[Music is making a comeback in movement spaces, as organizers
rediscover how song culture strengthens the capacity to create social
change.]
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WHY MOVEMENTS NEED TO START SINGING AGAIN  
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Paul Engler
December 1, 2022
Waging Nonviolence
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_ Music is making a comeback in movement spaces, as organizers
rediscover how song culture strengthens the capacity to create social
change. _

Singing and Chanting Abolish ICE Protest and Rally Downtown Chicago
Illinois 8-16-18, www.cemillerphotography.com

 

Social movements are stronger when they sing. That’s a lesson that
has been amply demonstrated throughout history, and it’s one that I
have learned personally in working to develop trainings for activists
over the past decade and a half. In Momentum
[[link removed]], a training program that I
co-founded and that many other trainers and organizers have built over
the last seven years, song culture is not something we included at the
start. And yet, it has since become so indispensable that the trainers
I know would never imagine doing without it again.

The person who taught me the most as I came to appreciate the impact
that song can have on movement culture is Stephen Brackett, an
activist and hip-hop MC known on stage as Brer Rabbit.

A tall Denverite with abundant dreadlocks and an easy-going presence,
Stephen started rapping for fun in the fourth grade. As a high school
student in the 1990s, he and his friend Jamie Laurie started the
Flobots, a group they have dubbed
[[link removed]] a
“band with an agenda.” Stephen’s stage name, Brer Rabbit, came
to him one day during a college freestyle, when he picked up a ceramic
rabbit from a countertop. In an “act of divine accidents,” as
he calls
[[link removed]] it,
he named himself after the figure in folklore “that represents most
what a rapper is and can be” — namely, “a trickster who succeeds
by his wits rather than by brawn, provoking authority figures and
bending social mores as he sees fit.”

Because his off-stage persona is so warm and humble, it can be
startling to watch Stephen transform into Brer Rabbit when he takes
the mic in a show, firing off rhymes that denounce destructive state
and corporate power while celebrating human potential. Perhaps best
known for their viral 2005 single
[[link removed]] “Handlebars,” which went to number
3 on _Billboard’s_ Modern Rock Tracks and has racked up more than
80 million views on YouTube, Jamie and Stephen’s sharp phrases can
be found throughout the Flobots catalog. In their 2007 song, “Rise
[[link removed]],” Stephen raps:

Don’t let apathy police the populace. /
We will march across / those stereotypes that were marked for us. /
The answer’s obvious, / we switch the consonants /
and change the sword to words and lift continents.

Stephen was a participant in one of our earliest Momentum trainings,
almost a decade ago, and he subsequently joined our team to become a
core trainer himself. In large part thanks to his leadership, we
developed a session within Momentum devoted to reviving song culture.
We named it “Why did we stop singing?” This module teaches how to
bring more music to our movements by breaking down common barriers
like self-consciousness, discomfort with vulnerability and lack of a
shared repertoire.

Stephen Brackett performing with the Flobots. (Twitter/@ColoradoSPH)

Once Momentum began incorporating it into its curriculum, “Why did
we stop singing?” quickly became one of the most popular parts of
the training. Over several years, many of the organization’s
trainers and leaders worked to develop the module and, as they did,
some important lessons emerged. Chief among them: Music is a powerful
tool that we have too often neglected in our organizing — and
members of our movements are hungry to bring it back.

RECOGNIZING THE POWER OF SONG

Momentum [[link removed]] was created in a moment
when several movements — including Occupy and the
immigrant Dreamers [[link removed]] — had experienced
dramatic cycles of mass protest followed by letdown and
demobilization. The training was designed to promote a more
sustainable culture of direct action, as well as to put traditions of
mass protest in dialogue with longer-term models of structure-based
organizing. Momentum has since grown into a training institute and
movement incubator that also coaches activist leaders, provides
skillshares and helps new groups develop. When Stephen, who was
already a prominent activist in the Denver area, attended our training
in 2014, he was convinced of the importance of the curriculum. But he
felt something was missing.

In the year before, Stephen had experienced the passing of a mentor,
Dr. Vincent Harding
[[link removed]],
a pastor, scholar and storied civil rights activist. A colleague of
Martin Luther King Jr., Harding had helped draft
[[link removed]] King’s
landmark 1967 antiwar speech, “Beyond Vietnam
[[link removed]].”
After King was assassinated in 1968, Harding worked with his widow,
Coretta Scott King, to establish the King Center in Atlanta and served
as the Center’s first director.

