Protest chants: how they actually work, and the ones worth using

Protest chants are the only piece of a march that everybody has to agree on in real time. A sign is one person’s opinion. A chant needs a thousand strangers to arrive at the same rhythm within about four seconds, which is a much harder engineering problem than it looks.

Some spread down an entire street in seconds. Others die somewhere around the third row while the person who started it studies their shoes. The difference is almost never the politics.

The mechanics

It has to be learnable on the first hearing. Nobody hands out lyrics. If a person forty feet back cannot join in on the second repetition, the chant is already finished.

Stress on the right syllables. Chants live on strong beats, usually two or four. The words have to fall so the emphasis lands where you would naturally clap. This is why so many chants that read well on paper collapse out loud.

Call and response beats a monologue. Splitting the line gives everybody a job and halves what each person has to remember. It also produces the volume, because half the crowd is always drawing breath while the other half shouts.

It has to survive walking pace. A chant is performed by people moving at roughly one hundred steps a minute. Anything requiring a complicated pause will fall apart the moment the front of the march slows down.

Short vowels carry, long ones do not. Open, hard syllables travel across a road. Soft consonant clusters vanish into traffic noise about ten metres from the person shouting them.

The call and response

The workhorse of the genre. One voice asks, the crowd answers, and nobody has to memorise more than four words.

• What do we want? / When do we want it?
• Show me what democracy looks like / This is what democracy looks like
• Whose streets? / Our streets!
• Are you ready to fight? / Damn right!
• Tell me what you’re standing for / Say it louder

Worth knowing that the democracy one is also the most complained-about chant in existence. Organisers have been writing essays about how tired it is for at least a decade, and it keeps getting used, because it is the easiest thing in the world to teach a crowd. That tension is the whole craft in miniature.

The two-beat

Four syllables, two hard stresses, no subtlety. These are what a crowd falls back to when it has lost the thread of something more complicated.

• No justice, no peace
• Not my king
• Hands off our courts
• Say it clear, say it loud
• The people united will never be defeated

That last one is technically too long by every rule above and works anyway, which is a useful reminder that the rules are observations rather than laws. It survives because the rhythm is so regular you can guess the ending before you have heard it.

The funny one

Humour does the same job in a chant as it does on cardboard. It gets filmed, it gets shared, and it makes a crowd look like people rather than a mob. It also keeps everybody’s spirits up in the fourth hour, which matters more than anybody admits.

The reliable formula is a very ordinary complaint delivered in the cadence of a serious one. Something about the weather, the walking, the queue for the toilets, the fact that you have been here before about this exact thing. The joke is the gap between the register and the subject.

The one that outlived the government that banned it

The best evidence that chants are built in the street rather than written at a desk is the most widely used protest chant on earth.

In June 1973 the Chilean composer Sergio Ortega was walking home through Santiago when he heard a young man shout el pueblo unido jamás será vencido. The people united will never be defeated. Ortega did not invent the line. He heard somebody shouting it and went home and built a song around it, working with the band Quilapayún and, by his own account, improvising the tune over chords borrowed from a Brahms sextet.

It was first performed at a mass concert on the Alameda in Santiago, roughly three months before the coup of 11 September 1973. The government it was written for was overthrown. The chant was not. It became the anthem of the Chilean resistance in exile and then, gradually, of everybody else, and you can hear it in its original Spanish at marches in countries that have no connection to Chile at all.

Look at why it travels. It is two halves that answer each other, the stress falls in the same place every time, and the second half resolves the first so the crowd knows exactly where the line ends. You do not need Spanish to join in. You need to hear it once.

Fifty years on, the most durable chant in the world is still a thing a stranger shouted in a street, and the composer’s only contribution was recognising it when he heard it.

Four ways to kill a chant

Starting it from the middle of a crowd. Sound needs somewhere to travel from. Chants start at the front or at an edge, never from the centre where they are swallowed.

Too many words. If it needs a comma, it needs cutting.

An unclear ending. People need to know where to stop so they can start again together. A chant that trails off will not get a second round.

Anything requiring inside knowledge. A chant about a specific clause of a specific bill will be understood by nine people, and the other nine hundred will politely wait for it to be over.

Also read

The cardboard half of the job is covered in funny protest signs: what makes one work. For something to put on the sign, try 14 quotes about fascism that everyone should read.

Lead image: a housing demonstration in Madrid. Photo: Barcex, CC BY-SA 4.0.