73 JAAC 5 (1) pp. 73–75 Intellect Limited 2013 Journal of Arts & Communities Volume 5 Number 1 © 2013 Intellect Ltd Review. English language. doi: 10.1386/jaac.5.1.73_5 ReVIew The RouTledge hisToRy of social PRoTesT in PoPulaR Music, Jonathan C. Friedman (ed.) (2013) New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 414 pp., ISBN: 9780415509527, h/bk, £140.00 Reviewed by Joshua Goodman, Independent Researcher and Composer There is a faint worry, when first encountering a title such as this, that the content will stagnate around middle-American Cold War-era angst. Beatniks, guitars, shouting; the sort of records one’s parents treasure. Yet whilst Jonathan C. Friedman freely acknowledges that hackneyed construct of the protest song’s context, or, as he describes it, ‘all-things-hippie’, and welcomes it into the critical debate, the scope of this volume is commenda- bly wide, historically, culturally and methodologically speaking. From the first chapter, which considers protest in the context of nineteenth-century African American music, to contributions that take us practically up to the present day, with often incisive observations on music’s role the Arab Spring and the political demonstrations that hammered the streets of Athens between 2010 and 2012, the volume is nothing if not expansive. As I will discuss later, this pluralism brings a few problems of its own. It remains, however, that an initial glance down the contents pages of this sizable collection will excite students and scholars of pop music and the social philosophy of music instantly. Friedman’s background as a holocaust scholar provides a more-than- usually vital tone to the edition. As Friedman suggests himself, his experi- ence of researching and analysing the most atrocious possible aspects of the human experience has demonstrably provided him with a fascinating vantage point from which to curate this ambitious survey of some of the ways in which people have musically performed reactions to hardship, distress and pain. The performed reaction to hardship – as opposed to written or other recorded texts – is indeed key. It is refreshing to be reminded that, in this as in many musical contexts, the most culturally relevant analyses spring from the presupposition that performance is text. Friedman makes it very clear