Our Subversive Voice: The History and Politics of English Protest Songs, 1600–2020. By JohnStreet, Oskar CoxJensen, AlanFinlayson, AngelaMcShane and MatthewWorley. McGill‐Queen's University Press, 2025. 292 pp. $32.95.

Protest music is a lively and essential part of social, cultural and political histories, yet most writing on the subject is to be found in musician's biographies or academic studies which focus on a single period or political movement. It is a field of study that Eric Drott called, in 2023, a ‘fragmented landscape’. Our Subversive Voice is an effort to change this. Our Subversive Voice looks at over 400 years of political music-making to argue that, firstly, Britain has a rich, indigenous history of ‘protest song’, and secondly, that ‘protest songs’ are a key part of political history, and that the nature of their expression – their creators, contexts and causes – can illuminate political history in a variety of ways. The book demonstrates the strengths of a cross-disciplinary approach. Having several authors, each with their own specialisms (across history, politics and musicology), allows for an authority unusual in studies of this breadth. The book also benefits from era-specific insights (such as early modern ballads, Victorian ballads and late-twentieth century subcultures). Most valuable here is, perhaps, the attention given to the relationship between art, politics and commerce, and how the shape of this relationship flexed over time, from street hawkers to radio. The book begins by foregrounding the political. Politics here is broadly construed: ‘politics involves everything to do with establishing who “we” are and what “we” want from the lives we lead’ (p. 14). Chapter 1 tackles chronology, and how we might conceive of protest song at different points in its history. This begins in the seventeenth century as this is when the trade in political songs began in earnest. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 explore the political work of protest songs in greater depth: their creators, their rhetoric dimensions, their music and more. The work here on the material culture of protest is particularly exciting – the song's materiality (whether that be broadside, cassette tape, vinyl record or MP3 download) cannot be extracted from the experience of the protest songs. Interactions with these forms of political communication was, for most of the period covered by Our Subversive Voice, a physical interaction. The emphasis on the practical business of popular music is also refreshing. The final two chapters read as much like media histories as political ones. Chapter 5 focuses on production. Chapter 6 neatly rounds off by considering regulation and censorship, which reminds the reader just how subversive some of these songs were and the dangerous potential they were perceived to have had. The study of ‘protest music’ does throw up difficulties with which Our Subversive Voice (and the project that preceded it) has had to wrangle. The first is primary material. As Street et al. explain, ‘The history of song is in part a history of ephemera, and no dataset can claim to be reliably representative of a body of work so subject to erasure’ (p. 11). Historians are not unfamiliar with this problem, and Our Subversive Voice readily acknowledges the silence that we find in some corners of the historical record: ‘many of the most potent songs of protest … may never have been written down’ (p. 11). Before the book, there was a website offering an index of the 750 protest songs selected by the project. From this list, 250 songs ‘warranting special attention’ (p. 11) have been singled out. Being so explicit about their source selection – and offering so easily navigable an archive – does pose the risk of calcifying these 750 as the canon, to the detriment of songs that did not make the cut and so languish un-transcribed in other (non-digital) archives. Street et al. navigate this by framing the book, in their own words, as ‘a subjective endeavour’ (p. 12). When treated as such, it proves a rich, enjoyable and thoughtful read. The methodology of appreciation seems appropriate for a source type that straddles the historical and the aesthetic, though a reader should remain cognizant of the authors’ selection criteria. The second is that there remain some unanswered questions. Most essentially: what is protest? As the book tells us, the term, with its modern connotations, was not in use until the 1850s. Street et al. argue that ‘it is not actually historically insensitive to describe much earlier songs [those before the mid-nineteenth century] as protest songs’ (p. 27). They note, for instance, that early modern songs often present with titular labels such as ‘remonstrance’, ‘complaint’ and ‘lamentation’ (p. 27). While these terms had ‘much less passive connotations than they do today’ (p. 27), this does not necessarily mean that they had the same force as ‘protest’. Given its legal origins, ‘complaint’ infers the respect of the complainer for the systems of complaint, working within the given political system and not against it. We might read such songs as purposefully borrowing – as Street et al. do note – from existing forms of complaint such as petitioning. For the most part, the emphasis on ‘protest song’ rather than ‘protest’ allows the text to move beyond questions of definition, showing us instead what political song-making may have meant at different times to different people. This approach leaves us with no doubt that these songs were political. We are shown how, by doing political work beyond the sanctioned spheres of elite political discussion, seventeenth-century ballads were subversive. We see that in the eighteenth century, on both sides of the party line, ‘song was a customary part of political discourse’ (p. 33). As the book moves beyond the Industrial Revolution and into the twentieth century, we see songs accompany mass movements (anti-war, nuclear disarmament, civil rights, gender equality and others). We encounter creators who make fortunes from their craft, and for whom the vague threat of censorship was merely a feather in their cap. What ‘protest’ might mean at any of these points changes greatly. Perhaps in much the way the first chapter nimbly sidesteps the unending historiographical debates about Jürgen Habermas's public sphere, Our Subversive Voice attempts to avoid the debate about ‘protest’ and its applicability to premodern expressions. This may, after all, be unresolvable. Even so, the reader cannot help but sense its absence. Our Subversive Voice does the essential work of opening the conversation and demonstrating the value of an interdisciplinary approach. It sets a path for future work and is an ideal starting text for students of protest songs, popular politics and cultural expression.