They say when things get bad all you can do is laugh. But at present, we seem to be rather laughed out as a species. There is a bitter note of defeat to our jokes; something of a harsh edge to our online jibing. A few months ago, the joke was that you couldn’t joke about how bad things were getting anymore. Now even that one has gone stale, leaving us mirthless; leaving us staring at one another, wide-eyed, toeing a poisoned ground in the process of bucking itself free of us.
Of course, there’s the shadow of that Trump thing spilling over us, killing the joy in our lives, but the Leader Of The Free World is just one of the horsemen of our particular apocalypse. We have that climate change thing to worry about; that mass displacement of the vulnerable in at-risk parts of the world thing to worry about; that international swing to the political far-right thing to worry about; that actual resuscitation of the ideals and beliefs of the fucking Nazi party thing to worry about.
The horrors we face are not new… and the words of rage and rebellion we have are the same that our parents had.
And we’re not immune here in Australia, either. We like to poke fun at the still raging garbage fire that is the US political system, but who the fuck are we to judge anyone? We are a country riddled by racism; a country where murderers of children can walk free and bile-filled senators can build an entire political platform off the backs of years of colonial oppression. We are not exempt. We are, when it comes down to it, one more symptom of that illness called late capitalism: a sick country founded on blood, too desperately proud to accept our past but too underdeveloped to move forward without doing so.
Dan Sultan’s new track ‘Drover’ serves as a “prequel” to Paul Kelly’s classic protest song ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’
Fighting a losing battle?
Which is to say, writing a protest album in 2017 is a losing proposition – mainly because there is nothing left to say anymore; because all roads are worn out. The horrors we face are not new, so there is no way for our music to be, and the words of rage and rebellion we have are the same that our parents had. Rage for too long and you end up doing what this article is already starting to do – to proselytize and to preach; to become that pain in the ass at the corner of the party spelling doom in the hope that it’ll help attract the opposite sex.
Anyway, even if we did manage to put our angst, and our pain, and our sadness into song – even if we managed to crystallise the ever-growing lists of minute, unbearable grievances enacted against us daily – then what? By selling records and going on tour and doing photoshoots and taking the complex machinery of making music on the road, we are only propping up the very same system that we’re trying to tear down. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but there might be no ethical creation of art under capitalism either.
…a protest record that doesn’t ignore its own hypocrisy; that thoroughly embraces the potential that maybe… none of this fucking matters
So there it is, the creeping, sub-audible muttering that underscores even the most fiery protest records, and even the most angry and acidic of art: “Maybe none of this fucking matters”. And the worse things get, the louder that voice will get, till what was once a whisper becomes a roar.
The way forward
Today, Dan Sultan released his new record. It is an album called Killer, and it is the sound of an immensely talented musician finally at ease with his instruments, and with himself. But more than that, it is a thoroughly modern protest record – a protest record that doesn’t ignore its own hypocrisy; that thoroughly embraces the potential that maybe, at the heart of it, none of this fucking matters.
As a result, Killer is a brutally honest listen. Sultan might have a popsmith’s ear for hooks, but he lays out his lyrics like bear traps: everyone is a target, and the album trembles with its own very particular form of rage.
The song will always show you what it wants to be. The song always decides
But Sultan did not plan for the record to unfold itself in that way, and he asked nothing of his material going into the project. He didn’t want to make a protest record, nor even necessarily to get political; he just wanted to follow the songs, tracing his art as though it were a dotted line.
“It just happens,” Sultan says, simply. “Everyone’s different, and they approach songwriting in different ways. There’s no right or wrong way to go about it. But for me personally, the song just kind of presents itself to me.” He laughs.
“I mean, the song will always show you what it wants to be. The song always decides, so it’s just about keeping your ear close to the ground and making sure that you’re able to hear it, and then just to go with it.”
Dan’s new single ‘Hold It Together’ is about “tapping into the strength of people who’ve come before you”
Of course that means sometimes Sultan surprised himself, and there were moments when writing the record that rubbed him raw. And if that sounds kind of nerve-wracking, that’s because occasionally, it was. “It doesn’t always work,” Sultan says, simply. “You can spend the whole day trying to nut something out, and if nothing happens, well then, nothing happens. But then there are other days you go in and it just kind of explodes.”
Clearly then, for Sultan, music is a kind of impulse. And maybe that is the way protest music is meant to be written. Maybe it is meant to be less an academic statement and more the beating of a heart – maybe it is meant to come as naturally as an exhale, and maybe, just maybe, that is how it stays relevant.
But anyway, for his part, Sultan isn’t playing that kind of long game. “At the end of the day, I’d be making records if people were interested or not,” he says, his voice rich. “That’s what it’s like, being a writer or a songwriter: it’s just something that you are.”
