This Is What Democracy Sounds Like: Protest Performances of the Citizenship Movement in Wisconsin and Beyond

Abstract

This article is a case study of an ongoing singing protest in Wisconsin, the group that calls itself Solidarity Sing Along (SSA). An offshoot of the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising, for the first 15 months of its existence SSA was an important nexus of local activists working to recall Republican state senators and the governor. After the recall's failure the group not only continued to carry on but quite effortlessly reoriented its claim making and centered its protests on the freedom to assemble and petition the government, which had been an important cause from early on. Maintaining its pro-labor orientation, SSA has become part of a broader movement for democratic citizenship rights. Situating the group in musical practices of the Wisconsin protests and social movements more generally, I show that how SSA makes and performs its music makes it a part of the citizenship movement. This case study reveals a novel form of claim making within the repertoire of contention practiced by social movements: SSA is a ‘part-time occupation’ and as such has potential to be more resilient and durable than ‘permanent’ occupations à la Occupy Wall Street.

Keywords::

• Protest music
• labor movements
• citizenship movements
• Wisconsin Uprising
• Occupy Wall Street
• repertoires of contention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. By occupation I mean a continued and intentionally disruptive presence in a symbolically significant public space.

^2. According to Wisconsin law, an elected official must be in office for at least a year before a recall can be initiated.

^3.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = r6r_AXEP8CE, retrieved 2 January 2014.

^4.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = XAMvJWX8tGI; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = Kknr-advKkg, retrieved 2 January 2014.

^5.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = tyqFbBSwlzY, retrieved 2 January 2014.

^6.http://www.wisconsinprotestsongs.com/

^7. ‘Forward’ has been Wisconsin's official state motto since 1851.

^8.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = jVEMZSP8Ypk, retrieved 2 January 2014.

^9. Other rights, for example women's rights or environmental rights (especially for the state's Native American population), are also of importance to SSA as a group and to its individual members.

^10. But see, for example, Juris, Ronayne, Shokooh-Valle, and Wengronowitz (2012) on OWS's difficulties to overcome internal inequalities in the framework of ‘majoritarian populism.’

^11. ‘Sing’ (as a noun), rather than ‘performance,’ is the preferred word of the participants of SSA to describe their activity.

^12.https://www.facebook.com/SolidaritySingAlong.

^13. More on Freedom Singers, see Lynskey (2011, p. 48, passim) and Roy (2010, pp. 170, 203, 208–211).

^14. SSA Facebook page, 17 March 2012, post by SSA.

^15. As of mid-September 2013, 686 tickets had been issued to SSA participants, with more than two-thirds since Walker won the recall reelection in 2012 and almost 25% in July–August 2013. A total of 272 people had been ticketed, and 414 citations went to ‘repeat offenders.’ The three top ticketed individuals received between 35 and 53 citations each (Raygo, 2013). Citations are usually for 200 dollars.

^16. Solidarity Sing Along Facebook page, 10 October 2012, post by SSA.

^17. Solidarity Sing Along Facebook page, 28 February 2012, comments on the post by Steve Burns.

^18. For the first 15 months, the group had a more or less regular conductor, who also ran the group's Facebook page, liaised with the Capitol police and newspapers, ordered and sold t-shirts. He was a trained performer, which gave him more experience in leading the songs, but others, often without musical or artistic training, also stepped in to lead the sings. After the failed recall, this person left the group, and once the police started punishing the conductors, whom they perceived as group's ‘leaders,’ more and more singers joined the rotation of song leaders.

^19.http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/solidaritysingalong.

^20. Roy (2010) on making music on the Web:

The main difference between this musicking and the musicking of organizations like the civil rights movement is that the social relations are mediated by technology. It is not making music together […] At the very least the Web can be the institutional basis of new movements to the extent that it wan be thoroughly integrated into other aspects of life in the same sense that black churches and black colleges were integrated into the lives of many civil rights activists. (pp. 249–250)

^21. Roy (2010) and Lynskey (2011) describe some of these adaptations in detail.

^22.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = l_jnOXhDF6c, retrieved 2 January 2014.

^23. Polletta (2004) analyzes similar pitfalls of deliberative, participatory democracy in US social movements. Arguing for the value and practicality of participatory democracy, she also notes the problems that arise when internal democracy is based on nonpolitical models like friendship, tutelage, and religious fellowship.

^24. Solidarity Sing Along Facebook page, 5 February 2012, post by Ashford Wyrd.

^25. I do not mean to suggest though that democracy is devoid of conflict.

^26. Solidarity Sing Along Facebook page, 27 May 2012, comment on the post by SSA.

^27. Solidarity Sing Along Facebook page, 17 March 2012, post by SSA.

^28. As of now, SSA has been honored with three awards for its activism. In addition to the ACLU award, it received the Spirit of the Movement Award form the local progressive coalition We Are Wisconsin in September 2012 and, in June 2013, the Power of the People Don't Stop Award from the Labor and Working Class Studies Project, a campus-labor-community initiative in Madison.

^29. Solidarity Sing Along Facebook page, 26 September 2012, comment on the post by Mary Ray Worley.

^30.http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/10/how_singing_foreclosure.php; http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/01/singing_protest.php, retrieved 2 January 2014.

^31.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = d6mjGou7RBg, retrieved 2 January 2014.

^32.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = sx-BSnYzH6c; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = PGWUMk5akXk, retrieved 2 January 2014.

^33. Solidarity Sing Along Facebook page, 17 March 2012, post by SSA.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Paretskaya

Anna Paretskaya is a political and cultural sociologist. Her primary research is in political and economic liberalizations in Europe and Eurasia in the late twentieth century. Her work on this topic has won awards from the Council for European Studies and the American Sociological Association's sections on theory, comparative-historical sociology, and sociology of culture. She is currently working on turning her doctoral dissertation, ‘A Soviet Middle Class and the Twilight of Socialism: Discourses of Politics and Culture in the Two Decades before Perestroika,’ into a book manuscript. Her other current research projects focus on the culture of recent political protest movements in Wisconsin (2011) and Russia (2011–2012).