In 2017 nineteen-year old rapper Dave released the track ‘Question Time’. It’s a seven-minute address on the state-of-the-nation, touching on various political issues of the day: Brexit, the NHS, the fire at Grenfell Tower, and the weaknesses of political leaders. Co-written with Fraser T. Smith (who had previously collaborated with Adele, Tinchy Stryder and Sam Smith) the song was widely praised. In 2018 it won the Ivor Novello award for Best Contemporary Song, given to works that ‘capture the moment’. Dave himself said he wanted to make a song that ‘felt like a time capsule’, and through which future listeners would ‘know that the UK was in this place, in this time’.

The ‘Our Subversive Voice’ project shows, over and over, that songs are often remarkable encapsulations of a place and a time, perhaps also of what literary theorist and historian Raymond Williams called a ‘structure of feeling’. But protest songs aren’t neutral or disinterested expressions of such feeling. Like other kinds of political speech and writing, they express a sense that the times are ‘out of joint’; things aren’t working as they should. Perhaps the old and the new are in conflict, or social-economic change is causing people to mourn what has been lost even as they hope for what might be to come. In such situations protest songs are just one kind of writing proposing how we might feel, experience and respond to ‘this place, in this time’.

Dave’s ‘Question Time’ was written after a narrow majority voted for the UK to end its membership of the European Union, but before a fractious Parliament and a shell-shocked government had decided how to do so. At the core of the song is an understated parodic quotation of Prime Minister’s Question Time, a theatrical rhetorical ritual of accountability with a central place in British politics. It opens with the declaration: ‘a question for the new Prime Minister’ (Theresa May, who had just taken up the office after David Cameron resigned in shame having lost the 2016 referendum). The phrase is repeated at the start of the third and fourth verses. Verse five begins with ‘a message for our old Prime Minister’ and verse six with ‘a question for the leader of the Opposition’.

Parliamentarians tend to hold government to account with reference to its competence, and to the appropriateness or adequacy of policies. Dave’s song is primarily concerned with moral accountability. Its themes are politicians’ virtues and vices. The very first question asked of the new Prime Minister is ‘How do you have a heart so sinister?’ That’s not something which could legitimately be asked in the House of Commons. May is pronounced ‘wasteful’, killing children in Syria and elsewhere. In verse two she is contrasted – unfavourably – with the rapper’s mother, a frugal, hardworking nurse going without to support her children. Government is upbraided for spending on defence when the NHS is dying, and the promise that Brexit would lead to more for the NHS is found to be worthless ‘now them politicians got what they wanted’.

May’s behaviour when visiting the ruins of Grenfell Tower, avoiding a meeting with the affected residents, is called cowardly. She is represented as dodging responsibility, an unemotional robot contrasting with the deep and real emotions – panic, fear, pain, grief, joy and relief – of Grenfell’s residents. Young people sent to prison under ‘joint enterprise’ are contrasted with the adults who knew but did nothing about the unsafe cladding of the tower, participants in a different sort of joint enterprise on which judges, the singer predicts, will be lenient. Politicians are described as ‘addicts’ and as ‘In a big fat game’, ‘gambling’ with lives.

While Dave’s song is indeed about a particular place and time, it makes use of language, of a rhetoric, which we find all over our five-century selection of protest songs. It describes persons, processes and events in ways – and with names – that encourage audiences to make particular evaluations. Through a series of contrasts Dave shows those in power failing to live up to the virtues of office, lacking empathy and understanding of others’ suffering, caught up in their own machinations, self-interested, superficial and cowardly. The song is an example of the genre of rhetoric known as epideictic – the kind concerned with praise and blame, and with making arguments about the moral evaluation of somebody’s behaviour set against what is presumed to be the community’s shared sense of right and wrong (a common sense which the song relies on and which it also reaffirms and recreates).

Rhetoric scholars also speak of a topos – established, typical and general forms of argument that people draw on and apply to particular situations. Interestingly, when it comes to evaluating the conduct of the rich and powerful, protest songs regularly – perhaps predominantly – employ epideictic rhetoric and draw on the same topos. That’s not to say that nothing changes. People have always evaluated things using ideas of good and bad, just and unjust, beneficial and harmful. What is significant is what is assigned to those categories, and how.

Over four hundred years before Dave we find the 1603 song ‘Come all you Farmers out of the Countrey’. This was a response to King James’s granting of knighthoods, for a fee, to anyone with an income higher than forty pounds per year. In the song, criticism of the newly ennobled is connected to a larger complaint about ‘things these days’:

Though thow has neither good Birth nor Breeding
If thou has Money, thow art sure of speeding.

