Notable coming from the leftward publication The New Republic is the piece by Senior Editor Jason Zengerle, thoroughly putting down those who call singer-songwriter Conor Oberst the latest “new Bob Dylan.” I’m not familiar with Oberst’s body of work, so I can make no comment on it, but after reading this piece I certainly suspect that it wouldn’t be my bag, so to speak.

In the run-up to the war, Oberst started performing a song called “Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come,” in which he hisses, “They say we must defend ourselves. Fight on foreign soil. Against the infidels. With the oil wells. God save gas prices.” Early this year, his band, Bright Eyes, simultaneously released two albums whose songs dwelled heavily on the war. And, shortly after that, Oberst put out a new single called “When the President Talks to God.” The influential Portland, Oregon, alternative paper Willamette Week subsequently hailed it as “this young century’s most powerful protest song.”

So, without further ado, here are the opening lines of the protest song of the century: “When the president talks to God, are the conversations brief or long? Does he ask to rape our women’s rights? And send poor farm kids off to die? Does God suggest an oil hike when the president talks to God?” Yes, the lyrics are that bad, and the instrumentation–provided by a lone, off-putting acoustic guitar–isn’t much better. And then there’s the problem of Oberst’s voice: It is fey and timorous, which may be good for lamenting lost loves but is ill-suited for stopping a war.

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As Dylan demonstrated, a good protest song is not simply political, nor is it narrowly confined to the issue that it’s protesting. The best protest songs provide historical and artistic context for an alternative worldview and, in doing so, give legitimacy and a powerful sense of inevitability to the protest; even if the target of the protest never hears the actual song, he’s ultimately unable to ignore its message and the followers that message inspires. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”–which Dylan wrote during the Cuban missile crisis–never specifically mentions war. Instead, it uses apocalyptic imagery–”I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests, I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans. … I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’, I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’”–to convey the horrors of war and, in the process, transcends its topic. As David Hajdu wrote in his book Positively Fourth Street, the song “provoke[s] feeling and thought as well as action.”

Well, fine and dandy, though when Zengerle says that Hard Rain “transcends its topic,” he’s starting with the premise that it is a song about war, and that it is a protest song, albeit one of the “best protest songs.” Having just written a nearly 4,000 word piece teasing out to what degree the much more “protesty” John Brown is not exactly what it may appear to be, I’m not inclined to write more reams at this instant on Hard Rain, but, suffice it to say, I think that limiting even its premise to “war” and “protest” is doing an injustice to the song.

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