Andrew Burgess (Skyway)
SPB: What is your favorite protest song?
Burgess: My favorite protest song? That's a tough one. I think it's impossible to talk about protest songs without mentioning the all-time greats that have held up over the years. I'm talking about songs like "We Shall Overcome," "We Will Not Be Moved," and "A Change is Gonna Come." And then you have to think about what it means to protest. To me, protest means fighting the system or pushing back against the status quo in a way that forces awareness and invites change. We live in a moment that needs change desperately on a lot of fronts: climate, gender, race, socioeconomics, technological dependence, healthcare, housing, food, education, the list goes on and on. All of these areas are facing systemic oppression and it's hard to know how to approach protest, or to know where to place your efforts. And I think that's intentionally built into the system. If we're exhausted, we're not going to fight. We're going to roll over and let those in power do whatever the hell they want. But time and again, that assumption by the system that they can overwhelm us by dividing us has been proven wrong.
So, since we're a punk band, I'll give you my favorite punk protest song — one that I think speaks to our current moment just as much as it spoke to its own moment in the late 1980s: "Unity" by Operation Ivy. It's a song that's against hate, that's against war, that's against racism, that's against sectarianism. It's also uniquely self-conscious of its role as "another unity song" in a long timeline of unity songs. As Jesse Michaels says, "you've heard it all before." This isn't a new message, but it's a crucially important one. And when you pair it with "Take Warning," which comes around to the message that "we say stand together / not to fight, just to exist," it hits even harder. "Unity" is admittedly "not a call to action." So, what does that mean? How do we stop a war that's fought on so many fronts through inaction? We do it by standing together, by finding common ground, by building community. And if there's one thing the system doesn't want, it's unity.
