Songs of Social Protest and Context

The present chapter focuses on the first variable of the triadic model (context-lyrics-music) introduced in the first chapter: the various dynamics of context-positioning in an SSP. Re-elaborating from Stefani (Una strategia di pace: La difesa popolare nonviolenta. FuoriThema, Bologna, 1993), I suggest five different types of relations between an SSP and the context/occasion it is performed in or conceived for: “Specific relation”, “Indirect relation”, “General relation”, “Phatic relation” and “Paratextual relation”. After that, I suggest that an SSP can also be written/performed by “positioning” the political action (or lack thereof) in some particular chronological (“Before”, “During” and “After” the protest) and spatial (“exposed”, “clear”, “ambiguous/neutral”, “hidden/rejected”) location. I then proceed to cross this classification with Greimas’s theory of modalization (e.g. Greimas in On meaning: Selected writings in semiotic theory. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1987) and separate the modalities of “Doing/Not Doing” from those of “Being/Not Being”, in order to distinguish between songs whose main ideological point is to underline the very action of protest (“Doing/Not Doing”), and songs which instead are inclined to describe a context/situation/character/etc. (“Being/Not Being”).