World Music and Activism Since the End of History

The decline of protest songs in the mainstream West since the 1970s has been oft noted, and has been traditionally related to specific developments such as the end of the Vietnam War. In this essay, I suggest that the decline was part of a much broader change in global culture, and that a cross-cultural exploration of the parallel trajectories of diverse political song movements can enrich our understanding of the global socio-political climate as a whole. I suggest that activist musical movements, in diverse parts of the world, illustrate with particular clarity how the 1950s-70s represented a sort of high point for a set of international socio-political movements which, although diverse, were animated by shared Enlightenment values of liberal secular humanism. Since the 1980s, however, the dissipation of these musical movements—and in many cases, their replacement by lyric expressions of militant, intolerant, chauvinistic neo-tribalisms—reflects the passing of this distinctive political historical moment, and its segue to a new era in global music culture and world history