For Teen Activists, What Good Is a Protest Song?

Summary

Podcast Summary: The New Yorker Radio Hour

Episode: For Teen Activists, What Good Is a Protest Song?
Date: September 19, 2017
Host: David Remnick
Reported by: Vincent Cunningham

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Overview

This episode explores the evolving landscape of protest and activism through the lens of multiple generations, focusing on teenagers involved in a cross-generational performance of protest songs. Reporter Vincent Cunningham interviews two teen cast members, Maxwell Weisz and Logan Rozos, who participated in "Primer for a Failed Superpower"—a concert by the TEAM theater company that brought together baby boomers, millennials, and Generation Z performers. The discussion centers on the relevance of traditional protest songs, the shifting tools of activism, and the generational divide in approaches to social change.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Generational Context of Modern Protests

• Protest Renaissance in the Trump Era:
  • David Remnick opens the show by noting a resurgence in protest culture post-2017, though today's activists rely heavily on tools and platforms unknown in the 1960s.
    • "There's been a kind of protest renaissance in the country...and social media has changed what it even means to protest." — David Remnick (00:29)
• Diverse Generations United by Protest Songs:
  • Cunningham comments on intergenerational dynamics and how today's teens differ from previous generations in their approaches to activism.
    • "The only view that we get really of people...significantly younger than myself are young people on college campuses...And that, I think, is a very unfair reduction of what the real energy there is." — Vincent Cunningham (01:17)

2. Personal Histories with Activism

• Early Activist Roots:
  • Maxwell Weisz's upbringing steeped in activism, including family stories of union engagement and early protest theater.
    • "My parents took me to a lot of marches as a kid. I went to the Women's march...my grandfather was a union delegate to the teachers union." — Maxwell Weisz (03:57)
  • Logan Rozos' activism began with small-scale action in middle school, such as protesting nail polish bans for boys.
    • "I remember in middle school, I did a small protest because they wouldn't let boys wear nail polish. So I did a walkout in my class." — Logan Rozos (04:28)

3. Shifting Modes of Protest: Online vs. Traditional

• Changing Tools and the Role of Social Media:
  • Teens today question the necessity of physical marches when activism can also happen online.
    • "We have so, so many new tools...we shouldn't necessarily be using civil rights movement era tactics to achieve our political demands." — Maxwell Weisz (05:35)
  • Online activism is sometimes seen as more a trend than a heartfelt cause.
    • "Currently activism and being woke is trendy...not because they think it's right, but because they think it's popular." — Logan Rozos (05:06)
• Lessons from Older Generations:
  • Face-to-face protest and visible community gathering remains significant wisdom passed down from older activists.
    • "Nothing gets done by sitting down in your room. You have to go out...and visually be there." — Logan Rozos, recalling advice from older cast members (05:30)

4. Experience With Protest Songs and Expanding Musical Awareness

• Learning Protest Music Across Generations:
  • Both teens discover new music and reflect on the evolving definition of protest songs.
    • "Most of the music in the show I was never exposed to...with this show, I remember...I asked all the older generation singers, like, can you tell me an album that I must go home and listen to?" — Logan Rozos (06:09)
    • "My dad is a huge Stevie Wonder fan...when we did Village Ghetto Land, I was like, oh. Because it doesn't protest against a particular issue." — Maxwell Weisz (07:07)
• Blurring Lines Between Personal and Political:
  • Songs that initially seem personal can be profoundly political in modern context.
    • "More and more the personal and political have been indistinguishable from each other." — Maxwell Weisz (07:24)

5. Generational Dialogues: Differences and Shared Challenges

• Performance as Dialogue:
  • The show staged a literal and metaphorical conversation: teens sang "Village Ghetto Land," adults sang "What a Wonderful World," revealing divergent perspectives.
    • "It was a pretty explicit dialogue between the teens singing Village Ghetto Land and the...baby boomers singing Wonderful World." — Maxwell Weisz (08:40)
• Perspectives on Recognition and Blind Spots:
  • Teens acknowledged the limits of mutual understanding due to rapid social change, especially with gender and LGBT issues.
    • "So much new vocabulary has been established...especially surrounding LGBT issues." — Maxwell Weisz (09:13)
    • "A lot of the older cast members never really understood the fact that there's non binary people because it wasn't a privilege that they have." — Logan Rozos (09:27)
• Wisdom from Younger Cast:
  • Logan recounts an empowering moment from a 12-year-old cast member about identity.
    • "If you approve yourself, then who cares?" — Gigi (as recalled by Logan Rozos, 09:52)

