Whenever we talk about Our Subversive Voice we are always asked one question in particular: ‘Do they work?’ Often people asking this question give the impression that they already know the answer: ‘No’.

But what does ‘work’ mean here?

Significant political change is always the outcome of a complex interaction between all sorts of things: long-term cultural trends, deep economic shifts, the actions of millions of people and – of course – luck. One part of that complex is the things people say to each other: the spread of ideas, arguments and beliefs through all manner of media including speeches, chants, arguments, debates, posters, books, pamphlets, banners, Twitter feeds, YouTube channels.

It would be unreasonable to expect a single song to substitute for all of that, or to hold that song to a higher standard than all the rest of political communication, very little of which ‘works’ in an immediate way and all of which is dependent on the larger situations of which it is part.

Rather than ask ‘do they work’ we are better off asking ‘what work do they do?’

Lord Reith, the Director General of the BBC at its founding in 1922, declared that the mission of the new service was to Inform, Educate and Entertain. That’s not a bad way to start thinking about the mission of protest songs. For instance, Peter Gabriel’s ‘Biko’ starts out informing people of something that happened:

September ’77
Port Elizabeth weather fine
It was business as usual
In police room 619.

Thus the song announces (memorialises and laments) the state murder of the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. Using Xhosa language and South African musical styles it informs listeners about a people and their culture. In this sense ‘Biko’ is a kind of ‘news’ song and has things in common with many of the songs on our list: a report on a miscarriage of justice and the wrongful execution of William Habron; the murder of Liddle Towers; accounts of police racism and brutality.

Eddy Grant’s 1988 chart hit ‘Gimme Hope Jo’anna’ is also about South Africa. It ‘educates’ audiences by explaining to them that the country ‘makes a few of her people happy, oh / She don’t care about the rest at all’ and that ‘She’s got a system they call apartheid / It keeps a brother in a subjection’, even proposing a potential connection between political action and change:

Maybe pressure will make Jo’anna see
How everybody could live as one.

This sort of argument about the nature of political rule, the causes of crises and what to do about them is of course common in the history of protest songs and well demonstrated by, to pick just one good example, Chartist Allen Davenport’s explanation of how people’s experience of hunger is a product of inequitable land distribution and the Corn Laws.

As a third example, consider The Specials’ ‘Free Nelson Mandela’, which is undeniably an ‘entertaining’ song. It enthuses audiences and perhaps energises them, encouraging or sustaining their common political feelings and commitments. In that respect it is like many of the ‘anthems’ on our list – songs that delight, afford people an experience of shared unity (keeping them marching in time), or give them solace from suffering at the front line. There are innumerable examples of songs doing this kind of thing, especially in the nineteenth century. The reformist anthem ‘The Gathering of the Unions’ and the suffragist ‘March of the Women’ are just two examples.

This is, of course, a simplified and schematic way of looking at these songs. In truth all three anti-apartheid songs do all three things: inform, educate and entertain. One way of finding out whether or not a song ‘works’ artistically might be to look at the balance of these elements and the particular ways in which they are combined. Does a song cohere? Does the need to entertain, and to keep words to a rigid pattern of verse and chorus with a clear rhythm and rhyme, overwhelm the attempt to spread information and to explain? Conversely, does a focus on telling the news make for something that fails as an attention-holding song?

Sceptics might still insist that – even with the most well-written songs – people often don’t listen to lyrics or simply misunderstand them. Eddy Grant’s song has an infectious, easy rhythm and you can definitely sing along to it without really thinking about who Jo’anna is. At a disco, ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ is just a fun song. But some people also misunderstand the news, road signs and the instructions on medications. It doesn’t follow that none of these things ‘works’.

We have to remember that such songs exist in a larger context, one that might improve the chances of being understood (or, indeed, wreck them). It isn’t all about the song. My main examples share not only a theme but a connection to the organised Anti-Apartheid Movement. Beginning in 1959 as a committee urging a boycott of South Africa, this grew into an international movement, receiving widespread support from cultural and labour organisations.

Mandela became an important symbol for that movement culminating in a concert in 1988 marking his 70th birthday – watched by hundreds of millions all over the world while he remained in jail. The British government never endorsed the AMM’s call for a boycott and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher publicly continued to call Mandela and the African National Congress terrorists (although we know now that in private she urged the South African government to free him). International opprobrium was part of such pressure put on the South African government, while support for its opposition was part of what helped it endure. The AMM was a central part of that, and the songs were a part of opposition to apartheid.

But to focus on the effects of songs on governments is perhaps to miss the point. The audience for them wasn’t the British, South African or any other government. It was the music-listening and -buying public. The question is how the songs worked on them. For some people the first they heard of the situation in South Africa was when Gabriel, Grant or Dammers sang about it or when the music sparked a conversation in a family, at work or at school and university.

Indeed, at a deeper level, learning the news about apartheid opened people onto an education about racial justice. Is it possible that these songs have not yet completed their work? In any case, the songs were one part of a much wider range of communications – news reports and political speeches, films and documentaries, pamphlets and books, marches and benefit concerts – which made claims, told stories and advanced arguments – trying to persuade people to think this or that, to feel one way rather than another about South Africa, apartheid and the ways in which racism can be institutionalised. The songs were a kind of political rhetoric and it is as political rhetoric that we must assess them.

Rhetoric is, simply, an art of persuasion. A rhetorician tries to paint pictures, tell stories and communicate information in ways that help us to see things in a particular light. Through rhythm, repetition and phrasing rhetoric may hold our attention and make things vivid. It tries to connect with what we already think – our sense of right and wrong, just and unjust, advantageous or disadvantageous – so that we can make a (hopefully sound and reasonable) judgement as to what to do about something.

