How do musicians’ decision making environments affect their music? Who are they trying to reach, and what are they trying to get them to feel?
Here’s another classic activist song. The Cranberries were from Ireland. The Irish Republican Army was a terrorist organization that had been waging a war against Britain’s occupation of Northern Ireland for 78 years when this song came out. As Dolores O’Reardon says in the song, the war had been going on so long many people had forgotten why they were fighting it. For some people it had turned into a cycle of revenge. Others kept fighting the war because it was a war.
The IRA could’ve found the Cranberries pretty easily and killed them for making this song. So how do you defeat guns and bombs with words and music? As an artist I think about this a lot. I meet a lot of Americans who think it’s weird how passionately Dolores sings. But if the IRA had killed her for singing a song about them, no one in Ireland or Northern Ireland would ever forget this song.
