Popular music genres elicit a visceral reaction from listeners.
Pop seeps into your subconscious so you unexpectedly hum along, funk and techno command dancing, metal demands headbanging and New Age coaxes you to close your eyes and take deep breaths.
However, the protest song has the rare distinction of appealing to the heart, body and mind. This total engagement is the minimum prerequisite for a song to receive a revolutionary badge.
What also distinguishes the protest song from other genres is that its compositional characteristics have largely remained intact, despite its adoption by the left and right, across generations and cultures.Perhaps the most important feature is its ability to win the crowd's involvement. Protest songs are born out of bleak times and are used to galvanise the downtrodden.
The call and response technique is often the key method sought to achieve this interaction.
It also serves as the genre's most enduring characteristic, linking 19th century hymns such as Oh Freedom and Go Down Moses, sung by enslaved African Americans, to the young Egyptian singer Ramy Essam, whose song Irhal rallied the bloodied masses in Tahrir Square. This form was also used with devastating effect by seminal hip-hop groups Public Enemy and NWA, who both shed light on the plight of African Americans three decades ago.
The protest song is also fond of questions. Bob Dylan's Blowing in The Wind, arguably the greatest protest song ever written, is built around nine rhetorical questions concerning the futility of war. Cat Stevens also posed a bunch of questions about war and ecological disaster with his tender Where Do The Children Play?
Recently Mohammed Mounir updated the template with his stirring anti-Mubarak anthem Ezzay (How Come). Through a series of probing questions, he compares his Egypt to a quarrelling lover. Over a propulsive beat, he asks: "How can you agree with this my love? / I adore your name while you increase my confusion / You cannot feel my kindness, how come?"
Then in the song's finest moment, Mounir finds the resolve and declares: "By my life I will keep changing you till you bless me!"
Protest songs are also at their most powerful when the lyrics tell the story of a particular event or a person. By focusing on Bloody Sunday, the 1972 killings of 14 civil rights protesters by British troops in Northern Ireland, U2 were more effective in raising global awareness of The Troubles than the generalist approach Simple Minds took with Belfast Child.
Bob Dylan may be viewed as the greatest protest singer from the Vietnam War era, however the singer himself reportedly declared Vietnam by the reggae artist Jimmy Cliff as the best protest song he ever heard. Despite its grand title, Cliff again focused on the miniature: a story about a mother receiving a short telegram from the US Army declaring her son had been killed in conflict.
Finally, no protest song is complete without a melodic hook that is both simple and engaging. This is often much harder than it seems, as the songwriter often has to ruthlessly edit his or her diatribe.
Bob Marley and his Wailers cohort Peter Tosh knew this, hence Get Up Stand Up - their ode to self empowerment - was immediately embraced due to its simple, repetitive chorus.
With music critics decrying the dearth of protest songs from western artists in recent years, it is heartening to know that young musicians from the Arab Spring have kept this valuable artistic tradition alive, proving the sound of revolution and freedom can never be lost in translation.
