This is a generation gap issue. Most of the progressives I know who are 40 or older came of age when the acoustic guitar and the conventions of folk music “meant” protest music. For them, there is something radical about that form of song, and the way that people interact when that music is played.

I am 32, and I grew up in churches and schools were the acoustic guitar and the conventions of folk music were completely emasculated, and rendered insipid and irrelevant (the nuns at my school played folk music- and I wasn’t to hear of Woody Guthrie for another 20 years). I think that is a common experience for people my age: folk music is antiquated and ridiculous.

Happily, many pro-peace, pro-worker and and community-first groups have workers from popular movements-past contributing to the movement. Sadly, they retain strong normative ideas about what “good” or “appropriate” protest music is. And that folk-music stuff keeps rearing up. And it really…. really, turns a lot of the under-40 set WAY off.

I first realized I was a political being when I agreed with the lyrics of, first, U2 and, later, hardcore punk rock. When I came of age in the early 1990s, Hip-Hop and Hardcore Punk were the truly credible forms of protest music. I still feel that way. And when I hear folk music I want to go form my own protest.

Some feel that Noise is the “truest” protest music, some think that Reggae is the most appropriate genre for standing up against the establishment. Some people think that carrying around instruments and have a freeform jam session is the best way to do it. Some think that having a Wobbly sing-along (but nobody ever heard the songs before and had better things to do than learn them) is the "purest expression of the popular struggle". Personally, I think that banging drums and having a sharp, 4 chord type chant is the most invigorating way to stand up for the people in public.

As a group, progressives just don’t all have the same tastes in music. I agree with the “No Music” voice. I think that, IF we all agree with the political message of the occasion, why screw it up by injecting an element upon which there is sharply divided opinion?

Here is the truth of it raw: when you guys bring out the acoustic guitars my mental associations are not “This Machine Kills Fascists” and the Wobblies…I think about all the insipid, irrelevant “A Mighty Wind”-types I’ve encountered and I cringe in embarrassment for you. In the cultural idiom of 2008 USA: that shit’s gay.

I reject the statement that “we” are boring. Fact is, probably a lot more people than you suspect truly hate (H!A!T!E!) folk music but are too nice to tell all the old hippies in the progressive movement to cut that shit out.

Maybe it is the music that you play that is “boring”. Maybe the idea of the "Leftist Political Festival!” is best thrown away because it conjures up visions of old hippies nostalgizing Woodstock and living out something that’s not vital or relevant anymore.

Young progressives didn’t grow up with folk. You did. It meant something progressive to you. It doesn’t for us. Perhaps the most precocious/recalcitrant/sassy/incorrigible idea of all, some under-40-types have the nerve to think that clinging to folk music is a very conservative position: it is imposing upon the present the norms and tastes of 40 years ago.