Consider one of the most famous political speeches: Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream. Like all great speeches it is both short and complex. I can’t do it justice here. Its power came in part from the way in which it was delivered – the rhythm, the sound and feel given to the words by King. It has a clear poetic structure which unfolds and opens out, narrating a history of the United States, painting pictures of how things have been, how they are now and how they might be in the future. In so doing it makes a straightforward and wholly rational political proposition about what the country could and should do to attain that future. And like all great rhetoric, although it appears to be a monologue, it is really a kind of conversation. The audience nod or shake their heads in response to the words. They applaud and cheer and make up their minds about the rights and wrongs of the arguments they have heard.

Songs can also do all of these things. Indeed they are just one of the ways in which people communicate their political ideas and experiences. They can’t be exactly like a political speech of course. Songs need to be short (generally), melodious (mostly) and rhythmic (always). The requirements, or expectations, of verse and chorus mean that songwriters are somewhat constrained in what they can say and how. A song is not a 400-page exposition of capitalist exploitation, a lecture on the history of the struggle for women’s rights or a ‘fully costed plan’ for reviving industry in the North East. But songs have advantages when it comes to reach and accessibility. They are not long expositions, lectures or costed policy plans. And they tend – from the rhetorical point of view – to concentrate on just some of the things we might expect in a standard speech, because they can do them well and sometimes with particular persuasive power.

One of these is the description of situations, and the related rhetorical figure of paradiastole. If we are to make a judgement of something – apartheid for example – we have to know what it is. That isn’t just a matter of definition. It is a matter of having a richer sense of what it is like. For instance, a politician seeking support for an increase in spending on transport infrastructure might describe how bad and run down or broken roads and railways are now. They might tell us about another country where they have invested in high-speed transport and about how great things are. We will judge that picture based on how well it is painted for us, and on the basis of what we already think is good, desirable or necessary.

Paradiastole means ‘redescription’. It is about changing the picture we have of something so that we change our judgement of it. That is what is happening when someone, critical of a proposal to spend money, describes it as wasteful or as a vanity project, and paints a picture of politicians thinking only about themselves and their personal legacy. If we are convinced by that description then the proposal to spend the money will, naturally, seem like a bad thing to do.

This sort of description and redescription of situations is a fundamental – perhaps the most fundamental – part of political argument and rhetoric. Just think about the political arguments that turn on whether we picture the poor as suffering and exploited or as feckless and lazy; migrants as people like us fleeing terrible situations or as criminals here to cheat the health service; climate change as an apocalypse or as painful pennies added to the cost of petrol. The images, definitions and descriptions through which we think about these kinds of situation aren’t created only by politicians. They are being created all the time by television dramas, human-interest news stories, novels, gossip, anecdotes – and songs.

Songs do this sort of thing particularly well. ‘Meat is Murder’ is nothing more or less than paradiastole, redescribing, through word and sound, what the meat industry is so that your picture of meat eating is assigned to a different and negative mental category. The song ‘Fulfilment Centre’ by Richard Dawson uses words and sound to communicate a picture of working in an Amazon warehouse so that it can never again seem like a good job opportunity. ‘The Parliament Routed’, from 1653, paints a vivid picture of a corrupt Commons:

Full 12 years and more these Rooks they have sat
To gull and to cozen all true-hearted people
Our gold and our silver has made them so fat
That they looked more big and mighty than Paul’s steeple.

If you hold that picture in your head there is no way you can support the Parliament.

Songs can do some things that other kinds of political communication can’t do so easily. Political rhetoric – as we saw with King’s speech – is a conversation. It involves audiences in the thinking it introduces and explains. Speeches pose questions to us (often implicitly but also literally in the form of the rhetorical question) so that we answer to ourselves, in our minds, and think along. This is something songs do pretty naturally. They are there for singing along to.

That is especially so in live performance. When Tom Robinson, for example, having painted a picture of life for gay people in 1970s Britain – a picture which can only be judged negatively – invites the audience to join in and ‘sing if you’re glad to be gay’, he is involving them in the process of describing and redescribing things; at least for a moment they hold in their minds the idea of being gay as something to be glad about. Similarly, when Crass ask ‘Do they owe us a living’ and an audience, or just us thinking along in our minds, replies that ‘Of course they fucking do!’ we have ‘tried on’ a way of thinking about work, painting a picture of it in our minds and responding in the only way possible.

Now, of course, at a basic and important level none of these songs is formally a political statement – not in the same ways as King’s speech. King was the leader of the civil rights movement and speaking at a demonstration. The situation, and the content of his ‘speech act’, was part of, and directed at, that moment in ways that everyone – for or against – understood at the time. Similarly, when a prominent back-bench MP says ‘resign’ to a minister it has a different sort of weight and force to when I shout it at them outside Parliament or when a singer on a stage says it to me at a concert.

The difference here is to do with the whole situation, not with songs as such. The ‘speech act’ of a politician can ‘work’ because they are recognised as having a certain social constitutional role – just as only certain people can declare us married or not guilty. That is an important difference between political speech and protest songs. But it doesn’t mean that a song is no sort of political speech act.

Songs communicate images of situations, associating them with certain ideas and feelings. They invite audiences to reflect on them, perhaps even to ‘try on’ those ideas and concepts. Thus songs inform by introducing us to new words and ideas. They educate by showing us ways those might be applied so as to explain and understand a situation. They entertain us, engaging our attention and provoking our feelings.

The question is, do protest songs work? The answer is that of course they do. They almost always work as songs which appeal to audiences, invite their participation and prompt reactions. Do they work politically? Not on their own. But they are part of a political world that does work (sometimes). Without songs important political work would remain undone.