C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 , 2019
their own social agita to rhythm
and melody. Look at Taylor Swift’s
“Miss Americana & the Heart-
break Prince,” a new ballad in
which Swift wafts her newfound
political disillusionment through
the halls of a metaphorical high
school.
“A merican glory faded before
me,” Swift sings. “Now I’m feeling
hopeless.” Her m essage — that o ur
democracy is not living up to its
promise — is painfully basic, and
yet the s ong has been g reeted with
reflexive star-worship. Variety re-
cently ran a headline: “Taylor
Swift’s ‘Miss Americana’ May Be
the Great Protest Song of Our
Time.” W hat a joke. A great p rotest
song can’t just surf the waves of
dissent. It h as to help create waves
of change.
The convulsions of t he 21st c en-
tury have produced at least two
great protest songs, though, both
of which arrived before Donald
Trump’s election. One was “FDT,”
a 2016 denunciation of then-can-
didate Trump by two Los Angeles
rappers, YG and Nipsey Hussle.
After years and years of countless
rappers praising Trump’s self-
made billionaire image in rhyme,
“FDT” served as a corrective meas-
ure, balancing b rash insults w ith a
lucid warning. “He can’t make de-
cisions for this country,” YG raps.
“He gon’ crash us.” Unfortunately,
“FDT” only addressed the im-
mediate political future. After
Trump’s v ictory, it b ecame another
grievance s mogging t he a ir.
The other great protest song of
the century doesn’t h ave an expira-
tion date. It’s K endrick Lamar’s “ Al-
right,” an anthem from 2015 that
asserts that (black) people must
first survive this world in order to
change it. At the height of the Black
Lives Matter movement, activists
sang its astonishing refrain in the
streets — “We gon’ be alright!” —
proof that a protest song could still
synchronize a crowd and conse-
crate a movement.
That’s how every protest song
should be measured — by its em-
pathy, i ts i magination and i ts utili-
ty. It has to be compassionate
enough to get inside your head,
visionary enough to help you
dream up what’s possible, power-
ful enough to shake the public
airspace. It c an’t j ust turn the t ides
inside your m ind. I t has t o get your
body out o nto the street.
Songs don’t change the world.
Listeners d o.
[email protected]that would reshape how America
looks at the world and its own
citizens — by pretending to be the
Clash.
Yes, a great protest song needs a
flash of familiarity for listeners to
rally around, but no song can
change the future by simply strip-
mining the past. Nor can any pop
song be expected to dismantle the
capitalist system that allowed ev-
eryone to hear it in the f irst place. In
his 2009 book “Capitalist Realism,”
the late critic Mark Fisher writes
about capitalism’s uncanny ability
to absorb anti-capitalist sentiment,
citing Pixar’s dystopian children’s
film “ WALL-E” a s an example of a rt
that “performs our anti-capitalism
for us, allowing us to continue to
consume with i mpunity.”
Along with nearly every con-
temporary protest song, the 1 975’s
“Love It I f We M ade It” b ehaves t he
same way. When frontman Mat-
thew Healy sings, “Modernity has
failed us,” what he really means is
that capitalism — a system t hat, to
paraphrase Fisher, promises infi-
nite growth on a planet of finite
resources — has failed us. But
Healy can’t say that. Capitalism is
what amplifies his voice. (It’s also
what allows these keystrokes to
roll across your eyeballs.)
So instead of disassembling the
corporate scaffolding that holds
them up, many of today’s best-in-
tentioned pop stars simply setsounds of Ronald Reagan’s A meri-
ca. Monáe’s “Americans” i s peppy
like a vintage Prince cut. The Kill-
ers’ “Land of the Free” is sodden
like an old Bruce Springsteen bal-
lad. Instead of meeting new
threats with new ideas, so much
contemporary protest pop re-
treats to the s afety o f the past.
That impulse isn’t original, ei-
ther. The most acclaimed protest
album to arrive during George W.
