After Earth Day, our reporters take a look at the growing role of green technologies—from battery storage’s environmental risks to the rise of lab-grown meat. Under the second Trump administration, debates over energy innovation and sustainability have intensified, influencing policy and public perception. Immigration enforcement has also escalated, affecting undocumented students at UC Berkeley and asylum seekers across the Bay Area. As the campus marks the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, echoes of past activism reveal how student voices continue to shape political and cultural life today.
This is a recording of North Gate Radio that was broadcast live on KALX radio station, 90.7FM.
Full Transcript
Nava Rawls: Hey y’all welcome to North Gate Radio, I’m Nava Rawls.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: And I’m Ellie Prickett-Morgan, happy Thursday Nava!
Nava Rawls: Happy Thursday! We’ve got a lot to talk about today…
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: Nava, some of this stuff is pretty heavy…
Nava Rawls: True, but I’m glad we’re talking about it, right?
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: Yea, let’s get into it!!!
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: We’ll hear first about some drawbacks with California’s investments into battery storage.
Glenn Church: If renewable energy is going to be a future, it really needs to rest on clean energy.
Nava Rawls: And, we’ll hear about how one startup is making real meat, but without the animal.
Bianca Le: What we’re doing is growing just the part of the animal that we want to eat.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: With the Trump administration ramping up immigration threats, we’ll hear about undocumented students at UC Berkeley asking the university to issue a public statement of support.
Maria: For some reason Berkeley hasn’t done that.
Nava Rawls: Then, we’ll hear from an asylum seeker in Oakland on why he can’t go back home.
Edward Tenorio: If they catch me, they’ll put me in jail.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: After that we’re traveling back 60 years for the anniversary of Berkeley’s free speech movement, which spawned not just words but music.
Lee Felsenstein: Wow there’s a place where you can play that illegal music on the air.
Nava Rawls: But first, the news…
Robert Strauss: Live from North Gate News, I’m Robert Strauss.
The Berkeley City Council has approved the demolition of the city’s last movie theater, the “UA” on Shattuck Avenue. The U-A opened in 1932 and was an 1800-seat // single-screen theater. Stars like Bing Crosby were in attendance for its grand opening. A developer is planning to build a 227-unit apartment building there. The developer, Patrick Kennedy says he’ll try to use the Art Deco details of the theater in the new building. The UA Theater closed in March 2023. That was after two other Berkeley movie houses were shut down. Both of them are slated to become housing as well.
Another department store bites the dust at Union Square … Saks Fifth Avenue will be closing in two weeks even though its lease runs out in 2027. Saks moved to an “appointment-only” format last year but the company said in a statement that it was unsuccessful and the store would close on May 10. It follows Bloomingdale’s – another high-end department store – which closed its Market Street location earlier this year. Saks bought competitor Neiman Marcus late last year. It plans to keep that store in the Union Square neighborhood open.
Harrington Street near San Francisco’s Balboa Park neighborhood is getting a new name … “Jerry Garcia Street.” The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to rename a part of the street after the Grateful Dead’s frontman Jerry Garcia. He passed away in 1995. Garcia was in grade school when his father died and he moved in with his grandparents on Harrington Street. The resolution reads in part, “Jerry Garcia’s memory brings music, joy and inspiration to the current residents of San Francisco.”
For North Gate Radio, I’m Robert Strauss.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: Welcome Back to North Gate Radio … I’m Ellie Prickett-Morgan.
Nava Rawls: And I’m Nava Rawls.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: Nava, did you know that California wants to have a grid running on 100% clean energy by 2045?
Nava Rawls: Woah, how are they going to do that?
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: Well, the state has already made some pretty big investments in wind, solar, and batteries …
Nava Rawls: Batteries?
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: Battery plants to be more exact. Imagine a town that depended 100% on solar energy… when it’s night time, that town would have no electricity. You need a battery to store that solar energy for later.
Nava Rawls: Seems like a good investment.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: Not everyone is a fan, especially after a huge battery plant on the Monterey Bay caught fire. I went down to Moss Landing, across from the plant, to see how one of its neighbors is thinking about battery storage.
Dave Grigsby: Let’s paddle on in here…
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: It’s a warm Saturday morning in February. I’m out on the Elkhorn Slough with. Dave Grigsby, owner of Kayak Connection. He’s leaning over the side of his boat to comb through eelgrass beds.
Dave Grigsby: So I’m just looking in the shallows right now for anything interesting.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: Dave has owned Kayak connection for 12 years. His business is tied to the slough, an ecological preserve that’s home to more than 700 species of invertebrates, plants, fish, birds, and marine mammals.