As he left his first Momentum training, Stephen was still wrestling
with a question that Harding had posed to him some time before. The
elder activist saw collective singing as a key aspect of many
movements, including both the U.S. civil rights struggle and the
international mobilization against apartheid in South Africa. “Dr.
Harding would come to the events we set up when we were organizing,
and he was very supportive,” Stephan said. “But there was a
persistent question he would ask us. He would say, ‘My brothers,
where are the songs?’ He was always wondering why young folks in the
movement weren’t singing.”

“After being in the Momentum training, Jamie and I started to ask
that question again,” Stephen continues. “It became clear that
songs were a missing ingredient in movement culture. And we realized
that maybe this was our part to play within the movement — as
musicians and as people who’d been trained by Dr. Harding. And so,
when we thought about adding to Momentum, we thought, ‘Okay, our
role is to get people to remember the importance of singing, to
remember how strong it can make us.’”

Stephen began honing his techniques for teaching people how to revive
song culture. He tested lessons in the classroom — he has worked as
an elementary school teacher and co-founded the non-profit Youth on
Record [[link removed]], which brings musicians to
work with young people — as well as in movement spaces, as the
Flobots members developed their project NO ENEMIES
[[link removed]].
Soon, he brought this practice to Momentum, making a pitch to our core
team that we needed to train organizers in the art of bringing songs
back to our movements.

We were sold. And at the next training, “Why did we stop singing?”
was born.

WE ARE ALL CREATORS

Once we began incorporating singing into our work, we discovered that
there was a great appetite among activists for reviving song culture.
But it did take some work to create an environment where people feel
comfortable embracing music-making.

One key step was conditioning people to be creators — not passive
consumers — of song.

We live in a consumer-capitalist society that trains us to be
purchasers and observers, rather than active participants, with regard
to the production of art, music and other forms of culture. This is a
departure from the norms of almost all ancient cultures, which relied
on people to produce their own music and art. The shift has negative
effects on social movements, and on democratic society as a whole.

More than a century ago, the composer John Philip Sousa had expressed
concern that new technologies of recorded music would lead to the
decline of singing in public life. In a statement for a Congressional
hearing in Washington, D.C. in 1906, he argued
[[link removed](Morgan-Ellis_Ed.)/05%3A_Functional_Music/12%3A_Music_for_Moving/12.03%3A_John_Philip_Sousa_-_The_Stars_and_Stripes_Forever],
“When I was a boy … in front of every house in the summer evenings
you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or
the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and
day. We will not have a vocal cord left.”

Sousa feared that we would go from a society in which everyone made
art and music on a regular basis to one in which creative output was
converted into commodities — products to be purchased by consumers
who did not, and increasingly could not, make meaningful contributions
to a common culture. In a 2007 talk calling for a revival of creative
participation, law professor Lawrence Lessig cited
[[link removed]] Sousa’s
warnings that this would cause people to become isolated from their
own capacities to create and recreate culture, shutting down organic
avenues for human communication and connection.

What Sousa feared has in many ways come to pass, and it’s why
members of social movements must recommit to creating cultures of our
own. Movements require unique and meaningful art, history and stories.
They need people capable of creating and sharing forms of expression
that strengthen subcultures not represented in the mainstream. We
can’t rely on the centralized corporations in Hollywood and
Nashville that churn out pop commodities to sustain the types of
culture needed to further struggle and change.

Across a wide variety of geographies and time periods, many of the
most impressive social movements that have emerged are ones that have
created their own particular forms of art that are explicitly designed
to address this issue. One powerful example comes from Brazil’s
Landless Workers’ Movement — the Movimento dos Trabalhadores
Rurais Sem Terra, or MST — which includes a form of ritualized
theatrical and musical performance known as the mística
[[link removed]] in all of its
major gatherings. Drawing
[[link removed]] on
practices of Christian mysticism, the mística
[[link removed]] features skits,
singing and clapping, ecstatic dance, call-and-response greetings and
team-specific chants or gritos, all of which cultivate solidarity and
collective identity among its members, while also giving people an
embodied experience of the movement’s history and aspirations.

Following such examples, trainers in “Why did we stop singing?”
stress the importance of group participation. They emphasize a
distinction Harding drew between “songs of performance” and
“songs of power.” Harding argued that _songs of performance_ are
ones sung by someone onstage or behind a microphone. Such performances
can be beautiful and moving, of course; but they lend themselves to
commodification — suggesting that music is something to be left to
highly trained professionals. By contrast, _songs of power _are sung
together by a group; they are used to strengthen bonds among people
who have come together for a common purpose. As Stephen explained,
“​​Songs of power are about decentralizing the performer and
centralizing the people and the needs of the moment.”

