Music, class, and protest. hard hats and hoodies: the songs of two working-class British protest singers

This chapter is concerned with what popular music protest song texts (music and words) and their performance/performers tell us about society and the class system, and how, in the process of doing so, articulate a class politics. Any critical reading of a singer/song/performance requires both broad theoretical and contextual readings of class and protest, along with fine-grained analysis of specific examples. In order to illustrate the complex relationship between popular music, protest, and class, we hone in on two artists from British, working-class backgrounds and from different popular music genres. Folk singer-songwriter Billy Bragg (1957-) and hip-hop MC Lady Sovereign (1985-) are treated as particular kinds of exemplars in the study of white, working-class, protest singers from the UK. These case studies do not attempt to offer all-encompassing theoretical or methodological approaches to studying popular music, class, and protest, particularly given the many variables and intersectional issues any artist, music genre, or geographic/temporal location brings. However, our intention is to illustrate that any discussion of class and protest within popular music needs to rigorously define what constitutes class as well as critically appraise how protesting becomes aligned with class identity, as illustrated through specific music examples. In this chapter, Bragg’s “Between the Wars” (1985) represent a critique of neo-liberal capitalism and the concomitant decimation of working-class lives, while Lady Sovereign’s “Hoodie” (2006) speaks to the demonisation of working-class youths and the stigmatisation they receive for their sartorial choices (that are viewed as deviant), which in turn has real-life implications for the wearers.