Protests and protest music

Bob Dylan shows radio DJs how it's done while Ireland's anti-war protests are chronicled in a new online documentary

Back when I was a Meejit, I moaned about the low levels of skin pigmentation on the artists who turn up on RTÉ Radio 1's musical menu – i.e. they're too damn white, and that matters even when you can't see 'em. Way back before that, I was a champion of “indie-rock” Dublin pirate station Phantom FM and its efforts to go legit. I've got to admit, these days I'm finding there is some contradiction between those two positions.

Frankly, Radio 1 is a paragon of racial diversity compared to Phantom, where there can be a great mix of sounds – albeit with crunching guitars often out front – as long as the artists making them are unmistakably honky.

Phantom has now gone one licensed year. It recently picked up a PPI award as best local music station, and it's not hard to hear why. It has a small but select audience to whom it talks intelligently about new music, and it plugs plenty of young bands. (Edel Coffey's morning show, Access All Areas, is especially impressive.) Even its news is done without 2FM-style condescension to “the kids”. So far so good, and I'm loath to lecture when – let's face it – I've got Ramones ticket stubs that are older than Phantom's main target audience.

After all, what do I expect from an “indie-rock” station? As the station's website puts it, it broadcasts “rock and independent music”. Trouble is, those words mean less and less today, and certainly don't carry the same sense of this-is-where-the-creative-energy-lies that they arguably did in the grungy Nineties when Phantom set sail as a pirate.
Compare it to Ireland's newest music station, the regional Spin South West – which I was able lately to listen to with my 12-year-old while driving in and around the noted southwestern city of Galway. Chart-oriented and not without condescension to its young audience, Spin nonetheless moves and grooves easily between nerdy white-boy “Emo” and hot coloured girls singing R&B. The ratio of quality to crap is of course a purely subjective measure, but I would put it at roughly similar to Phantom's.

It's not as though Phantom insists on one kind of sound, and that therefore a genre limit (“rock”) carries a coincidental colour bar; Phantom has got sleepy “post-rock”, for example, coming out the wazoo, and the occasional dance-floor vibe. The other day I heard Phantom play Beck's jazzy hip-hop pastiche, “Where It's At” – but you're only likely to hear a black rapper when a white guy like Beck samples him.

You'll hear Los Campesinos! because they're actually Welsh indie-poppers, but not the LA mestizo sounds of the Chicanos and African-Americans in Ozomatli. Here's a Dublin band called Stagger Lee, but very little from the black carriers of the tradition of African-American music which gave the world that name. (Jimi Hendrix and Phil Lynott, of course, get their traditional pass.) The phrase “Play that funky music, white boy” has rarely seemed more apt.

One has to wonder if the narrowness is rooted in a deeper ignorance that the Phantom folks share with their audience. As the station was celebrating its birthday lately, I heard its main man, Simon Maher, presenter of the afternoon Phantom Daily, doing a (typically lame) text-in gimmick, inviting listeners to tell us their birthdays so Simon could tell them which celebrities share them. (Woo-hoo.) One listener was born on 14 July, and Simon, presumably reading from a website, cited “American folk-musician Woody Guthrie, in 1912”, then added: “He's the Alice's Restaurant guy.”

Sweet Jesus. One can only speculate what the man who was once Woody's self-appointed heir, Bob Dylan, would make of that piece of generational mistaken identity, now that Bob is newly part of the line-up on Simon's station.

For many people who are fanatical about both Bob Dylan and good radio – there are fortunately two of us who plead guilty 'round my place, and we're happily serving life sentences – Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour is already familiar from downloads and/or BBC Radio 2. For everyone else, Phantom programmers included, there is one hell of an education on offer. Dylan plays stuff that is much more obscure than the station's typical offerings, but wears his anorak more lightly, while single-handedly darkening the Phantom musical line-up.

There's little new music here. Instead, amidst a deliberate old-time wireless atmosphere, there is a remarkably deep weekly excavation of R&B, gospel and country (and precious little straight “folk” or rock), with some blue-eyed crooning thrown in. Dylan growls inimitably, amusingly and informatively between songs, and the encyclopaedic effect is only slightly spoiled when you hear the long list of research credits at the end.

The sheer quality of Dylan raises expectations of everything, but I still don't expect to see Eamonn Crudden's Route Irish on ordinary broadcast TV: after all, it is simply an accomplished film-maker's intimate and revealing document from deep inside the local manifestation of the most significant global popular movement of recent decades, the waxing and waning protests against the Iraq war. If you want to see it – and I think you do – you'll have to find it online, where Crudden, a stalwart of the copyleft ethos, is making it available for free.

From the distance of nearly five years, the huge crowds of early 2003 are a sad sight. Crudden persuasively argues that those mass protests were a sort of popular purification ritual, so that people could proceed to watch the war guiltlessly (“well, I marched against it”); and that their typical slogan, “Not in my name”, was a very poor substitute for “Over my dead body”. Even the less passive protests at Shannon don't get off easy.

If you haven't seen it yet, prepare to blush – especially if you happen to be a Green Party politician.