Dave Grigsby: Oh, we’ve snuck up on some otters eating. We’ll kind of paddle that way so we don’t disturb them… They’re looking at us so we’re a bit too close. I was too focused on the eel grass.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: The day is an absolute stunner, there’s not a cloud in the sky, the wind is gentle, and we’re in shorts and t-shirts in February. But other than the otters, we don’t have too many neighbors kayaking.
Dave thinks it’s because of the battery fire. He’s seen a drop in business after the Vistra Energy battery facility burned for two days in January, right across the road from where we’re kayaking. Since then elevated levels of heavy metals have been detected in the soil around the plant.
Dave wasn’t at Kayak Connection when the fire started, but he remembers going down to Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz with his wife to try to get a look.
Dave Grigsby: I had a pair of binoculars, and I’m looking at flames as high as the smokestacks, and those stacks are 500 feet high. And then we started tasting metal in our mouths.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: More than one thousand people had to evacuate. Even more still had to shelter in place. And that metal taste was reported by residents from the furthest reaches of the Monterey Bay.
On the second day of the fire Monterey County officials held a press conference to brief the community. The first speaker, Monterey County Supervisor Glenn Church, made a comparison to another really famous energy disaster.
Glenn Church: This is really… a three mile island event for this industry.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: If you’re too young to have lived through it, Three Mile Island is the name of a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania that experienced a partial meltdown in 1979. It triggered a bunch of safety regulations in the nuclear industry, and it gave life to a really powerful anti-nuclear movement.
A meltdown is a big scary word, but you should know, no one died or was even injured at Three Mile Island. To this day, experts are still divided about how much harm the meltdown caused to the health of the surrounding community. It’s controversial, but there’s an argument that Three Mile Island killed the growth of an alternative form of energy which could have lowered our dependence on fossil fuels.
Glenn Church: If renewable energy is going to be a future, it really needs to rest on safe energy.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: Now, clean energy advocates are concerned the Moss Landing fire might be a similar inflection point for battery storage, where it could become politically impossible to build. Two months after the initial fire, I asked Church how he felt about that comment.
Glenn Church: Unfortunately you have to make comparisons like that sometimes to get people’s attention.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: Church sees the situation as nuanced, but his point has really resonated with the community. They’re already mobilizing against new battery plant proposals.
Brian Roeder: First off, Google Assembly Bill 303.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: That’s Brian Roeder, who lives in Prunedale (8 miles from the Vistra Plant), speaking at a press conference in February. Roeder is a vocal advocate of a new bill that would change how battery storage facilities get permitted.
Right now, plans to build battery storage facilities can be approved directly by the state through the California Energy Commission. Individual counties have minimal input. This was supposed to help streamline the growth of battery projects so that California could hit its clean energy targets by 2045.
The bill Roeder is pushing would close that loophole and put deciding power back into the hands of local governments.
Brian Roeder: Doesn’t matter how good our arguments are, if we’re not there making them in the room when the decision’s made, they are not going to be heard.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: Roeder doesn’t want new battery storage facilities to be built, at least until they’re proven to be way safer. Patrick Durham runs a safety consulting business that deals with battery technology and he gets where Roeder is coming from.
Patrick Durham: Probably the best way I’ve heard it described is we’re building the plane as we’re flying it.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: He says there will be growing pains, including fires because this is cutting edge technology.
Patrick Durham: The technology’s advancing so quickly, that the regulations and the building codes and everything around it, it’s barely keeping up.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: Durham says with each mishap, the state needs to learn and bring in more regulation to make battery plants safe…
Back on the slough, Dave is not totally ready to give up on the battery plants, even after they’ve hurt his business.
Patrick Durham: Look, we need power.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: He says he’s not against the plant operating, he just wants some common sense changes. And if not at Moss Landing, where there’s already built infrastructure to connect to the grid, where would new batteries go?
Patrick Durham: I would prefer it to be in someone else’s backyard, right? Where I may giggle and laugh at some, you know, some place like Needles or Taft or, some godforsaken spot in the desert, but somebody lives there.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: For now, Dave will be waiting for summer weather to hopefully bring his customers back. He’s still worried about the health of the ecosystem, but he can take comfort in the fact that scientists and the EPA are monitoring the slough.
The cleanup process could easily take a year and whether Vistra will be able to rebuild is still in question. The California Public Utilities Commission already modified their operating standards for battery plants in March, and if AB 303 passes, the battery plant industry could face even more challenges.
For Northgate Radio, I’m Ellie Prickett-Morgan.