The beauty of group singing is that no one person has to be
particularly good; people just have to be willing to open their mouths
and sing. In a movement, there is no need to demonstrate virtuosity,
and so the training encourages people to “turn down their diva”
and look for opportunities to encourage everyone to join in. “When
we started doing the module, the number one thing that I saw was
joyful participation,” Stephen said. “Coming from a teaching
background, that’s always an indication for me that learning is
happening.”

“I want people to experience singing together and feel what that
does and how that changes the room,” he added. “And that’s one
of the main things the training does. You see people move from
whatever states they are in to having a feeling of unity. They’ve
gone through something together. You can feel that, and that’s what
tells me it’s working.”

FOUR KEY BENEFITS OF SONG CULTURE

Stephen often talks about music and group singing as a piece of
movement “technology,” an advanced tool that can enhance our
capabilities in several distinctive ways, provided we practice its
use. As Momentum has developed “Why did we stop singing?” over the
years, four key benefits of song culture emerged thanks to a talented
group of trainers with roots in a diverse set of movements —
including Michael McDowell of the Movement for Black Lives
[[link removed]],
James Hayes of the Ohio Student Association
[[link removed]], Dani Moscovitch of IfNotNow
[[link removed]], Momentum Training Director Cicia
Lee, and Akin Olla, who has worked with Dream Defenders
[[link removed]] and the United States Student
Association [[link removed]].

The first benefit is that songs allow us to connect with history —
both on political and personal levels. In terms of political history,
singing connects us with previous movements that have adopted song
culture as a means of strengthening their resistance. In labor
history, the Wobblies were famous in the early 1900s for adapting
[[link removed]] songs already in
the folk tradition and turning them into pro-worker anthems
[[link removed]] —
just as in the 1960s, activists in the civil rights movement converted
Gospel hymns into the “freedom songs
[[link removed]]”
that famously powered their actions.

There is a caricature that singing activists of the past were hippies
who naïvely imagined a world of peace and harmony. But in fact, the
use of song could reflect a hard-headed realism, recognizing that
cultural expression is essential in helping movement participants form
the strong bonds needed to organize in challenging and sometimes
dangerous situations.

“Whenever somebody jokes about ‘Kumbaya,’” Harding said
[[link removed]], “my mind goes back to the Mississippi
summer experience where the movement folks in Mississippi were
inviting coworkers to come from all over the country, especially
student types, to come and help with the process of voter registration
and Freedom School teaching, and taking great risks on behalf of that
state and of this nation.”

Pointing to the radical history
[[link removed]] of
the song, which comes from the Gullah Geechee people, Harding insisted
that collective singing was more than just an aesthetic pleasure, and
far different from the toothless exercise it’s sometimes portrayed
as by critics.

While the songs we sing today can be new and different — reflecting
cultural lineages that are always evolving — the very act of
participating in movement song culture ties us to those who have
advanced the struggle for freedom and justice in previous generations.
“When we sing a song and we learn the history behind it, it’s like
a connective tissue to those who came before us,” Stephen said.
“We’re locating the struggle that the song came out of, and then
we’re adding to that story. We’re finding ourselves in that
lineage.”

In terms of personal history, reviving song culture in our movements
can be a way of encouraging us to remember and rediscover songs that
are part of our family and cultural histories. Many of Momemtum’s
trainers who are first- or second-generation immigrants have shared
stories about how much their families had to give up in order to
survive in coming to the United States. For some, it has meant
forgetting the songs that their grandparents sang. Rediscovering those
songs and reviving them in the present can be a powerful way of
honoring cultural traditions from which we have become estranged.

In “Why did we stop singing?” trainers point out that there is a
culture of silence in the United States and a norm of singing only
when we can’t be heard — like in the shower or the car. Accepting
the social imperative to remain silent means erasing our collective
history. Leaders in the Momentum training contend that most history
books are written to erase the history of dispossessed groups who have
fought for power in the past. Singing together can help restore our
connection to that shared history.

A second key benefit of group singing is that it allows us to resonate
with one another as a community: physically, emotionally and
spiritually. As the term implies, social movements are a social
experience. They require interacting with others and coming together
in joint purpose. A great deal of a movement’s effectiveness is
based on how well the people in it can connect with one another. In
this context, singing is a singularly effective piece of movement
technology. When we speak, and even more when we sing, our bodies emit
vibrations. By singing we can express and channel the emotions of the
moment more profoundly and lastingly than we can through speech alone.
By producing the same sounds and vibrations at the same time, groups
of people literally can get on the same wavelength with one another,
creating a profound collective experience.