That is to say, those with money (obtained from the direct ownership and management of farms) are being quickly elevated, and knighthood, which ‘in old Time’ was an honour attained only by ‘the best Spiritts’, is debased. The song paints a picture of that debasement by opening up a gap between real standing and virtue, and mere appearance. It contrasts ‘twoe Shillings Bonnetts’ with ‘three Pounds Beavers’, describing carts and coaches that impress the vulgar, the buying of new gowns and the ‘ladifying’ of people who do not deserve it.

Something similar is found in ‘Well met Jockie whether away’ from 1604–10, an attack on Scots coming to the court of King James. It exploits prejudices about the unrefined ‘Jockie’ who is mocked in the refrain: ‘by Sweet St. An’ he is now ‘growne a gentleman’. Each verse contrasts items of clothing: work shoes once made of Scottish cow hide are now made of Spanish leather and ‘bedeckt with roses’; stockings that cost twelve pence have ‘turned into a silken hew’; a bonnet is now a ‘bever hat & fether’.

In both of these songs people at the centre of courtly power are represented as undeserving; appearance is distinguished from reality, and a new elite is found to be superficial, indulgent and avaricious. Both songs are attacks on people seen as upstarts, and each relies on some idea of natural nobility to which, they suggest, we should return.

In a similar way – but with a different political intent – ‘Times Alteration’ (1618–29) attacks the rich for putting personal luxury before noble charity. It contrasts past and present, the time of the song and the time when, as the refrain has it, ‘this old cap was new’, lamenting the loss of fine nobles and of a time when ladies wore civil habit rather than ‘French Fashions’. Then, principles of good hospitality were respected, charity valued, and gentlemen were courteous and welcoming. Now, luxury has brought with it bribery and corruption while soldiers go unpaid.

Similar themes inform the 1635 ‘Christmas Lamentation’ written in response to a proclamation requiring the gentry to be resident in their country mansions rather than in London. In the country, it was thought, the gentry served the king, kept houses ready to defend the realm, guided and relieved the ‘meaner sort of people’. By staying in London they were taking money out of the counties, and spending it ‘in excess of apparel’, as the proclamation put it, transferring resources to foreign nations, consuming ‘delights and expence’ while their estates wasted away. The song argues that Christmas has been lost while ‘great men’ have flown to London:

Where they in pomp, and pleasure doe waste
That which Christmas was wonted to feast.

The indulgence of the rich in London is contrasted with the virtues of piety and charity. As tillage decays in every town, high rents mean that ‘Pierce the Plow-man, barefoot may dance’. Here again, a ruling class is upbraided for profligacy, pride and luxury and for failure to abide by social, economic and moral obligations. They are, as it were, being told to cease their superficial metropolitan pretensions, and commit to ‘levelling up’ of the regions.

The wealthy and the noble were not the only objects of such criticism. The 1642 song ‘Vox Populi in Plaine English’, likely sung at demonstrations in the months leading up to civil war, targeted clerics, representing them as ‘proud’, ‘growne lofty’, and as ‘fat-belied priests that have livings great store’, worried that they might have to wear ‘leather garments, instead of black cloth’. All this is contrasted with the collective singers of the song, a ‘rude regiment’ and ‘troupes of courageous hearts’.

Reversing standard epithets (the rhetorical trope of paradiastole) the song names bishops as the rabble rather than ‘the people’ who are redescribed as the best of the king’s subjects, seeking the:

good of both Kingdome and State
whatever Baals Priests and proud Prelates doe prate.

This builds up to an appeal to the ‘good people’ in general to take courage, to free themselves from ‘the antichrists yoke’ and ultimately to a call for English people to gain for themselves the liberties the Scots have. Rather than restoration of a natural moral order, then, the song calls for the establishment of a new one.

In these early songs we find a familiar critical political repertoire, centred on the description and redescription of people and behaviours so that they may be judged in terms of virtue and vice. In the 1650–3 ‘A New Game at Cards: OR The three nimble Shuffling Cheaters’ we find these tropes applied in a way very familiar to us today from their use in criticism of ‘professional’ politicians. A protest at the downfall of the monarchy, the focus of the song is the machinations of politickers of various kinds, represented through the metaphor of a card game at which they cheat, hoping to win money.

