Get Up, Stand Up: The Story of Pop and Politics is a 6x60 minutes documentary

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 TV-series about the relationship between singers and politics in the USA, the UK, Germany and France from the 1960s until 2003. It was made in 2003 by Rudi Dolezal, Hannes Rossacher and Simon Witter as a joint production between German ZDF

ZDF

Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen , ZDF, is a public-service German television broadcaster based in Mainz . It is run as an independent non-profit institution, which was founded by the German federal states . The ZDF is financed by television licence fees called GEZ and advertising revenues...

 and the French-German culture channel Arte

Arte

Arte is a Franco-German TV network. It is a European culture channel and aims to promote quality programming especially in areas of culture and the arts...

. It has since been showed by a number of other broadcasters in Europe, but also by Australia's ABC

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly referred to as "the ABC" , is Australia's national public broadcaster...

 .

The series feature an impressive list of interviewees, including Joan Baez

Joan Baez

Joan Chandos Baez is an American folk singer, songwriter, musician and a prominent activist in the fields of human rights, peace and environmental justice....

, Tom Paxton

Tom Paxton

Thomas Richard Paxton is an American folk singer and singer-songwriter who has been writing, performing and recording music for over forty years...

, Bono

Bono

Paul David Hewson , most commonly known by his stage name Bono , is an Irish singer, musician, and humanitarian best known for being the main vocalist of the Dublin-based rock band U2. Bono was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, and attended Mount Temple Comprehensive School where he met his...

, David Bowie

David Bowie

David Bowie is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s...

, Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash

John R. "Johnny" Cash was an American singer-songwriter, actor, and author, who has been called one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century...

, Daniel Cohn-Bendit

Daniel Cohn-Bendit

Daniel Marc Cohn-Bendit is a Franco-German politician, active in both countries. He was a student leader during the unrest of May 1968 in France and he was also known during that time as Dany le Rouge...

, Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...

, Ice-T

ICE-T

* Ice-T, an American rapper and actor* ICE T , a tilting model of the German InterCityExpress series of high-speed trains...

, Bob Geldof

Bob Geldof

Robert Frederick Zenon "Bob" Geldof, KBE is an Irish singer, songwriter, author, occasional actor and political activist. He rose to prominence as the lead singer of the Irish rock band The Boomtown Rats in the late 1970s and early 1980s alongside the punk rock movement. The band had hits with his...

, Willie Nelson

Willie Nelson

Willie Hugh Nelson is an American country music singer-songwriter, as well as an author, poet, actor, and activist. The critical success of the album Shotgun Willie , combined with the critical and commercial success of Red Headed Stranger and Stardust , made Nelson one of the most recognized...

, Roger Waters

Roger Waters

George Roger Waters is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. He was a founding member of the progressive rock band Pink Floyd, serving as bassist and co-lead vocalist. Following the departure of bandmate Syd Barrett in 1968, Waters became the band's lyricist, principal songwriter...

, Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen , nicknamed "The Boss," is an American singer-songwriter who records and tours with the E Street Band...

, Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger

Peter "Pete" Seeger is an American folk singer and was an iconic figure in the mid-twentieth century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead...

, and Neil Young

Neil Young

Neil Percival Young, OC, OM is a Canadian singer-songwriter who is widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians of his generation...

.

A much shorter, two-hour version, called Get Up, Stand Up: The Story of Pop and Protest, aired on PBS

Public Broadcasting Service

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

 in September 2005, hosted and narrated by co-founder of Public Enemy Chuck D

Chuck D

Carlton Douglas Ridenhour , better known by his stage name, Chuck D, is an American rapper, author, and producer. He helped create politically and socially conscious rap music in the mid-1980s as the leader of the rap group Public Enemy.- Early life :Ridenhour was born in Queens, New York...

 . The PBS version focuses mainly on the American history of protest songs.

The title is borrowed from the reggae

Reggae

Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.Reggae is based...

 protest song Get Up, Stand Up

Get Up, Stand Up

"Get Up, Stand Up" is a reggae song written by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh.The song originally appeared on The Wailers' 1973 album Burnin. It was recorded and played live in numerous versions by The Wailers and Bob Marley & The Wailers, along with solo versions by Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer...

by Bob Marley

Bob Marley

Robert Nesta "Bob" Marley, OM was a Jamaican singer-songwriter and musician. He was the rhythm guitarist and lead singer for the ska, rocksteady and reggae band Bob Marley & The Wailers...

 and Peter Tosh

Peter Tosh

Peter Tosh, born Winston Hubert McIntosh , was a Jamaican reggae musician who was a core member of the band The Wailers , and who afterward had a successful solo career as well as being a promoter of Rastafari.Peter Tosh was born in Grange Hill, Jamaica, an illegitimate child to a mother too young...

.

Episodes

• Part 1: We Shall Overcome - An introductory overview
• Part 2: Next Stop is Vietnam - The music of the Vietnam War peace movement in the 1960s
• Part 3: Fight the Power - Protest music in the 1970s and the 1980s
• Part 4: Say it Loud - An overview of politics in black music, from Paul Robeson
  Paul Robeson
  Paul Leroy Robeson was an American concert singer , recording artist, actor, athlete, scholar who was an advocate for the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the twentieth century...
  
   to Ms Dynamite
• Part 5: We Are The World - the big aid concerts of the 1990s
• Part 6: What's Going On - In the new millennium, musicians like Bono
  Bono
  Paul David Hewson , most commonly known by his stage name Bono , is an Irish singer, musician, and humanitarian best known for being the main vocalist of the Dublin-based rock band U2. Bono was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, and attended Mount Temple Comprehensive School where he met his...
  
   and Bob Geldof
  Bob Geldof
  Robert Frederick Zenon "Bob" Geldof, KBE is an Irish singer, songwriter, author, occasional actor and political activist. He rose to prominence as the lead singer of the Irish rock band The Boomtown Rats in the late 1970s and early 1980s alongside the punk rock movement. The band had hits with his...
  
  become political lobbyists