Bush’s tumultuous presidency
came from G reen D ay, a rock band
who chose to confront the war on
terror — a new kind o f endless wartrying to change the world out-
side, the new radicalism should
try to change what was inside of
people’s heads,” Curtis s ays in “ Hy-
perNormalisation,” his 2016 BBC
documentary. “And the way to do
this was through self-expression,
not c ollective action.”
Decades later, the easiest way
for a musician to smuggle a pro-
test song into people’s heads is by
tapping into collective nostalgia.
Ta ke Janelle Monáe and the Kill-
ers. Both have penned songs about
life in Donald Trump’s America,
but they’re only recycling the“Love It If We Made It” recites
the ugliest global headlines of the
past few years while flashing a
hopeless smile. “This Is America”
holds a mirror up to our violent,
racist, violently racist system, t hen
gives a blank s hrug.
What are these songs trying to
achieve? Both offer hyper-topical
verses, flanked by titular refrains
that radiate heroic despair — and
by setting those feelings of total
powerlessness to such patently u r-
gent music, the effect becomes
strangely self-canceling. You feel
seen, but y ou also f eel small.
During the civil rights move-
ment — our country’s most ster-
ling model of social change —
marchers sang “We Shall Over-
come,” a larger-than-life gospel
song that promised victory just
over the horizon. The watchword
of Trump-era protest aspires only
to a stalemate: “Resist.” It’s a de-
fensive posture, a declaration of
inertia, and it feels apt for these
times. In a society so profoundly
stuck in its own cultural nostalgia,
it’s become impossible to envision
what tomorrow should look l ike.
This paralysis of imagination is
the c risis o f our century. I t poisons
everything f rom our politics to our
pop c ulture. You c an see it in every
Hollywood f ranchise r eboot, every
MAGA hat, every episode of
“Friends” on Netflix, every hour
we spend online celebrating the
20th anniversary o f everything w e
refuse to let go. Even Beyoncé,
with all of her vision and political
power, chose to spend her s ummer
shoring up the immortality of a
25-year-old Disney f ranchise.
When did the future become so
difficult to imagine? The docu-
mentary filmmaker Adam Curtis
thinks progressives lost their way
sometime after t he c ivil rights e ra,
when members of the left began
abandoning political action for
the individualism of art and mu-
sic. “They believed that instead of
NOTEBOOK FROM C1
offenses by the powerful against
the powerless, as the #MeToo
movement has taught us. (The
Media Lab, strange to say,
identified several leaders of the
movement as the winners of its
2018 Disobedience Award.)
Ito calls himself an ethicist as
well as a tech entrepreneur.
If so, he ought to be able to
reason through this situation
and realize that taking more
than a million dollars from a
known sexual predator should
disqualify him from continuing
to lead the organization, which
benefited from the money.
Especially when his own private
ventures benefited even more.
If Ito can’t figure that out, MIT
ought to do it for him.
[email protected]Fo r more by Margaret Sullivan visit
wapo.st/sullivanin the harm of these young
women? Why is there no
accountability for men with
power? Why should I be
concerned about Ito keeping his
job when he was not concerned
about the people that Epstein
was hurting?”
MIT has not moved to distance
itself from Ito. Nor, so far, have
the powerful boards on which Ito
serves, including the New York
Times, the Knight Foundation
and the MacArthur Foundation.
The university is investigating
what happened, but Provost
Martin Schmidt has described
that effort, according to the
Times, as an attempt to “identify
lessons for the future” r ather
than “an investigation of any
particular individual.”
That sounds toothless — and
far too typical of the “we’ll look
into it” s chool of dealing withpunk outfits should make that ob-
vious to even the most clueless of
readers, b ecomes the ringleader of
a group of girls determined to take
down the Darkroom.
The polyphonic narrative that
ensues has the pacing and urgency
of a spy thriller but the middling
stakes of a book about a group of
privileged kids sending each other
cryptic texts. By the time the stakes
do achieve life-or-death heights,
the novel has forced itself into an
awkward stance of violence and
suspense that doesn’t entirely fit
with its crumpled class notes and
teenage self-importance.
