Right on

In Competition 2522 you were asked to submit a right-wing protest song. There are some fine examples of this underexploited genre in Tim Robbins’s mock-documentary film Bob Roberts which features a guitar-playing senatorial candidate who appropriates the language of the Sixties protest movement to peddle his ultra-conservative message. The campaign trail is peppered with numbers such as ‘Times Are Changin’ Back’ and ‘My Land’, which rail against drugs and lazy people.
The standard was disappointing this week, with only four of you making the cut. Most went for the anthemic model of Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger, but this is hard to pull off from a right-wing perspective that lacks the righteous indignation of a mass movement feeling oppressed. The alternative might have been to focus on a sense of pathos and injustice by telling the story of an individual victim (as in Dylan’s ‘Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’) or group (Woody Guthrie’s ‘Ludlow Massacre’).