Protest song is dead. What Elvis Costello, Nina Simone and Bob Dylan were rooted into are now desolate and simple attempts to provide a basic display of unity. Nice enough a gesture, and a thoroughly dedicated one by Primal Scream and Dexys Midnight Runners, but what a drab one. Enough is Enough will chart nowhere close to the top bracket of protest songs, with its lyrical display like Shane MacGowan speaking through what the public already knows and an arrangement of instruments that lack either confidence or inspiration. As dull a pairing as to be expected from the latter days of two stunning bands back in their heyday. Instead, they are reduced to coasting off on the message alone.
Enough is Enough is not exactly Rage Against the Machine levels of inspiration. A track that will coast along on its support of RMT strikes rather than of anything of actual musical quality or intent. All protests need a good song, and this one isn’t it. Was Stamp Down the Dirt from Costello’s 1991 classic Spike not available? It would appear not. Crying out for where wages go and the one rule for us and one rule for them mentality provides Enough is Enough with some easy ground to mount its lyrics to, but it is such a shocking failure of a track, with its spoken word presence annoying more than anything.
Five minutes long and rather than feeling like a rallying cry to play at protests and marches, it feels like an advertisement for something people are aware of. Gathering support is not done through bland and awkward MacGowan-like ballads. Mick Lynch probably gets the best line of the bunch and he is just scattered halfway through this lengthy, repetitive track. Does it linger on the mind? Absolutely. It lingers on the mind the same way Lou Reed’s collaboration with Metallica does. It is strange, it is awful, but there was probably some good within those first few drafts. Repeating “enough is enough” toward the end of the track creates some nice repetition, but it feels equivalent to that Bridge Over Troubled Water cover for the victims of Grenfell. How much good it really does is measured by the activism that comes from the release of the song. Actively switching Enough is Enough off is about all this Bob Crow-inspired piece will do.
Enough is Enough. Its gesture is correct. Equal rights and justice for all, the spoken-word intro provides. But it is that spoken word intro and the musical number that follows, that is utterly despondent. Enough is enough. There is no fire to this protest track, with its message on its sleeve in case it wasn’t so obvious display not just making a boring song, but one that has no desire to become a musically unique object. Protest for the sake of it with Primal Scream and company, rather than actual art and work to be proud of. Its sentiment will defend much of the qualities here, for members of big bands to rally around a justifiable cause is grand, but the simple fact of it is that the musical quality is absent. Neither as intricate and detailed as Pulp’s Common People nor as brazenly obvious and scintillating as Happy Xmas (War is Over). Pick a lane, but never this.
