“Should the current global turmoil caused by the Trump administration motivate a collective response from the Popular Music community?” That is the question we posed to writer Daniel Rachel. 

Our inquiry was prompted by the knowledge that history tells us Popular Music has continually voiced dissent since the end of World War II. Singer-songwriters and social activists Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie in the 50s and 60s led the way for Bob Dylan to defy Popular Music conventions and appeal to a burgeoning counterculture. Civil Rights activists used music to build solidarity, Joan Baez’s We Shall Overcome became an anthem. Dominant voices in Folk and Rock performed at Anti-Vietnam War rallies. Benefit concerts in the 70s, Concert For Bangladesh and 80s, Live Aid were established as a model for Rock stars using their celebrity to influence political and humaniterian issues. These large-scale concerts showed the power of music to address global issues. By the late 70s Punk had become another form of protest in Popular Music. From the 90s till present protest music expanded to include Hip-Hop, Hardcore and Punk, focusing on issues like police brutality, institutional distrust and gender rather than a single unified cause. 

Daniel Rachel’s excellent Too Much Too Young – The 2 Tone Records Story – Rude Boys, Racism And The Soundtrack Of A Generation explains the history of a turbulent time in British musical history with incredible detail capturing the daily struggles and contradictions within the bands and the audiences during harsh political times. Rachel’s knowledge garnered from compiling Too Much Too Young and his latest book, This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll convinced us he would be a compelling and informative guest to discuss our question. Interestingly, Daniel took the opportunity during our conversation to voice his strongly-held opinion on a crucial social issue we did not expect. Listen attentively and we think you’ll agree Daniel Rachel touches on an important matter that should motivate a collective response from the Popular Music community. In the closing moments of the conversation Daniel says, “Man, I got a bit heavy there!” 

Daniel Rachel is a former musician turned award-winning and bestselling author. His previous books include Too Much Too Young: Rude Boys, Racism and the Soundtrack of a Generation (a Sunday Times, Uncut, Rough Trade US and Resident Music book of the year) and Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters (a Guardian and NME book of the year). He lives in London.

As you read this, the topic of social media is in the news once again with droves of people fleeing from Twitter/X to head over to Blue Sky and Threads. In 2019 we invited Andrew Marantz, to talk about his book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. Marantz had been embedded in two worlds. The first is the world of social-media entrepreneurs, who, acting out of naïvete and reckless ambition, upended all traditional means of receiving and transmitting information. The second is the world of the people he calls “the gate crashers”–the conspiracists, white supremacists, and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agenda. Antisocial ranges broadly–from the first mass-printed books to the trending hashtags of the present; from secret gatherings of neo-Fascists to the White House press briefing room–and traces how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then how it becomes reality.Antisocial reveals how the boundaries between technology, media, and politics have been erased, resulting in a deeply broken informational landscape–the landscape in which we all now live. Marantz shows how alienated young people are led down the rabbit hole of online radicalization, and how fringe ideas spread–from anonymous corners of social media to cable TV to the President’s Twitter feed.

Andrew Marantz is an American author and journalist who writes for The New Yorker.  In 2019 he published his book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.