People who have studied the way that music works in religious
communities have observed that activities such as chanting magnify a
group’s power by concentrating its voice into one chord and one
breath. In “Science and Spiritual Practices,” biologist Rupert
Sheldrake writes
[[link removed]],
“One advantage of repetitive chanting, or of singing simple songs in
unison, is that everyone can join in, even if they think that they do
not have a good voice or cannot sing in tune.” He adds, “No doubt
this experience of connection and unity is a major reason for the use
of chanting and singing in practically all traditional societies,
communities and religions.” Likewise, the theologian Cynthia
Bourgeault explains
[[link removed]] in
“Chanting the Psalms” that chanting and singing can help bind
together a “far-flung group of human beings” via “what is most
simple and universal in the human experience — breath, tone,
intentionality and community.”

“Singing allows people to shift emotional states, and it does it
very quickly,” Stephen said. “If you watch a movie, it might take
two hours to deliberately shift through emotional states. A book can
do that a few times, but it takes a few hundred pages. A song can do
it in 90 seconds. It can do it when just a few people are together, or
for thousands of people. In the course of an action you can take
people through the emotional states of where your community is at and
then move to where they want to be. Better than almost anything else,
songs affirm our emotions and also take us someplace aspirationally.
That’s something that needs to be employed for our communities that
are hurting and disempowered.”

Third, songs can be a powerful and succinct form of messaging —
allowing movements to convey ideology, slogans, ideas and demands in a
particularly memorable way. As an elevated form of chanting, songs can
evoke strong emotions, including feelings of solidarity, freedom,
pleasure and joy, much more quickly than pamphlets or speeches.
Joining with others to sing out loud and in public is a radical
assertion of purpose, humanity and will. It’s a way of saying, “We
are here, and we know what’s at stake and what we stand to gain —
or lose.” It’s also a way of audibly demonstrating that we are in
this struggle together.

A fourth power of singing as a movement technology is that it lends
energy and spirit to protests that might otherwise seem lifeless and
repetitive. Or, as Momentum trainers put it more bluntly: Singing
makes actions suck less. In “Why did we stop singing?” a presenter
asks, “Who’s ever been to a shitty action?” There are always
immediate laughs and nods of recognition. A lot of demonstrations
might have decent turnout — they might even draw a big crowd — and
yet they feel dull and uninspired. Singing together changes the
emotional depth and power of an action, helping to make them into fun
and joyful events. In tense and emotionally fraught moments, it
reinforces the group’s common purpose. And, by reinforcing our
shared humanity, it reminds us that many voices are more powerful than
one.

HOW WE CAN BRING SINGING BACK TO OUR MOVEMENTS

The module pioneered by Stephen and other Momentum leaders has made
songs and musical culture a key element of the organization’s ethos,
and this same ethos has become a part of many of the groups that our
core team worked with — including IfNotNow
[[link removed]], Sunrise
[[link removed]] and Movimiento Cosecha
[[link removed]]. For some, group singing has been a
hallmark of their direct actions. As writer Emily Witt explained
[[link removed]] in
the_ New Yorker_ in 2018, “Part of what makes the Sunrise
Movement’s activists seem so optimistic is that they conduct most of
their protests while singing.” Critics have branded members of
groups like IfNotNow “singing zombies,” a charge the group
has refuted
[[link removed]] with
Halloween-y humor, posting photos on Twitter of members made up to
look like zombies posing with signs with quips such as, “Sh*t, I’m
a singing zombie while all my friends are having fun on Birthright.”
In the end, the ability of singing to evoke derision from opponents
only highlights the potency of the technology.

Members of IfNotNow respond to critics calling them “singing
zombies.” (Twitter/IfNotNow)

So how can more movements get their songs back?

One main piece of advice is, “Just do it.” The more people are in
the habit of singing together, the easier it becomes. Trainers in
“Why did we stop singing?” coach that putting songs back in our
meetings and actions is like riding a bicycle: Once you get in the
habit of doing it again, you realize that you never really forgot. And
in this case, it’s not just our bike, but the bike our ancestors
rode, and it’s just waiting for us to dust off, tune up and get
moving.

To help the process along, it is important to inoculate participants
against natural feelings of awkwardness and self-consciousness. A good
way of doing this is to ask people in a meeting, “Does it matter if
you’re a good singer?” As people immediately answer “No!” it
gives license to people who may be worried that they can’t carry a
tune to participate fully regardless of their talents. For his part,
Stephen has always contended that singing in a movement context is the
opposite of trying out for “American Idol.” “We try to
destigmatize the idea of people raising their voice by saying that if
we’re singing together, then the sound of all of our voices is what
we will hear,” Stephen said. “It’s not just one person, and
we’re not doing this as a show. We’re doing this to connect.”