In the #MeToo era, the intent of
“The Swallows” is admirable: Trace
toxic masculinity back to its roots,
the peacocking years of early ado-
lescence, and empower a group of
young women to shatter it. And
Lutz is mordant in her descriptions
of “boys will be boys” sliminess —
there’s a preppy villain, a pedo-
philic oaf, a smooth-talking manip-
ulator, an unfunny class clown and
a teacher cum writer who enables
them all (and whom Lutz expertly
uses to skewer male novelists who
can write only about their imag-
ined sexual prowess).
It’s in the machinations of the
campus cold war itself — and in
her clumsy homage to le Carré —
that Lutz stumbles. More than
once in “The Swallows,” prep
school kids sit next to each other
and talk facing forward, “like
spies”; whether Lutz intended to
play this for laughs is up for de-
bate. The book is full of anony-
mous notes and secret m eetings —
some to exchange privileged i nfor-
mation, some to preserve social
standing, some a combination of
both — that come across as comi-
cally s elf-serious. T his is not t o say
that misogyny in high school and
the sexual harassment of adoles-
cent girls aren’t serious issues —
rather, they are intersectional
ones, and there is much to be said
about power, privilege and cycles
of abuse that is skimmed over in
favor of spy-versus-spy skuldug-
gery i n “The Swallows.”
Where the novel t ruly succeeds is
in its implication of adults in the
nasty schemes of kids. Lutz inge-
niously employs a clueless guid-
ance counselor named Martha
Primm as a figurehead of deranged
internalized misogyny and the sys-
temic victim-blaming that has
plagued institutions of higher
learning across the country. Sexual
trauma is personified in school li-
brarian Claudine Shepherd, who
was educated and abused at Stone-
bridge and carries on the school’s
dark legacy with severe conse-
quences. Even Alex becomes too
entangled in her students’ dealings
and ends up suffering at the hands
of one of the m ore calculating b oys.
No o ne is perfectly i nnocent in “The
Swallows,” a nd no o ne should be.
[email protected]Re bekah Frumkin , author of the
novel “The Comedown,” is a professor
of English and creative writing at
Southern Illinois University.BOOK WORLD FROM C1the Media Lab shouldn’t be one
of them.
Consider the words of Arwa
Mboya, a graduate student in the
Media Lab, writing last month in
the Te ch, where she urged Ito to
step down.
Describing herself as a young
black woman from Kenya who is
“on a very low rung” of the power
ladder, she made a strong case
that “minimally positive
behavior” — apologies and
returning money — is not
enough.
“Why are we so ready to
forgive and accept an apology
that does not take true
responsibility for the role playedmight come to mind.
A Washington Post article this
week explored Epstein’s
philanthropic donations,
including $6.5 million to
Harvard made before his 2008
conviction, and the larger
questions that arise in
philanthropic gifts: “The
financier’s donations supported
important research and helped
scientists work toward
discoveries, but they also
provided a veneer of credibility
to a convicted sex offender.”
There are plenty of gray areas
and ethical quandaries in this
realm.
But Ito’s continuing to direct“Joi not only pursued Epstein’s
money and this kind of cash-for-
redemption trade, but then
personally benefited from MIT’s
misbegotten relationship,” he
said. “Even the corruption has
corruption.”
While it may seem an obscure
subject to those outside the East
Coast academic and media
spheres, the Media Lab episode
raises broad questions about
how worthy institutions —
museums, schools and think
tanks, to name a few — raise
money.
The names Koch and Sackler
SULLIVAN FROM C1
MARGARET SULLIVAN
News flash, Media Lab: Ito needs to go
Thriller can
be hard to
swallow
The protest
songs of
today fail
to resonate
KYLE GUSTAFSON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Matt Healy of the 19 75 , whose “Love It If We Made It” has the pitfalls of many of today’s protest songs.LARRY BUSACCA/GETTY IMAGES FOR COACHELLA
Kendrick Lamar’s sterling “Alright” from 201 5 asserts that (black)
people must first survive this world in order to change it.THEATRE
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