960s fits into the greater narrative
of the post-World War II era. Growing prosperity and young technologies
such as television and transistor radios helped give the emerging “baby
boom” generation an unprecedented sense of autonomy and common
experience, and the Vietnam War and Civil Rights movements united
millions across race and class and geography.
Eyerman notes that the military draft, which ended in the early 1970s,
made Vietnam more than just a moral issue for Americans, but one with a
“personal, self-interested dimension.” And rock and folk music helped
forge a soundtrack of easy melodies and memorable, resonant phrases for
an explosive historical moment.
“There was just an incredible intensity of feeling about the political
situation,” says Dorian Lynskey, author of “33 Revolutions Per Minute: A
History of Protest Songs,” published in 2011. “A lot of people expected
an imminent revolution.”
Protest songs in the ’60s and ’70s weren’t only heard at protest
rallies: From “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “People Get Ready” to “Ohio,”
they also placed high on the Billboard charts.
The current state of protest music
Bill Werde, former editorial director of Billboard and director of
Syracuse University’s music business school, the Bandier Program, says
protest music still exists in the U.S., but he isn't sure the appetite
exists for them as mainstream hits.
He points out that there is a lot of protest music happening outside of
the U.S., like that of the popular Iranian singer Mehdi Yarrahi, who
shared a song titled “Roosarito,” Farsi for “Your Headscarf,” urging
women to remove their mandatory headscarves. He was flogged by Iranian
officials over a conviction for possessing and consuming alcohol. Or the
Indonesian post-punk band Sukatani’s anti-corruption anthem “Bayar Bayar
Bayar" (“Pay Pay Pay”).
“It has led to this nationwide call for greater freedom of expression
under an increasingly authoritative regime there,” he says of Sukatani's
song. “This may be hard for some folks to understand or to accept, but I
think one of the simple realities may just be that things aren’t bad
enough here in America for people to really feel that urgency, when you
compare America to places like that.”
Puerto Rican rapper and filmmaker Residente, known for releasing
socially conscious music on topics including war, colonization,
socioeconomic inequality, climate change and beyond, disagrees. He says
that there are contemporary protest songs — you just have to know where
to look. For example: Bad Bunny’s “Lo Que Le Pasó A Hawaii," “What
Happened to Hawaii” in English, a song that ties the U.S. colonization
of Hawaii to the Puerto Rican fight for independence.
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In this 1963 file photo, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan perform at the
Newport Jazz Festival in Newport, R.I. Two years later, on the night
of July 25, 1965, Dylan strode onto a stage at the Newport Folk
Festival, plugged in an electric guitar and gave the music world a
shock. Fifty years later, it's considered one of the most important
events in rock history, the high-voltage moment when Dylan broke
from folk and helped show his fellow musicians the poetic
possibilities of rock. (AP Photo, File)
 Last year, Residente released “Bajo
los Escombros,” ("Under the Rubble") with Palestinian artist Amal
Murkus, dedicated to the children killed by the war in Gaza. “There
are not many songs talking about it,” he says.
Eyerman wonders if the recent mass demonstrations against Donald
Trump will “grow into a national force,” with a “distinctive protest
anthem.”
A divided country
Like the 1960s and 1970s, the country is deeply divided, politically
and socially. But Werde otherwise sees a more limited landscape for
protest music. He cites the increased consolidation of the music
industry and demise of legacy media outlets, which means “today’s
hits are smaller than they used to be” and there are fewer
opportunities for protest songs to become full-on anthems. The only
way that happens is if “things reach a certain point … like with
George Floyd and Black Lives Matter.”
Songs played around that time included Lamar’s “Alright,” Childish
Gambino’s “This Is America” and Beyoncé’s “Freedom," which came out
before Floyd's murder in 2020.
Often, protest songs become anthems because of their reception.
Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond" is an example, a song
with no explicit ties to any political party that became an anthem
for Republicans in 2023. “It’s all about the plight of the working
man,” Werde says. “It shows you how music can really be manipulative
at times and how a lot of politics is all about like marketing an
idea whether it’s true or not.”
A possible reason for the reluctance to produce protest songs may be
simply that in 2025, "artists, like most corporations, really want
to be left out of the political discussion these days because it’s
just too risky to their bottom line,” he says.
His most mainstream example of pop music protest is Lamar’s Super
Bowl halftime show, with its nod to Gil Scott-Heron’s early ’70s
anthem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and its indirect
symbolism, delivered in a way that Werde says corporate sponsors had
to agree to, and that wouldn’t “leave an enormous part of that
audience feeling deeply offended.”
Residente says that when he started his career in the early 2000s,
performing political music had real-life consequences: He was banned
from playing in Puerto Rico for four years; once, in Venezuela, he
was shot at. “To be censored in your own country is horrible,” he
recalls. Nowadays, he is still political in his music but has
noticed stateside artists tend not to be.
“I hope that in the United States there will be more (political
songs),” he says. “It’s weird. Maybe they’re very concentrated on
the business.
“Not every artist is going to talk about social awareness,” he adds.
He says he hopes there will be more activist groups in the U.S.,
like Rage Against the Machine or System of A Down.
History reinvented
What were once protest songs have since been stripped of their
original context and repurposed for antithetical ends. Creedence
Clearwater Revival’s anti-Vietnam War anthem, “Fortunate Son,” was
featured at Trump rallies — over the objections of songwriter John
Fogerty — and used in a Wrangler commercial decades after its
initial release. Dylan's “Blowin' in the Wind” was the soundtrack to
a Budweiser commercial aired during the Super Bowl in 2019. Green
Day’s anti-George W. Bush hit “American Idiot” has been used by
conservatives on TikTok.
“Things live on a fragmented level like never before,” Werde says.
Music discovery happens on TikTok, presented without any context.
Gen Z has discovered the Irish band the Cranberries, but when
“Zombie” plays, they don't necessarily know the history of the
Troubles that the song was written about.
Collins, however, says her audiences seem as engaged as ever. Now
85, she still gives some 100 shows a year and still features “Where
Have all the Other Flowers Gone” and others in the protest canon,
along with such newer works as her own “Dreamers,” about immigrants
in the U.S.
“When I sing ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ ... everyone sings
it, everyone knows it. I'm kind of astonished when that happens,”
she says. “They're not just protest songs. They're songs of life and
the journey of life, things you're up against."
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