6. Expanding the Notion of Protest

• Everyday Forms of Protest:
  • The conversation ends with recognition that protest also includes micro-actions like using pronouns or trigger warnings to foster inclusivity.
    • "Saying a trigger warning or giving pronouns is a type of protest because you're enforcing an idea that you want to be inclusive." — Logan Rozos (10:35)
• Multiplicity of Tactics:
  • No single formula for meaningful protest; effectiveness may vary.
    • "I'm not gonna write off checking in somewhere on Facebook, and I'm not gonna write off walking, marching in the streets...there's no, like, perfect way to protest." — Maxwell Weisz (11:02)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Currently activism and being woke is trendy...not because they think it's right, but because they think it's popular."
  — Logan Rozos, 05:06

• "We have so, so many new tools...we shouldn't necessarily be using civil rights movement era tactics to achieve our political demands."
  — Maxwell Weisz, 05:35

• "If you approve yourself, then who cares?"
  — Gigi (as recalled by Logan Rozos), 09:52

• "More and more the personal and political have been indistinguishable from each other."
  — Maxwell Weisz, 07:24

• "There's no, like, perfect way to protest. Like, it's not like you either you live up to this ideal, or you're just wasting your time."
  — Maxwell Weisz, 11:02

• On Generational Stereotypes:
  "Gen Xers...love to take notes. That's all they did was take notes." — Maxwell Weisz & Logan Rozos, 11:33

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Protest Renaissance and Introduction: 00:29–01:17
• Teen Activist Backgrounds: 03:57–04:39
• Debate: Traditional Protest vs. Online Activism: 05:06–06:00
• Learning Protest Songs Across Generations: 06:09–07:07
• Discussion on Personal vs. Political Protest Music: 07:07–08:06
• Generational Dialogue in Performance: 08:20–09:02
• Navigating LGBT Language and Identities: 09:13–09:37
• Wisdom from the Youngest Cast: 09:49–10:19
• Broadening the Scope of Protest: 10:35–11:30
• Lighthearted Generation X Notes Joke: 11:33–11:44

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Conclusion

The episode provides an insightful examination of the changing nature of protest through dialogue between generations. While teens and adults may differ in tactics and perspectives, both groups recognize the power of communal efforts—and the need for activism to adapt with the times. Through the shared experience of protest songs, the episode reveals not just the evolution of musical protest, but the ongoing negotiation over what it means to resist, to be heard, and to enact change.

Transcript

[Maxwell Weisz]

Floor 38.

[Logan Rozos]

These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent.

[David Remnick]

I think it'd be interesting to really try to unravel what his ties.

[Maxwell Weisz]

There's this sort of country city divide.

[Logan Rozos]

Their own convenient ends, and it's not.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Clear where it goes next.

[Maxwell Weisz]

From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC studios and the New Yorker.

[David Remnick]

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Since the inauguration in January of Donald Trump, there's been a kind of protest renaissance in the country with people on the left and some in the center of American politics dusting off the tactics, the chants and the songs that became symbols of resistance during the civil rights and Vietnam eras. But a lot of the people doing the protesting today weren't around in the 60s, not by a long shot. And it's by and large a young person's game. And social media has changed what it even means to protest whether all the singing and chanting is even necessary anymore. The New Yorker's Vincent Cunningham talked to two young people who were involved in a concert performance put on by the theater company called the Team that tried to get at that generational divide.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I mean, I sometimes wonder about people who are teenagers now because in some ways they might be better suited to deal with the particular chaos of the moment than any of the rest of us. But the only view that we get really of people at this point significantly younger than myself are young people on college campuses reacting to whoever the latest campus speaker is. And that, I think, is a very unfair reduction of what the real energy there is. It certainly can't just be that primer for a failed superpower is really sort of a simple idea. It's a group of people singing protest songs. The complexity comes in two ways. One, what is a protest song? So I never thought of Smells Like Teen Spirit as a protest song. It's one of the songs in the concert. And the other feature is that these songs are being sung by people who fall into three large age categories. First are baby boomers, older people, abridged generation, as they called it, of 30 something people, and a younger group which they're calling teens. I visited a rehearsal for Prammer because it seemed to be an exercise that would really illuminate the differences, but also hopefully some of the similarities between generations.

[Logan Rozos]

I thought my whole life that I was a millennial, genuinely. And I've been like broadcasting. Oh, yeah, I'm a millennial. We're gonna Change the world. But I found out that, like, I didn't meet the cutoff. Cause I was born in 99, so I'm a part of Generation Z. I.

[Maxwell Weisz]

Mean, millennial was originally coined to mean somebody who was going to come of age after the new millennium. And I will come of age after the new millennium because I was born after the new millennium.

[Vincent Cunningham]

So I invited two of the teenagers that I met at this rehearsal, Maxwell Weisz and Logan Rozos, to just talk to me about how it had been to learn these songs alongside so many other politically minded people, but of these different ages. And are you guys both in high school?

[Logan Rozos]

Oh, I just graduated. Thank God.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Just graduated.

