Songs in the dark

This Wednesday, I went to spiritual direction, with a sister at the College of St. Benedict’s—a poet and a former English professor, who, in the course of our conversation, quoted the Bertolt Brecht lines above to me.

If you haven’t been to spiritual direction before, it mostly looks like conversation. You meet with a spiritual director to talk about your prayer and interior life. We were talking, this time, about the current times in Minnesota and the country et large—because there is no way we could not, and also because the interior life is not, really, such a separate space from the outside world.

Later that evening, one of the resident scholars, who’d accompanied me to the protest in Minneapolis, sent an email with a link to the above YouTube video.

I thought at first that it was just an old Bruce Springsteen song with a protest image in the background, but no. The lyrics, too, were about the current ICE violence and arrests. Springsteen had written the song over the weekend and posted it earlier that morning. He was naming politicians and speaking back to them. He was holding up the people who had spoken up and stood up and been subject to violence too.

By the end of the week, he would perform it live at a benefit concert at First Avenue in Minneapolis.

It made me think about the history of protest songs. And it made me wonder about the kind of art that gets made and turned to during all kinds of dark times.

What do we look for? What do we want?

This is, actually, an open question. What do people want right now? And—given what people want—should writers and artists deliver?

These aren’t really questions that I can answer—but asking them sent me down a rabbit hole of protest songs old and new. And there were two main types that stood out to me.

The first call attention to the darkness. They take what people would rather deny or turn away from, and make them look. They preserve the act of injustice in the song so that it cannot be denied.

This can be obvious—a loud rage that’s immediately apparent in both the lyrics and the style of the song. Or it can be more subtle. Or, somehow, both. Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” for example, describes lynching in brutal, unflinching detail, but the music itself is slow, haunting, almost gentle. She sings with restraint and control. If you turn the song on low, in the background, it is easy to listen without first realizing what you are listening to. When the lyrics register, it is all the more shocking because of the juxtaposition.

This is one of the powerful things that protest songs can do, in a way that other art forms often can’t. When we read something, we are more aware of what is on the page. Written text requires our direct attention in the way that music does not, so we can stop if it affronts us But music often comes to us as melody and instrumentality first. Lyrics, skillfully composed, can be half-slipped into our subconscious before we fully register what they’re saying.

I was midway through drafting this post, when I encountered a video of Jesse Welles performing “Join ICE” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The song’s title makes clear its content, but if you heard the intro to the song without knowing its name, the lyrics, I think, would surprise. The upbeat, chipper melody does not align with the dark content, which describes the ICE agents’ actions, before ridiculing their lack of qualifications. The entire song is a mocking spin on the ICE recruitments circulating everywhere—those Uncle Sam posters with the words “Join ICE” emblazoned at the top.

Most of the songs I listened to were by professional muscians—canonical works from best-of lists or recent works like Welles’s performance. But protest songs often crop up in informal contexts as well. Later in the week, a friend of mine posted a reel on Instagram of a group that had covered the song “Warlike Lads of Russia” by Nic Jones, rewriting the lyrics to reflect Greg Bovino’s departure from Minnesota. The cover also fell into this category of protest-via-humor, masked by a cheery intro before the direct lyrics begin.

Humor is a powerful protest tool—though it can also leave me feeling, at times, a bit hollow. I think this is because, in its best form, humorous commentary is sharply insightful and clear. So even as it makes you laugh, that laughter can often be laced with despair.

Which brings me to the second group of songs.

These ones came from within the darkness, but looked beyond it. They were focused on hope or the future. During the conversation with my spiritual director, she reflected on how the song “We Shall Overcome” served as an anthem for the Civil Rights Movement. In this this clip, at the March on Washington, is it sung by the folk singer Joan Baez, but the crowd is audibly singing along with her. I ended up listening to this, as well as Martin Luther King Jr’s speech that draws on this song. And then I spent some time with Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a Changin” too.

I think sometimes that hope can sound naive or like a form of denial. But these songs are not denying the current circumstances—the words overcome and change hold, within them, both the truth of the present wrong and the belief that the future can be better. Paricularly when sung along with other people, they can be expressions of resolve and solidarity.

Here’s Welles again, joined by Baez—the past and present coming together and looking towards the future.

The other piece that came up in my spiritual direction conversation was a bit about what individuals have to offer.

My spiritual director, again, is a sister, living in community. The sisters at St. Benedict are currently organizing food drives for people in St. Joseph. She mentioned that while everyone might want to organize the food and do the deliveries, this is the role of only a few of the sisters. But part of living in community means that what each person does enables others to play their part.

This was not her saying—do nothing. But rather framing the conflict differently. The sisters organizing the food drives couldn’t do so if the other sisters weren’t doing the other work around the convent that sustained them.

And so I thought about this is an artistic sense too.

One of my classmates published a flash fiction piece earlier this week, and it popped into my social media feed—which has mostly been converted to news updates for the past few weeks. The news updates aren’t an imposition—I had been off social media for a month and returned specifically to get updates from local groups in Minnesota. But there have been a lot of them, and they can overwhelm. So it was good, in the midst of this, to suddenly be met with her short story, to enter the interpersonal dynamics of fictional characters and language she’d crafted.

If I feel that way, at such a remove from the current conflict, I can only imagine that those directly impacted might feel so too. It is another form of singing in dark times, to keep offering small forms of beauty.

I thought of this again when I walked up to the library mid-week to pick up some books. One of them, Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris, I had requested because of an encounter with the title poem last fall. I’d been in the midst of a bad stretch of concussion symptoms, and this poem cut through in a way I don’t think I can adequately articulate here—except to say that the poem both speaks into the darkness and out of it at once.

It opens with two brief lines.

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

And then the speaker, anticipating the reader’s reaction against such a sunny view, continues.

Hear me out: that which you call death

I remember.

In just these four lines, the speaker has already asserted the reality of suffering and death—and also that there exists an exit, a door opening up into something beyond them.

These lines turned over in my head during those weeks last fall, and they’ve been turning over in my head again now.

All to say: The ecosystem of writing is large. I think we need everything, growing together. Protest and humor and hope and beauty. Things that speak directly into what is happening and things that remind us how much else remains beyond it too.