Music as Protest: How Songs Fuel Revolutions

For me personally, I have always knew that music is beyond just what we usually use to see it to be. For many of us, we always think music is only limited to give us this romantic or love feelings. The issue I guess is affecting our present generation is we have so much limit music to a particular pattern and this has limit the potential music can do to our society.

Probably because the type of music that is quite popular is the love music, so we have limited the ability of music to transform change only when it involves love or romantic issue and situations. But that is not actually true. For many years, music has been used behind entertainment but even as a tool for protest and revolution.

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Growing up as a Nigerian, I know some musicians that actually make use of their music to cause revolution and one perfect example is Fela Kuti. His style of music is beyond the entertainment or even the love pattern. When you hear his song and the lyrics in the song, it carries strong message that is passed to the government and nations. On several occasions, his songs have kick-started revolution.

I know someone reading this post might actually be surprised, how can an ordinary music cause revolution? Well the ability of songs to cause revolution lies in the way they are able to communicate strong messages in the songs. It can be through the lyrics in the songs just like I said earlier, sometimes it can even be the beats or the visuals display in the music. In one way or the other, music has the ability to transform revolution.

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But the big concern is in this our present age, we are seeing a drastic reduction of music or songs that is able to cause revolution. What we really have right now is people singing because of fun, money or generally because of trend. Many people are not even singing to pass a message through their songs. This is a shame because it is creating a mindset, a new one to the present generation that that is how music should be which is wrong.

Gone are the days we will hear about music that will unite tribes, settle conflicts or even call government back to other irrespective of what they are doing whether right or wrong. I still believe the music industry still have that revolutionary potential, just that we need singers that will step up to display it through their songs. We need songs like they Black Lives Matter anthem. We still need music that will remind us what humanity is and what it stand for.

I also believe the major chase is a whole lot of people are actually afraid of the consequences that might want to come from making your songs to be revolutionary in nature. In proven records, it has been proven that singers who their song always passed this revolution message is constantly attacked either by the government or even by the nation. This has created fear in lots of singer to run away from those types of songs to be made which should not be so actually.