Something similar underpins the 1653 song ‘The Parliament Routed OR, Here’s a HOUSE To Be Let’. In this hugely influential song the Parliament is attacked for corruption, its members said to be easily bought, enriching themselves and sending money abroad (to the Dutch no less). That is, they are represented as hostile to the nation itself, and to the soldiers who served it in revolutionary war. Politicians’ votes are explained as driven by self-interest –

they voted, unvoted, as fancy did guide
to pass away time but increasing their treasure

– leaving the widows, tradesmen, rich and poor alike to suffer. A parliament of vice-ridden rooks oppressing the nation is contrasted with Cromwell who is aligned with God in so far as he has a mission to restore England’s glory.

The language of moral critique and contempt in songs from the eighteenth century is even more familiar. The 1751 song ‘The Coney Warren, Its Uses’ comes from a play – The Charnwood Opera – performed as a commemoration of opposition to the enclosure of land in Leicestershire (but not published at the time). It too criticises the state of things today by contrasting them with an idealised past:

Good lord, what a difference! I sigh when I’m told
Of our modern squires, and the gentry of old
Generosity then distinguished the man
But find common honesty now if you can.

The core of the critique is scabrous, to say the least. It turns on a play on words conflating ‘coney’ and ‘cunny’. Wealthy lords are represented as sexually loose but fiscally tight, needing always to keep their women at home satisfied. Those women are represented as voracious, their nature more animal than human:

A strange greedy creature, with horrible maw
For she will eat nothing but flesh that is raw.

The lords need all the land for themselves so that they can breed rabbits to feed to their wives, leaving the poor eating ‘water porridge’. The song warns that

All the commons in England shall warrens become
The coneys on commons keep coney at home,

and that the corruption will spread: ‘The Squire’s example does scab all the flocks’, while

The Parson may pray, and may preach with a pox
and bid you be penitent, and orthodox.

The rhetorical stakes intensify further as the lords are found guilty of avarice and debauchery; ‘devils incarnate’, they are ‘defiling’ the land, are murderers and rapists. Couplets such as

Blood-suckers of the Poor whilst themselves they do feed
Which is worse than rebellion or witchcraft indeed

or

By cunning they live, which they call politics
By fraud, circumvention, and forty sharp tricks

are the right length to appear on Twitter today and while the language is a little arcane the invective would be quite at home there.

The argument of ‘The Freeholder’s Ditty’ from 1756 is also rather familiar. Here the nation is said to be losing standing and pride and in ruin because (imagine it!) ‘venal souls’ determine its fate – ‘Paultry Rogues, Copyholds and pamper’d slaves in Ermine’. The present is contrasted with the reign of Elizabeth who ruled without parties but with good advisers who did not seek to ‘feed’ their friends with ‘public funds and plunder’. That sort of virtue is contrasted with present vice; fawning and lying are the way to advance, there are no principles other than party identification, and ‘dark design; black Politicks’.

Some songs – especially as the mass of people start to become more politically assertive – direct invective away from politics and politicians as such, finding vice and corruption elsewhere in society, perhaps proposing that government action might be a remedy for distress. For example, the Wilkite song ‘A New Touch of the Times’ (1774–5) is addressed to ‘the good people of England’ who are set against the farmers (accused of overcharging for corn), along with the millers who short weigh, bakers who adulterate the flour, butchers selling old mutton as lamb and so on. On the other side are the king and queen whose health is toasted, but above all ‘brave Wilkes’, who shall bring down the ‘villains’.

In the nineteenth century, politicians and the wealthy are often directly aligned in protest songs. The 1810s ‘Hand-Loom Weavers’ Lament’ is addressed to the ‘gentlemen and tradesmen that ride about at will’, asking them to call themselves to account and take note of the gap between wealth and poverty. It complains that endless wars are putting up prices, while markets collapse and wages fall. The children of the poor are dressed in rags, while ‘yours do dress as manky as monkeys in a show’. The former hunger while

With the choicest of strong dainties your tables over spread
With good ale and strong brandy, to make your faces red.

The chorus insists:

You tyrants of England, your race may soon be run
You may be brought unto account for what you've sorely done

and builds to the dramatic claim that Napoleon Bonaparte is not the most important threat to the nation, but ‘bigger tyrants, Boneys of our own’. The address then shifts to the audience/singers:

And now, my lads, for to conclude, it’s time to make an end
Let’s see if we can form a plan that these bad times may mend
Then give us our old prices, as we have had before
And we can live in happiness, and rub off the old score’.

