Another aspect during this exercise that I was reminded of was how simply tracking protest songs over fifty years did not take into account dramatic cultural changes that have also occurred over that time. We are after all, it could be argued, products of our own environment so it's not just the level of our social response but also how we have responded over time AND how awareness causes us to respond.

Using the anti-war category was only useful where we assumed that awareness about that issue is consistent. Let's face it, war unfortunately is as old as human beings charging over the hills with sharp sticks. But what if growing awareness about an issue also changes over time thereby affecting the response.

To try and determine this let's now focus on an issue where awareness has undoubtedly grown over time and see what that tells us. The category below is environmental songs, again taken from Wikipedia:

Now as before accepting the fact that our data is incomplete we hope we have enough to possibly draw some conclusions. What we can see is an apparent increase in awareness of environmental issues as time goes on, this may or may not be also due to an increasing population. There are also two quite prominent peaks that occur around 1991 and 2007. Is there a correlation for example between the release of 'An Inconvenient Truth' in 2006 and the peak of the following year, maybe, maybe not? But what we can see is that artists are responding to the apparent issues of the day when they occur and certainly the rise in prominence of environmental issues is reflected in the chart above. The key question however is still whether they still respond in significant numbers today.

So what we have we learnt. Well basically that there is much more to this discussion than simple and cursory statistics can provide, much of that is anecdotal and even then the view will continually change over time, change with the issues at hand and your perspective. Both charts do 'suggest' that artists continue to act on important issues and write protest songs but whether they do so as prominently as in years gone by I haven't been able to determine so the jury is stlll out.

And on that score I'm going to throw my hands in the air and go cry in the corner. And maybe perhaps that's what a lot of us have done these days where in simpler times we may have responded differently.

One thing I do know for sure is that it's not like the world is devoid of issues, it's not like we don't have something to shout about in song, I'm just not hearing it as much as I remember. Are you?

Jason Durbin (aka Lagrange Audio) has been a synth and music tech enthusiast for 30 years since getting his hands on his first synth in 1983 at the tender age of 16. He hasn't earned a single Aussie dollar from music but the journey has been nothing short of incredible and he has met and interacted with some amazing people along the way. Jason is a true enthusiast doing it for nothing more than the pure love of it.