[Maxwell Weisz]

I'm going to be a junior in the fall.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Going to be a junior. What was your involvement with protest before the show?

[Maxwell Weisz]

Oh, you want me to go first? Okay. My parents took me to a lot of marches as a kid. I went to the Women's march. Probably the first big piece of theater I did was an experimental opera about boycotting meat in the early 1900s. And my grandfather was a union delegate to the teachers union. And I never met him, but my family knew that unions and labor was really important.

[Logan Rozos]

Just being an activist was kind of always in my life. I remember in middle school, I did a small protest because they wouldn't let boys wear nail polish. So I did a walkout in my class.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And so I wonder, sort of just as a matter of your generation, Right. Like so much political speech, so much political thought gets done online. I wonder how you guys feel about traditional protest, whether for your generation, it makes as much sense as the other ways of communicating. Like, you know, just the Facebook status. Yeah, exactly, Right. Instead of outside with a picket sign, is there a way? Does that feel old or anachronistic to you, or.

[Logan Rozos]

I think currently activism and being woke is trendy. So right now, everybody wants to be politically engaged, not because they think it's right, but because they think it's popular. But when I met Primer, I started talking to the baby boomers and the millennials about their type of protest. And I remember, like, one of them told me that nothing gets done by sitting down in your room. You have to go out, you need to gather as a community and visually be there.

[Maxwell Weisz]

But at the same time, I'm not sure how prominent of a role marching and like, picketing will have in the future of activism. I do think it's important to meet with people who share a common goal. But I think that, like, we have so, so many new tools that have emerged since the civil rights movement that, like, we shouldn't necessarily be using civil rights movement era tactics to achieve our political demands.

[Logan Rozos]

I know the one thing we did.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Right was the day we started to fight.

[Logan Rozos]

Keep your eyes on the prize hold on, hold on. The only chains that we can stand Are the chains of hand in hand Most of the music in the show I was never exposed to just because I grew up in Bushwick. So, like, the music I knew was, like, Wu Tang, Clang, tlc, Biggie, or, like, chicken noodle soup. Soulja Boy, like, they legit taught us chicken noodle soup in my school for my graduation song. I cannot lie about that. But then I think with this show, I remember with this show specifically with music, I asked all the older generation singers, like, can you tell me an album that I must go home and listen to? Remember, one of our castmates, Jake, told me about this cover of Smell Like Teen Spirit by Patti Smith.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Okay.

[Logan Rozos]

I have so much great music now that I really wish I would have listened to as a kid. It would have probably made me a lot stronger.

[Maxwell Weisz]

Yeah, I got introduced to so much new music and also, like, reintroduced to music from my childhood. Like, my dad is a huge Stevie Wonder fan. But, like, when we did Village Ghetto Land, I was like, oh. Because it doesn't protest against a particular issue. Like, people might not see it as a protest song. They might see it as a personal song. But, like, I think in recent years, more and more the personal and political have been indistinguishable from each other. And, like, Jake talked about, like, how our generation and his generation's protest music doesn't know what it's protesting because there's this idea that everything is so messed up, including ourselves, and we can't avoid being part of the problem. So, like, how do you pick one thing to fight against?

[Vincent Cunningham]

First of all, I was so excited about this because I love Village Ghetto Land. I'm like, also, like, a big Stevie Wonder fan. I love it. Talk to me about. Because there was Village Ghetto land in there. There's what a Wonderful World, which is such an interesting contrast.

[Logan Rozos]

Brill.

[Maxwell Weisz]

This piece. It was a pretty explicit dialogue between the teens singing Village Ghetto land and the 30 somethings and the baby boomers singing Wonderful World. Like, we've known nothing else but crushing poverty. And we live in this awful ghetto. Like, look at us. And the adults being like, anyway, look at that rose. Yeah, look at how beautiful life is so pretty.

[Logan Rozos]

Why are you upset?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Did that sort of. Some of those things echo what you saw in the actual dynamics between the generations, like, about them being blind to the problems of young people. Did you feel that?

[Maxwell Weisz]

Not to any significant extent, but a couple times. It's just not possible for us to fully understand each other because so much new vocabulary has been established, especially surrounding LGBT issues.

[Logan Rozos]

Yes. I think of pronouns. A lot of the older cast members never really understood the fact that there's non binary people because it wasn't a privilege that they have.

[Maxwell Weisz]

The younger cast, I feel like they've had so many experiences of things already changing and getting better.

[Vincent Cunningham]

By younger cast, you mean the literal children. I met literal children, 8th graders.

[Logan Rozos]

Samaiya's 13, Shmai's 13.

[Maxwell Weisz]

Zaydah's 14. Gigi's 12. Zach is 13. Wow.

