The First Book on Postwar Protest and Struggle Music to Offer a Broad Sonic Sweep Across All Genres
“Will Kaufman has uncovered a massive hidden history, one that none of us can ignore.”
–Chuck D
American Song and Struggle from World War II to MAGA: A Cultural History by acclaimed historian Will Kaufman is coming October 31 from Cambridge University Press. In the works for years, this landmark, timely, and insightful volume is the first book of its kind to deal with postwar protest and struggle music across all genres, offering a sweeping chronicle of a nation singing its way through crisis, adversity, and political oppression. It covers an incredible amount of cultural, political, and musical ground. It will be released as a hardback book and e-book and shortly thereafter as an audio book.
Following on from his previous volume, American Song and Struggle from Columbus to World War II—which took home the prestigious 2023 Choice 360 Award for the best academic title in music—Kaufman now takes his study up to the present – to an America poised on the brink of tyranny and autocracy under Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.
The book examines a vast multi-genre landscape. Rather than limiting his study to acoustic “protest” songs, Kaufman leads us on a journey through Broadway musicals, opera, avant-garde classical compositions, symphonic music, swing, bebop, free jazz, experimental music, electronica, blues, rock, soul, country, folk, gospel, punk, riot grrrl, heavy metal, disco, hip-hop, rap, reggaeton, Indigenous and immigrant songs, Puerto Rican and Hawaiian resistance anthems, corridos, and more.
Kaufman explores “struggle”—a human impulse that cuts across social strata and artistic disciplines. While the book addresses monumental moments in civil rights and anti-war movements, it also uncovers surprising cultural intersections, radical subtexts, and hidden histories.
Among these are:
* Bruce Springsteen’s stark ICE protest song “The Streets of Minneapolis” pitted against the attempted weaponization of country and gospel music for white Christian nationalism by such MAGA artists as Lee Greenwood and Ted Nugent;
* the construction of Donald Trump as a malign figure in Anthony Davis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, The Central Park Five;
* the soundtrack to the Black Lives Matter movement of the 2010s and 2020s, with hip-hop leaders like Kendrick Lamar (“Alright”), Childish Gambino (“This Is America”), and Beyoncé engineering anthems confronting police violence against people of color;
* post-9/11 hyper-patriotism, as in the backlash following The Dixie Chicks’ criticism of George W. Bush and the Iraq War, alongside the political dissent of Americana artist Steve Earle;
* the unlikely, surreal link between the 1950s duet “Baby It’s Cold Outside” and the September 11 attacks via the radicalization and anti-Western worldview of Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb;
* Rage Against the Machine’s use of explosive musical fission to mount an ideological assault against institutional corruption, global imperialism, capitalism, and police brutality;
* foundational West Coast and East Coast albums from N.W.A (“Fuck tha Police”), Public Enemy, and Ice-T’s Body Count functioning as an underground news network documenting institutional racism and the violence that stems from it;
* the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ‘90s – on Broadway (the musicals Rent and The Falsettos); in popular songwriting (Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia in interplay with Ralph McTell’s “Streets of London”); in country music (Reba McEntire, “She Thinks His Name Was John”); in hip-hop (the diagnosis and death of Eazy-E), and in activist recording (the Red Hot Organization’s benefit albums);
* the dawn of hip-hop as radical archive – from South Bronx block parties to global force, with trailblazing artists like Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five (with “The Message”) and Afrika Bambaataa creating a vital, multi-layered record of urban oppression;
* rap and reggaeton as unstoppable transnational vehicles for youth identity and anti-colonial resistance in the music of Puerto Ricans like Tego Calderón and Daddy Yankee and Hawaiians like Sudden Rush and Bruddah Waltah;
* challenges to misogyny in folk and rock music (Holly Near’s Redwood Records; Susan Hiwatt, “Cock Rock”); in 1990s underground punk (Bikini Kill and riot grrrl); and in hip-hop (Roxanne Shanté and the “Roxanne Wars”);
* Organized musical campaigns like “Rock Against Reagan” against the Reaganite attempt to co-opt Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” as a celebratory, patriotic jingle (rather than a critique of the Vietnam war and the abandonment of the working-class);
* the radical underground history of disco and electronic dance music as vital sanctuaries of collective survival pioneered by Black, brown, and queer communities;
* Richard Nixon’s attempted co-optation of country music against the resistance of Johnny Cash and other anti-war country stars;
* the impact of song in Indigenous struggle through the music of the American Indian Movement, the songs of Peter LaFarge, the advocacy of allies like Johnny Cash and Steven Van Zandt, the power chords of Link Wray, and the songs of John Trudell, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Joanne Shenandoah;
* jazz titan Sonny Rollins’ instrumental masterpiece Freedom Suite utilizing the tenor saxophone to express a profound demand for Black civil rights and cultural respect;
* Ornette Coleman’s free jazz as a soundtrack to Black revolution;
* FBI and US government policing and censoring of classical music activists like Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein as well as blacklisting leftist folk artists like The Weavers (including Pete Seeger);
* the activism of Rosa Parks, Seeger, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others fueled by the mission of the Highlander Folk School and its emphasis on the power of collective song;
* the musical activism of Coretta Scott King and Bayard Rustin;
* The juxtaposition of Latinx representation in the 1940s and 1950s between Puerto Rican songwriter Eduardo Reyes’ vocal opposition to social stereotyping and the cultural flattening of West Side Story;
* themes of dissent in American avant-garde and experimental classical composers like Harry Partch, John Cage, and Edgard Varèse;
* the subversive queer energy of mid-century performers like Johnnie Ray, Little Richard, and Liberace;
* Paul Robeson and the Peekskill riots;
* revisiting the writing of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” as a radical rebuttal to the nationalism of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”;
* Josh White’s friendship with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, enabling a blues singer’s unprecedented proximity to the White House to advocate for civil rights in the midst and aftermath of World War II;
* Tin Pan Alley’s anti-Japanese hysteria in the context of Pearl Harbor and Japanese internment.
Kaufman will be reading from American Song and Struggle from World War II to MAGA at several high-profile speaking events:
July 15 — The British Library (London, UK): Kaufman will participate as a featured speaker in a public session titled America Now! 1976 And All That: Remembering the American Revolution, drawing on material from the upcoming book.
November 18 — The Woody Guthrie Center (Tulsa, OK): Following the book’s release, Kaufman will host a special public reading and presentation, anchoring the book’s historical discoveries in the life and work of Guthrie.
Will Kaufman is Emeritus Professor of American Cultural History at the University of Lancashire, Preston. A widely sought-after expert on American music, politics, and history, Kaufman has seen his groundbreaking research featured on major independent media platforms, including a comprehensive broadcast interview on Democracy Now! He is universally recognized as the world’s foremost authority on Woody Guthrie, notably capturing headlines for uncovering Guthrie’s relationship with his racist Brooklyn landlord, Fred Trump. Kaufman’s extensive bibliography includes a definitive trilogy on the balladeer—Woody Guthrie, American Radical (2011), Woody Guthrie’s Modern World Blues (2017), and Mapping Woody Guthrie (2022)—alongside highly regarded broader cultural histories, including The Civil War in American Culture and American Culture in the 1970s. Learn more about Will: www.willkaufmanbooks.com
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