I watched the first episode of the ABC's new popular music show Stand Up Get Up last night. Entitled 'We Shall Overcome', it very quickly traced the birth of political music, looking at folk music's pivotal role in the fight for human rights from the American union movement and the 1960's civil rights movement to the struggles against apartheid and for Native American rights.

The point made was that 'People can remember tunes, but they don't remember speeches and that music unites people in a movement. Fair enough.'We Shall Overcome' does that job.

Philip Gomes thought it was fun.

Woody Guthrie, Peter Seeger and Bob Dylan were the key figures. Dylan's music was interpreted as defining the mood of his generation--- Blowing in the Wind---- in a style that combined rock and folk music. But why the great emphasis on Peter, Paul and Mary? Why them when there was nothing about music and Aboriginal Land Rights in Australia, nor any mention of Midnight Oil?

It was a conventional understanding of politics--that of the folkies and 1968er's understanding of a protest song. Hence the images of folkies strumming guitars and singing their dissent in Greenwich Village coffeehouses. That signifies a protest song railing against capitalism, war, racism, rising unemployment and an indifferent government

Stand Up Get Up did not broaden that understanding of politics and music to explore rock music's criticism of everyday life in a consumer culture, by say the Dylan of Highway 61 Revisited, or the Kinks, or the Ramones or the Velvet Underground.