Baby, the rock n’ roll spirit should be on your side

I am a rock ‘n’ roller by origin and inclination. I started off in rock journalism writing about bands and song and gigs. I wrote a book vaguely about U2, though not really. I loved the blues, where the whole thing started: the cry of the slave waking up to the theft of his life. I revered Lennon and Dylan because they tuned into that cry and sought to mobilise its power into the modern world. For a few years in my youth I nestled into the cool embrace of modern rock ‘n’ roll culture of protest and hope. But then I began to sense something amiss. Rock stars were talking about a woman’s ‘right to choose’ as if, as with slavery, this was a straightforward matter of freedom from oppression, as though the unborn child was the equivalent of the slave master. I grew uncomfortable. I listened to Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit and heard a different song to everyone else: Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh/Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.