With the initiative of organizational leaders such as Ilana Lerman
[[link removed]],
IfNotNow worked to codify many best practices for leading and teaching
songs, and the group now provides its local groups with concrete tips
on how to maximize their impact. One important practice is always
having the words to each song written up in a format that’s easy to
access and distribute. Another is having people share information
about a song’s origins — where it comes from or what it means to
them — when they teach it to others, which can serve both to show
respect for forebears and inspire a deeper connection to the music.
During group singing, leaders can assign roles to facilitate
participation, having some people guide the melody, others focus on
keeping the beat, and still others nurture group energy. Finally, it
can sometimes be powerful to invite people to enter into a moment of
silence afterwards, to let the song land and give participants an
opportunity to feel its impact.

Over time, groups develop a repertoire of songs they can draw from,
and having favorites that can be repeated provides a great foundation
for a movement’s song culture. These do not have to be the freedom
songs of old. While many people are intimidated by the idea of coming
up with entirely new tunes, remixing popular songs is a way of drawing
on our common cultural heritage and connecting people with something
familiar. “People say, ‘Well, I’m not a brilliant songwriter.’
And I respond, ‘You don’t have to be, because so many of the songs
from movements in the past have been popular songs that were
repurposed. I talk to people about how we can do that now and how easy
it is,” Stephen explained. “We’re taking something that’s in
the culture and adapting the meaning, so that it represents us.’”

After the repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program
in 2017, Cosecha organizers blocked Fifth Avenue in front of Trump
Tower. (AAWW)

When you start looking, it becomes clear that there are many such
songs to choose from: choruses and catchy hooks that originated in
songs of performance can become songs of power when adapted by
movements. Once people are given a chance to make lyrics of their own
in an environment that’s fun and supportive, the creativity flows.

Participants in trainings have improvised new, protest-inspired lyrics
to everything from “Call Me Maybe” to “Single Ladies.” On the
streets, fresh anthems from Janelle Monae’s “Say Her Name” to
Chance The Rapper’s “Blessings” have found their way into mass
marches, just as refrains like Kendrick Lamar’s “We gon’ be
alright” and Beyoncé’s “You won’t break my soul” have been
adapted as protest chants. For the holidays, climate activists have
updated “Frosty the Snowman” into a cautionary tale, and
anti-racists have transformed “Silent Night” into “Silent
Whites.” In the hands of striking teachers in West Virginia,
Ludacris’s 2012 hit, “Move B*tch Get Out Da Way” became
[[link removed]] “Move, Mitch,
get out the way” — a denunciation of State Senate President Mitch
Carmichael.

“Activists in Ohio flipped Lil Jon’s ‘Aww skeet skeet god
damn’ to be ‘Our streets, streets, god damn,” Stephen said. “I
tell people. ‘It could be Taylor Swift. It could be Young Thug. It
could be any of those things.”

The work of reviving song culture is not just about bringing music
back to activist spaces. It is only one part of a broader effort to
reinvigorate a type of communal culture that can sustain social
movements over the long haul. But revitalizing singing is a critical
and, for many, a natural place to start. Most people have memories of
singing with others at home, in school, or in a place of worship —
they have experienced how meaningful it can be as part of a social or
spiritual community. By restoring a culture of song, movements can
give their members a chance to fulfill this common human desire, and
to become stronger and more cohesive in the process.

“One thing I ask is, ‘What is the price of _not_ doing
this?’” Stephen said. “When people are looking at our movements
years from now, are they just going to be looking at a bunch of Google
Docs? We want them to have something more than that. We want them to
be able to sing the songs that we sang — to be part of our
understanding, part of our culture.”

Thinking about the start of “Why did we stop singing?” Stephen
reflected on how nerve racking it was the first time they did the
module, but also on how it proved to be a great success. “It just
struck a chord. I had thought that I would need to spend far more time
trying to convince people about the importance of songs and why this
shift in culture needed to happen,” he said. “But it turned out
that I didn’t really have to make an intellectual argument. Once we
started talking about what had been lost, it was like people’s souls
were crying for the opportunity to sing together.”

_Paul Engler is the director of the Center for the Working Poor in Los
Angeles, and a co-founder of the Momentum Training
[[link removed]], and co-author, with Mark Engler,
of "This Is An Uprising [[link removed]]."_

_Research assistance for this article provided by Raina Lipsitz._

* Protest Song
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* Social Movements
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* Grassroots Organizing
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