‘The Double Dealer’ from 1830 is a broad depiction of decline and corruption in ‘Strange time when stones must bleed’. Critical of the fact that ‘Some thousands are extremely rich, And millions are most wretched poor’ it is particularly hostile to politicians, asking:

How long must wolves in Parliament sit
Watch-dogs, stealing people’s rights
Church pretty shepherds must repent
That know no flocks by any lights,

dismissing proposals for reform as ‘puff’.

1834’s ‘The New Poor Law and the Farmer’s Glory’ responds to that year’s updating of Poor Laws from 1601 which, applying good Benthamite principles, sought to reduce costs and change incentives by creating workhouses. The song’s rhetoric of contrast is carried in the tune – ‘Home, Sweet Home’ – emphasising the gulf between the conditions of the workhouse as it is and how things ought to be. It begins with a depiction of life in the workhouse, its abuses, how it breaks up families and so on. It then presents a warning: ‘Beware, you blow’d out farmers and noblemen beside’ promising them a future, ultimate judgement. The makers of the poor laws are then aligned with Satan:

For those who made the poor laws they are the spawn of hell
And of those that do uphold them the truth to you I’ll tell
For the devil is their master, who put it in their heads
And this they will prove all on their dying beds.

From the same period, ‘The Corn Laws’ (1837) makes a clear political demand, insisting in the chorus: ‘Then Open every British port, and let the poor be fed’. However, it is not addressed to politicians but to

Ye millions that so keenly feel
the pressure of the times
to you I earnestly appeal.

It aims to explain to them the causes of their distress, namely that ‘the haughty possess the land’ and have ceased to follow divine command, and enjoins audiences to take up the cause and to ensure that

all property is insecure
and insecure must be
till they our plundered rights restore.

Its closing appeal is to Victoria – ‘queen beloved’ – arguing that she must surely be moved by her people’s cry for bread.

In the twentieth century the targets of protest songs proliferate and reliance on religious imagery decreases. But the focus on vice and virtue, on failure to live up to the demands of standing, station or office, remains. War songs, for example, are often critical of the officer class. ‘Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire’ contrasts the fate of the front-line solider with that of the officers hiding out eating, drinking and staying safe far away from the front-line. The 1922 ‘An Appeal by Unemployed Ex-Servicemen’ contrasts the virtues of the hard-working poor trying to provide for their families with the rich:

their sovereigns they nurse, and they keep a full purse
so the poor man can’t get a share.

Famously, ‘The Man Who Waters the Workers’ Beer’ paints a picture of the terrible boss who enjoys his car, yacht and aeroplane not caring if his poisoning of the beer makes the workers ill. But there is a different sort of political edge here in that the boss class is said to fear ‘a strong and healthy working class’. Here is a song proposing not only a moral judgement but a way in which people might change the system.

The period after 1945 is full of songs attacking the ‘establishment’ and rhetorical effort is put into defining and describing it in particular ways. That establishment is sometimes generational (composed of older people out of touch with the modern world and its needs), at other times cultural-economic (the values of the upper-class contrasted with those of the newly empowered mass of people). The Adverts’ ‘Great British Mistake’ is an attack on ruling class complacency that becomes an attack on the culture as a whole. In ‘Eton Rifles’ The Jam measure the distance between the militarised and well-organised scions of the ruling class and the disorganised working people they attack. XTC’s ‘Generals and Majors’ opines against rulers too ready to have fun with war. In ‘Two Tribes’ Frankie Goes to Hollywood mock leaders for whom war and international relations are just a game.

There are also songs that, like Dave’s, protest specific leaders. In this respect Margaret Thatcher was clearly inspirational. Fifteen months into her premiership The Beat simply sang ‘Stand Down Margaret’ while UB40 represented her in frightening mythical form as ‘Madam Medusa’. The anarchist collective Crass were blunter when, after the Falklands War, they asked their own question of the Prime Minister: ‘How does it feel (to be the mother of a thousand dead)?’ Echoes of older songs about Parliament can be heard in Billy Bragg’s ‘Ideology’. He raises a pertinent question of MPs:

They must declare their interests
But not their company cars
Is there more to a seat in parliament
Than sitting on your arse?

Plenty of other state-of-the-nation songs of that time also evoke ancestral spirits. ‘Heartland’ by The The sounds at times like it could almost be from the eighteenth century:

Let the poor drink the milk while the rich eat the honey
Let the bums count their blessings while they count the money.

Labour politicians – perhaps because expected (or claiming) to be moral in a way others are not – get a particularly hard time. In 1962 Leon Rosselsson parodied the Party anthem ‘The Red Flag’, to criticise what seventeenth-century songs would have called ‘speeding’:

We will not cease from mental fight till every wrong is righted
And all men are equal quite, and all our leaders knighted
For we are sure if we persist to make the New Year's Honours list.

