Protest Music Is Not A Luxury

I love driving.

Growing up in Ass, Nowhere, a car was the best way to be alone, to be elsewhere. The only place to play music loud enough my ears would ring.

Whenever I had something someone I loved needed to hear I would invite them on a drive. I still do this. I told my thesis advisor that my plans for fellowship included taking each of my friends on a ride through rural Michigan while listening to their favorite album. I never got to; everyone scattered mid pandemic.

Sometime during the loneliness, my girlfriend introduced me to the music of piano balladeer, Vienna Teng. I don’t think we were in a car that time, but maybe we were. We took a lot of drives just to get out of the apartment.

I got a little drunk one night and impulse bought a bundle of all Teng’s CDs and can’t recommend a better way to spend $50 and an evening.

She yearns and belts with the best of them. Her piano chops are electric. Melodies that delight and draw upon deep wells of emotion. She’s deadly with the “Happy Music, Depressing Lyrics” combo we’re all so fond of. Teng’s craftsmanship is so confident and complex, I assumed everyone knew about her and loved her like we do Fiona Apple, and that I had missed out this long because I listened to too much pop punk and spurned Top 40 until I was 25.

I try not to give too much airtime to things I don’t like in this newsletter about things I love, but the sole professional review listed on the Wikipedia page of Teng’s 2013 album Aims, is from a reviewer whose estimation of other artists, such as the Jezabels I’ve read before and found antithetical to my being. He admits he’s perhaps not the audience for either artist, and praises parts of their work, but some of his dismissals are absolutely maddening.

The review remarks heavily on the footnotes in the album’s lyrics sheet, which are not present in the CD I own, but I get the idea. The songs come “with homework”. As someone who gobbled up the reading lists accompanying Rise Against’s major label records, perhaps I’m just closer to Teng’s intended audience than the above reviewer. I read Jonathan Safran Foer because Tim Mcilrath suggested it, and I don’t even hold it against him!

My copy of Aims, instead, shows a three-way Venn diagram of themes, sorting the songs into “Exhortation,” “Critique,” and “Intimacy.” At the center is track 3, “Landsailor.” A sunset song a friend remarked would fit over the closing credits of a movie, “Landsailor” chugs along on a steady drumbeat imitative of a train or semi-truck. Fitting for the lyric’s subject: supply chains and locomotion.

The reviewer’s jab at Teng’s “millennial protest rants,” sits particularly sour in my ear. Teng, who wrote the album while completing graduate work in environmental sustainability, is not ill informed of the planet and its people’s plights. I don’t think her work here can be so glibly described as rants, and her sugar sweet singing to help deliver the hard truths is incredibly effective. I think one of the aims of Aims is to counteract the doomerism that was already coalescing around climate change inaction in the popular forum. Yes, the world is burning and dying, but we are not all yet dead. Teng is not satisfied with the silly individualism of greenwashed capitalism, the facile belief that shorter showers and meatless Mondays serve as a substitute for climate justice. Her sights are set on the Fortune 500 companies responsible for the vast majority of carbon emissions.

“Landsailor” sits at the center of the album’s thematic confluence. At the outset, ostensibly a praise song for the vast wonders humans are capable of creating: the deepwinter strawberry, the marvels of modern heating and cooling, all the things that make our present lives possible. The volta is quiet, two lines at the close of an ascending verse melody:

The critique is straightforward. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

If we care about our fellow humans, and we must, we must, we must, we cannot let the grueling demands of convenience render people “headless, and faceless”. And it feels personal, of course, to learn that the things we love are rooted in another’s suffering. I think of the powerful sequence in episode four of Ramy about strawberries.

Glen Phillips features on the third verse, playing the voice of the unseen workers masked behind the walls of alienation and distance. When Vienna returns to duet with him, the narrators acknowledge the intimacy of “the bed that we made,” the interchangeability of the exploited worker. Better than any celebrity choir singing “Imagine,” this exclaims, “Our fates are inextricable.”

The song’s masterstroke, and its entry into that third category “Exhortation,” comes from the conclusion. The narrator asks to be wed to the workers, and for their eyes to be shielded no more. The takeaway, as I read it, is that all those wonders listed in the song’s opening verses are made possible by humans, and therefore their unmaking, their altering, are also within human hands. We cannot undo the harm of all this climate catastrophe, but that does not absolve us of an overwhelming need to act against it.

Ursula Le Guin’s evergreen quote comes to mind, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

I’m know burning dead dino juice to buzz around the Midwest likely outstrips whatever environmental good I might garner from composting eggshells and half the bundle of kale that goes bad in my fridge every week. And while I’m privileged enough to feel some sense of safety, release, relaxation, alone in my car, I understand the history of the American highway is the history of racist expansion, the erosion of private space and personal freedom. Am I the cause, or am I simply a symptom?

“Landsailor” is not a dirge. Our awareness of agony does not forbid feelings of joy. No ethical consumption under capitalism is not a call for the willfully ignorant bacchanal, but rather a rallying cry for the dissolution of whatever enables injustice.

That’s my millennial protest rant. Next week one of the editors of DEAR Poetry, Mandy Seiner, is going to share an excellent essay about Samia. I think you’re going to love it.