[Logan Rozos]

And I remember coming out was such a hard thing when I was talking to Gigi, and then Gigi said, you know, you didn't have to come out. You never developed into being gay. You were born gay. She was like, when you tell people that you're gay, you're just giving them the power to approve you. If you approve yourself, then who cares? And I remember, like, Gigi telling me that, and then, like, an hour later, she told me that she was 12. And I remember at 12 years old, I was having just such a hard time understanding what gay was.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Come, all of you good workers.

[Logan Rozos]

Good news to you.

[Maxwell Weisz]

Out I have that good old union.

[Logan Rozos]

I'm a lot more knowledgeable and politically engaged than I was before the show. And before the show, I thought I was, like, extremely engaged. After meeting all these people with all these different stories and all these different pains and accomplishments, problems and solutions. There's different spectrums of protests and different variations and different levels. Like, saying a trigger warning or giving pronouns is a type of protest because you're enforcing an idea that you want to be inclusive. Mm.

[Maxwell Weisz]

I think, like, I'm probably going to grapple for, like, my whole life about the most effective way to bring about political change. And, like, I'm not gonna write off checking in somewhere on Facebook, and I'm not gonna write off walking, marching in the streets, and I'm not gonna write off, like, weird experimental operas about meat strikes. I think that there's so many different ways to do things, and there's no, like, one certain. There's no. There's no, like, perfect way to protest. Like, it's not like you either you live up to this ideal, or you're just wasting your time.

[Logan Rozos]

Yeah.

[Maxwell Weisz]

Like Gen Xers. One thing that someone pointed out to me that I hadn't realized before is they love to take notes.

[Logan Rozos]

They do.

[Maxwell Weisz]

That's all they did was take notes.

[Logan Rozos]

They had, like, a whole pad full of notes.

[Maxwell Weisz]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I feel so triggered right now. I know exactly what you're talking about.

[David Remnick]

The New Yorker's Vincent Cunningham spoke with performers Maxwell Weiss and Logan Rozos, who were in primer for a failed superpower last month. Now, I know you weren't counting, at least I hope you weren't. But this is episode number 100 of the new Yorker Radio Hour, a little milestone for us. And over the last two years, I've introduced you to many of the people who make the New Yorker tick. The writers and cartoonists and my colleagues on the editorial staff who are the heart and soul of the magazine. But the radio show comes to you every week because of so many more people than we ever have time to put in the credits. So if you'll indulge me for a minute, it's a special occasion after all. I'd like to call out a few of them. I have to start with Pamela McCarthy.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Hello.

[David Remnick]

The deputy editor and sort of the fairy godmother of the Radio Hour. And Dean Cappello.

[Logan Rozos]

I want you to have options.

[David Remnick]

The Godfather, though not in the Marlon Brando sense.

[Logan Rozos]

Hi there.

[David Remnick]

Here at One World Trade center, the ever vigilant Fabio Bertoni.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Hello.

[David Remnick]

Well, hello, Radio Hour. Peter Canby and the whole amazingly hard working crew of fact checkers.

[Logan Rozos]

You're always on the record unless they.

[David Remnick]

Say Mike Luo and David Rhoad, Wei Chu, Susanna Kempel and Nathan Burstein.

[Maxwell Weisz]

Happy 100th episode, New Yorker Radio Hour.

[David Remnick]

Natalie Raby, Erica Hinsley and Adria Piazza. Deanna Donegan and many of her illustrators, especially Rebecca Mock and Richie Pope. Bruce Dionnes.

[Vincent Cunningham]

What are you doing?

[David Remnick]

Cassandra Dacosta, Rhonda Sherman and the New Yorker Festival crew, Risa Leibowitz and Lisa Hughes. The publisher of the New York Just Like.

[Maxwell Weisz]

Hi.

[David Remnick]

Now, a mile north of where I'm sitting at WNYC is Melissa o'. Donnell. The infinitely diligent Sarah Sandbach. Hi. Michael L. Cessor. Melissa La Case and Alicia Allen. Hal Trencher and his team in sponsorship, Peter Weingart and Mandy Naglich. And Yuri Kim.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Oh, my God.

[David Remnick]

Are you. Valentina Powers. Aaron Cohn. Technical gurus, Rob Christiansen. Greg Gasparino and David Satkowski. Jennifer Houlihan, Roussel and David Cottrone. Theodore Couslin and Robin Bielenkoff. Michelle Rusnik and Michelle Halliburton. And Edward o'. Connor. John Chow.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Hello.

[David Remnick]

And Laura Walker.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Hello New Yorkers.

[David Remnick]

The president of New York Public Radio. If it takes a village to make a radio program, I'm paraphrasing, this is a very special radio program and it takes two villages. I'm grateful to everyone who helps us to do this thing every week and and most of all to you for listening. See you next time.

[Maxwell Weisz]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Churina Endowment Fund.