Chumbawamba’s ‘Amnesia’ from 1998 is a complaint about politicians forgetting their values and promises and makes specific sideswipes at the New Labour party of Tony Blair:

Burns are red, bruises blue
Out with the old cheated by the new.

Blunter still is Atilla the Stockbroker’s ‘Guy Fawkes’ Table’, written at the time of the Commons vote in favour of the Labour government’s policy of invading Iraq. The chorus repeats:

Aneurin Bevan, your party is dead
And the time for a new one is nigh
Will the last person Left please turn out the lights?
New Labour, just fuck off and die.

Chris T-T’s ‘Tony’s Heart’ is a folk ballad about how Prime Minister Tony Blair falls ill and is found to be literally without a heart.

Such attacks were not confined to the ‘usual suspects’ of benefit gigs and acoustic guitars. George Michael’s ‘Shoot the Dog’ satirizes Tony Blair’s eagerness to sign up to the US-led invasion of Iraq and reworks tropes we’ve seen from earlier periods, speculating on sexual relations and other such shenanigans between the singer, the Prime Minister, his wife and the American President.

Perhaps at the pinnacle of this ‘genre’, both of its time and yet also drawing from, speaking to and soundly summarising four-hundred years of tradition, is Jarvis Cocker’s far-from-ambiguous song ‘Cunts Are Still Running the World’. It was released in 2006 with the chaos of post-war Iraq on full view, not least the torture perpetrated by US soldiers stationed there, and a time of increasing inequality. After the 2008 financial crash it would be the subject of a ‘Christmas number 1’ campaign. The song paints a familiar picture contrasting the way in which the rich treat the working class with the fact that their children are fed on fancy food – ‘crayfish and lobster tails’. As a class they imagine their success to be evidence of a natural order, and put wealth above virtue: (‘Fuck the morals, does it make any money?’ the song ventriloquises). ‘If you thought things had changed / Friend, you'd better think again’ sings Cocker in the chorus:

Bluntly put, in the fewest of words
Cunts are still running the world.

Songs are, on the whole, too short, and the requirements of the form too constraining, to develop anything approaching a detailed analysis of a political situation. But they are very good at painting a picture, staging political scenes in ways that audiences can immediately apprehend. When it comes to depictions of those at the top of a hierarchy – be it religious, monetary or political – those pictures are of virtue and vice. If they work, if they are intelligible to us, it is because they are pictures we already know, images from an established genre – a topos – of political criticism and protest song which writers, performers and audiences repeat but also rework, seeking to change who and what we assign to each category, and to intensify our anger or outrage (and our solidarity with each other). Our ‘betters’ are found to lack spiritual and moral clarity and, as shown by their appetites for fancy clothes, food, sex and personal advancement, to be all too worldly.

In vividly representing such vice, such songs imply the existence of virtue, shared by those singing along. Sometimes that virtue belongs to tradition, something to be restored, and at other times it is to be achieved. The essence of modern politics is, after all, the endless standoff between progress and conservation, future utopia and lost golden age, revolution and restoration.

The moralisation of that division makes, I think, for a rather limited politics. There is always a risk that our hatred of politics and contempt for politicians, no matter how justified, gives way to anti-political demands and desires for a strongman to sort it all out. But such songs are not reducible to these arguments. They are a form as well as a content. When Dave asks his questions, he doesn’t just mock the ritual of PMQs – he appropriates it. Dave – or the ‘voice’ of the song – takes up the position of ‘questioner-in-chief’ calling leaders to account. That position is then shared with anyone singing along to the song, as part of a live audience or simply following it silently in their mind.

In fact, all the songs we’ve discussed here – be they monarchist or revolutionary, anti-Scot or anti-Thatcher – simulate a democratic principle according to which a person with no office, no official qualification other than that of being a citizen, has the right and the capacity to question, make fun of and challenge the words and deeds of Kings, Lords, Priests, Bosses, Politicians. This might be the most important thing protest songs and similar works of art can do. They afford us an experience – albeit in a fictional form and only for a moment – of a right, and a capacity, to stand on an equal footing with those in power, and of making a judgement of what they do and say, of what conduct might be virtuous.

Protest songs – and not just Dave’s – don’t merely ask questions. They put things into question and may make us realise that the way out of ‘this time’ and ‘this place’ is something ‘we’ alone – the singers, the listeners – can establish. That is to say, protest songs interpret the world in various ways. Only politics can change it.