Matt Ward: Why I Protest | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- It doesn’t get much radio play or press coverage, but the protest chant is a music genre with a long history and a global network of performers and audiences. Almost everyone could recite a protest chant off the top of their head, such is the way these little ditties worm their way into the consciousness.

Occasionally, the protest chant interacts with the pop music world. Sometimes a song is written with the specific aim of it being sung on the picket line – like Pete Seeger penning We Shall Overcome or John Lennon writing Power To The People. Sometimes protesters make a song their own – like Black Lives Matter activists chanting Kendrick Lamar’s We Gonna Be Alright while being pepper sprayed by police, or Kansas’ cheesy 70’s ballad Dust In The Wind becoming the unlikely melody of Myanmar’s most famous protest anthem. Sometimes pop songs imitate protest chants to powerful effect – what would Public Enemy’s biggest songs be without their chant-along chorus, let alone the entire genre of street punk? And then, every now and again, the two merge when a protest chant becomes the chorus of a pop song. Once this was most likely a folk singer taking seriously the notion of “music of the people”, but since the 90’s and the invention of samplers, it is often electronic musicians who incorporate the sounds of the street march into their song. An update on this tradition is the new album Why I Protest by Mat Ward.

Ward is a Sydney based electronic artist. He has been prolifically releasing politically themed music for the last five years, though it has generally been instrumental. For this record, he has started rapping along to his poppy drum’n’bass inspired beats, basing the songs around eleven different protest chants that form the choruses of the album.

Some of the chants are old classics, for example opening and closing tracks Always Was Always Will Be Aboriginal Land and The Workers United Will Never Be Defeated. Others are obviously from more recent campaigns, like Science Has The Facts, People Lose With Fake News.

Megaphones and chanting are often associated with anger and militancy, but Why I Protest is a fun and light-hearted record. It brings out the musicality in chants – which aren’t just the yelling of an angry mob but involve an artistry of rhythm and rhyme. The best protest chants often incorporate humour too, which comes out here in songs like album highlight Why Are You In Riot Gear? I Don’t See No Riot Here.

Why I Protest works as an album of fun singalong political songs, aided by Ward’s verses expanding on the chorus topics. It also works as a tribute to this often neglected form of music – one that is democratically crowd sourced for content; which is designed for and produced by strangers gathered together united by common values. If you go to a lot of rallies, it’s easy to take chants for granted or even find them a bit tiresome. But the protest chant is a musical demonstration of a basic political idea – that one person alone can make a bit of noise, but a group working in unison can shake a city.

- Andy Paine.