Paper/Proposal Title
Rethinking Protest Music: Revolutionary Songs from Myanmar
Location
M1400
Start Date
11-2-2023 1:45 PM
End Date
11-2-2023 3:15 PM
Keywords
Burma, Myanmar, protest, music, military coup
Abstract
Since the February 1, 2021 military coup in Myanmar, Burmese musicians have been creating and circulating “revolutionary songs.” These anti-coup recordings span a variety of musical genres, but all of them proclaim the same message. This message – rejecting an illegitimate authority and valorizing the wishes of the common people of Myanmar – marks the songs as belonging to the long tradition of protest music. In this presentation I argue that the question that scholars often pose of protest music - does it successfully persuade listeners to join a social movement? - is not the best question to ask of Burmese revolutionary songs. Myanmar’s revolutionary songs seek not so much to persuade as to empower. As the songs’ creators and disseminators explained to me, they created their recordings and posted them on social media as a way of fighting back against a lethal regime. These songs are intended to be a form of motivation and support for those who are already engaged in the struggle against Myanmar’s military dictatorship. As a focus group of Myanmar young people revealed, however, the audience for revolutionary songs does not always embrace the songs in the spirit which their creators’ intended. Ultimately, this presentation argues that scholars must be cautious about making liberatory claims for protest music.
Author/Speaker Biographical Statement(s)
Heather MacLachlan, Ph.D. (Cornell, 2009) is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Dayton. She is the author of Burma’s Pop Music Industry: Creators, Distributors, Censors (University of Rochester Press, 2011), Singing Out: GALA Choruses and Social Change (University of Michigan Press, 2020), and numerous scholarly articles.
Rethinking Protest Music: Revolutionary Songs from Myanmar
M1400
Since the February 1, 2021 military coup in Myanmar, Burmese musicians have been creating and circulating “revolutionary songs.” These anti-coup recordings span a variety of musical genres, but all of them proclaim the same message. This message – rejecting an illegitimate authority and valorizing the wishes of the common people of Myanmar – marks the songs as belonging to the long tradition of protest music. In this presentation I argue that the question that scholars often pose of protest music - does it successfully persuade listeners to join a social movement? - is not the best question to ask of Burmese revolutionary songs. Myanmar’s revolutionary songs seek not so much to persuade as to empower. As the songs’ creators and disseminators explained to me, they created their recordings and posted them on social media as a way of fighting back against a lethal regime. These songs are intended to be a form of motivation and support for those who are already engaged in the struggle against Myanmar’s military dictatorship. As a focus group of Myanmar young people revealed, however, the audience for revolutionary songs does not always embrace the songs in the spirit which their creators’ intended. Ultimately, this presentation argues that scholars must be cautious about making liberatory claims for protest music.
