New album coming of protest songs about Bush

Burt Bacharach has teamed up with rapper Dr Dre for a new album of passionate protest songs. Bacharach, 77, known for classic pop songs like Alfie and Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head, says several tracks are critical of President Bush.

Dr Dre provides drum loops on three of the tracks on the album, At This Time, while other contributors include Elvis Costello and Rufus Wainwright. Tracks on the album, due out on October 24, include Please Explain, Where Did It Go?, In Our Time, Who Are These People, Can't Give Up, Go Ask Shakespeare and Dreams.

Bacharach said: "People ask why a man who has been known for writing love songs all of his life is suddenly rocking the boat. I had to do it. This is very personal to me, and this is the most passionate album I have ever made."

A friend of Bacharach said: "Burt's pissed at the administration, concerned about the world he is leaving to his children, and you can feel it."

HIGH TIME. What would a protest song by Burt Bacharach sound like? Is Hal David writing the lyrics? Instead of "Raindrops," it could be "Crap from the White House keeps falling on my head." This album may supply the answer to this writer's question (from the Pioneer Press ):

Where Have All The Protest Songs Gone, Long Time Passing? -- by Glenda Holste

The anti-war movement needs music.

The shaking windows and rattling walls in 2005 reverberate from ever-stronger percussions about what the United States is doing — or not — at home and abroad. Flashbacks to 1968 haunt the moment. A boomer would be remiss — and dismissed — if she were to say that the '00s are the '60s reincarnate. But the uncertainty, anger, fear, outrage and sorrows spawned by the mad rush of events make 2005 feel like the defining year 1968 circling back on itself.

The ethos proves itself inescapable in a place like the American Friends Service Committee exhibit "Eyes Wide Open," spread on the sloping west lawn at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul today and Saturday. In row on row, pairs of combat boots represent the members of the U.S. military who have fallen in Iraq. Hugging next to these sentinels of sorrow, a circle of boots from Upper Midwest fatalities are grouped so the visitor can grasp a feeling for the 113 of our children, parents, neighbors who have died in Iraq. Combat boots, 1,928 pair in all. The unknown number of civilian casualties have notice in winding rows that circle, then spill down the hillside, some with names attached, some small, some stylish. Walk along and you might find a pair like one in your closet, as I did Thursday.

The great marches against the American war in Vietnam echo now, too. Last week, Washington filled with protest. This week, protesters provoked their own arrest outside the White House.

The whole world is watching, as it did in the 1968 uprisings from the streets of Prague, Paris, Chicago …. But where now are the sounds as good as those of John Fogerty, Bob Dylan, the young Joan Baez? Pete Seeger? Peter, Paul and Mary? Where are the successors to John Lennon's "Revolution" and "Give Peace a Chance?"

Where's the new music to march by, to rally with? Where are the metaphors that move words into human action?

Now we get unimaginative echoes by artists who might not even know where "Fortunate Son" came from for their allusions to President Bush. Now we get punked-up and hip-hopped by plugging individually into iPods but we have no authentic new voice for the streets.

In the Martin Scorsese documentary "No Direction Home" about Dylan, Studs Terkel is heard interviewing Dylan. Terkel says, "All your songs are about more than the event."

In the same film, Baez explains those times, "We really thought that as songwriters, we were going to change the world."

They did.

Back in the day, music raised wrath that poured out of concerts, records and radios onto the streets, inspiring the civil rights movement and challenging the U.S. government's unjust prosecution of war in Southeast Asia.

In this day, the best of younger generations that we have is Green Day, Bad Religion and Lagwagon.

Yes, rockers are still doing good in the world, bringing their celebrity to social causes and urgent relief efforts. But awareness and fund raising, while needed in this battered world, are not the same as generating music that raises collective hell. Bob Geldof, rocker-turned-humanitarian, says in the TV film on protest and pop music, "Get Up, Stand Up," that Dylan's "explosion of ideas" in song "entered the culture as a way to articulate whole political ideas."

The year 2005 needs songs to guide the feet, to hold to the heart, to articulate whole political ideas that challenge hubris as a foreign policy and plutocracy-enrichment as domestic policy. New songs. Songs that take their heritage seriously, as did the protest songs of the 1960s and 1970s.

Is there not in the mind of a musical artist just one anthem as great as "We Shall Overcome?"

AND WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here are the lyrics of a nice protest song (if you don't know who Victor Jara is, please google him):

The Hands of Victor Jara -- by Chuck Brodsky

The hands of Victor Jara
Were chopped off at the wrists
But still they point a finger
And they raise a mighty fist
There is a revolution
It might be in your backyard
It might be some place like Chile
Or it might be in your heart

The voice of Victor Jara
Was cut out at the tongue
But that does not stop the singing
Songs need to be sung
He sang about his people
They were not the privileged few
And nothing that's dictated
Will ever ring as true

The blood of Victor Jara
Will never wash away
It just keeps on turning
A little redder every day
As anger turns to hatred
And hatred turns to guns
Children lose their fathers
And mothers lose their sons

The soul of Victor Jara
Hangs on a white cross
Life was his religion
Not for sale at any cost
He defied the generals' orders
By not singing their refrain
In front of all those frightened people
He did not give his life in vain

The hands of Victor Jara
They're strumming the guitar
Down in the Paris Metro
Or in front of the Kerrtry Store
And they hold onto a promise
That torture cannot break
Truer than the average, the hands of Victors Jara
They do not shake

(Copyright Chuck Brodsky -- www.chuckbrodsky.com)