I was going to put this on the Dancing Mania thread but then decided it was something different.  I was reading in the NZ Listener a music review of something I would not normal look at.  It was of a NZ rocker.  And the second paragraph read: "That a 17-year-old bogan could settle on the name Shihad for his fledgling speed-metal band back in the late 80s without realising its (misspelt) Arabic derivation, only to then briefly shelve the name to cope with post 9/11 marketing issues, and then find himself in 2014 getting married in the oldest mosque in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, still has him chortling into his cup of English breakfast tea."  It then goes onto to talk about his new album Haja, the music of which is "underpinned by Sudanese vocals and rhythms called aghani-al-banat - or "girls' music" - that he first heard on day three of his wedding during a female-only part of the performance.  "I'm the only guy in the room and she's dancing a damce for me that's hundreds of years old."He goes on to say there were 300 women dancing.  He described the dance as "a wry sense of rebellion within what is otherwise quite an authoritarian society". He then compared it to early rock and says hip-hop is the nearest thing to rebellion in music now.  

But I wonder if there wasn't also a sense of rebellion in the American African slaves' singing while they worked and others like that.  

And there have been sit-ins and the like for many years, with Gandhi, and pacific protests by Maori in NZ and no doubt elsewhere. What other forms of rebellion that are non-violent can you think of? Does life in harems have an element of rebellion?

Not exactly a ‘silent’ form of rebellion but protest songs go back a long way. In England the radical protest movements of the 17th century, such as the Diggers and the Levellers, certainly gave rise to several popular ballads, like for example the 'Diggers’ Song', which protested about land rights of the common people versus the landed gentry;

You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now,
You noble Diggers all, stand up now,
The waste land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name
Your digging do disdain and your persons all defame
Stand up now, Diggers all.

Your houses they pull down, stand up now, stand up now,
Your houses they pull down, stand up now.
Your houses they pull down to fright poor men in town,
But the gentry must come down and the poor shall wear the crown.
Stand up now, Diggers all.
etc...

But I suspect songs, ballads, anthems and hymns protesting a variety of causes probably go back much further. The rhyme "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?", seems to have originated from about the time of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt and it may well have been taken from, or later been adopted into, a song - although there is no actual record of this from the time.

Industrialisation in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was also accompanied by several protest movements, such as the Luddites, and saw the appearance of a number of songs protesting about the conditions faced by agricultural and industrial workers. Interestingly, in contrast to his usual portrayal as a figure of fun or fear, Napoleon Bonaparte is sometimes presented as a champion of the common man in English songs of the time. For example 'Napoleon's Dream', dating from about the 1820s/30s (ie. in the period of widespread unemployment and hardship due to the severe post-war depression in English industry and agriculture) is, for an English song, very different to the usual bellicose, patriotic, jingoism of other contemporary popular ballads of the time, like say, 'Rule Britannia', 'Hearts of Oak', or 'The Roast Beef of Old England'. Its last verse concludes with positively republican fervour;

Those rulers and princes their stations demean,
Like scorpions they spat out their venom and spleen.
But liberty all over the world shall be seen,
That's the dream of the once famed Napoleon.

Then from the 19th into the 20th century there were a whole host of British folk songs about working conditions in the mines, mills and factories, and often with specific political messages, such as this one, 'The Blackleg Miner';



The 'Blackleg Miner' probably dates from the very late 19th or early 20th centuries. It makes reference to 'The Union', but while Trades' Unions in Britain were legalised in 1872, the first officially recognised, but by no means nationally inclusive coal miners' unions, were only formed in the late 1880s: the South Wales Miners' Federation was founded in 1898; the National Union of Mineworkers (ie not just coal) was formed in 1899; while the Northumberland Miners' Association and the Durham Miners' Association joined in 1907 and 1908, respectively. Note also that the 'Blackleg Miner' song makes specific reference to the Seaton Delaval Mine and the adjacent Seghill Mine, both situated close to the Northumbrian coast East-North-East of Newcastle upon Tyne, and while neither were especially deep, they were still considered dangerous mines as their tunnels extended, at quite a shallow depth, a good mile or so out under the North Sea. According to the song the majority of the workforce was vehemently pro-unionn, and violently against any non-union, ie blackleg or scab, miners - and while I am guessing, I nevertheless suspect that the mine-owners, the ancient Delaval family who I see are still major land-owners in the area, were very much against any unionisation in 'their' mine - hence the local community's rough treatment of blackleg/scab workers:

Oh, Delaval is a terrible place
They rub wet clay in the blackleg's face.
And around the heaps they run a foot race,
To catch the blackleg miner!

So divint gang near the Seghill mine.
Across the way they stretch a line,
To catch the throat and break the spine
Of the dirty blackleg miner!