Nava Rawls: Keeping on the theme of green tech, did you know that the Bay is a hotspot for businesses that make alternative meats? Mission Barnes, based in San Francisco, is one of these companies. They make lab-grown meat, and they want it to be as close to the real thing as possible. It’s not just for animal lovers – there might be an environmental benefit too. Reporter Anna Zou has more.
Anna Zou: I’m here with Bianca Le, a cell biologist at Mission Barnes. So your company, Mission Barns, is based in San Francisco and makes bio-engineered meat, like meatballs, and pepperoni. Tell me about that process. How is this stuff made?
Bianca Le: So how this is made is we have a donor pig, her name is Dawn. And Dawn provided us with a small sample of meat. And then back in our pilot plant in San Francisco, we use cultivators. So think of this as like a stainless steel tank, like what you see at a brewery. To grow yeast cells or to ferment wine at a winery, we use that same equipment to grow meat.
Anna Zou: How did you extract that sample?
Bianca Le: It’s a harmless sample performed by a vet. It’s called a biopsy. It’s essentially what we as humans go through when we doctors need to take a sample.
Anna Zou: So part of Mission Barnes’ pitch is that it’s sustainable. I read that producing some of this meat uses a lot of the stuff that’s used to grow the animal cells, I think called purified growth media, and that uses a lot of natural resources. I heard that that can maybe increase the potential for global warming, but I just wanted to know, is this stuff really as good for the environment as we say it is.
Bianca Le: Yeah, so if you look at how conventional pork is made, for example, it takes a lot of resources, a lot of land, a lot of water to not only let the animal survive and grow, but also to grow all of the food that that animal eats. And then you’re using those resources to grow the liver, the lungs, the brain, as well as the muscle tissue. And so you’re using a lot of resources. For a lot of parts of the animal that you’re not eating, what we are doing is growing just the part of the animal that we want to eat. So about for every calorie you get out of a pig, it takes about 13 calories to feed that pig. In our process, it’s about a three to one ratio. So much more efficient, much more sustainable.
Anna Zou: Okay. And how do you decide what cells to use for what meat? Because you know bacon is made out of the belly. Are there certain cells that you extract in order to get that body part? If that makes sense?
Bianca Le: Yeah, no, it definitely makes sense. So yeah, meat is made up of lots of different cuts. It can come from the belly, the back, what’s the same is what the tissue is made out of. So meat is just skeletal muscle. And fat. Those are the two major cell types that we are eating when we are eating meat. And so we’re able to just get the fat cells and grow just the fat to make all sorts of cuts. So you’re right. We’re making bacon, we’re making meatballs, sausages. It’s the same fat across lots of different products.
Anna Zou: This is Daniel Ryan cooking his bio-engineered meatball. Are you the chief culinary person? Like so you do all the cooking?
Daniel Ryan: Correct. Yeah. Yeah, so I, I work in product development. I’m the director of product Development Mission Barns.
Anna Zou: and it looks like it’s browning and the oil is splattering off the pan. It just looks like a, a real meatball.
Bianca Le: That’s real meat made without the animal.
So Daniel’s made his famous tomato sauce to go with the meatballs just like you would eat a conventional meatball.
Anna Zou: Okay, well, the moment of truth. Hmm. I can like kind of taste like some… gristle.
Bianca Le: Well, yeah. I’ve always encouraged tasters to use their hands and actually squeeze the meatball and like tear it apart. You can actually see the chunks of our mission fat in it, and you can see the juiciness come out of the meatball because it’s real pork fat.
Anna Zou: Well, what would you tell people who are skeptical of bio-engineered meat, GMOs?
Bianca Le: Yeah, so we don’t, we are non GMO, um, but. Tasting is truly believing. I think it’s really hard for people to think about the future of food. It feels like a very far away, um, concept, but really it’s happening today and we’ll be able to serve this to consumers and once they taste it, they’ll know that it’s exactly what they would expect.
Nava Rawls:That was Bianca Le talking to our reporter Anna Zou for NorthGate Radio.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: The Trump administration has been making good on its promise to deport undocumented immigrants and international students … and they’ve been clear that they’re going into sanctuary spaces like schools.
With this in mind, undocumented students at UC Berkeley are asking the university to issue a public statement of support. Julia Mayer reports.
Julia Mayer: Maria is a senior at Cal, majoring in economics and she grew up in Santa Barbara. She doesn’t want to give her last name because she’s undocumented. Maria says she wasn’t surprised that Donald Trump won a second term.
Maria: I kind of already expected him to win.
Julia Mayer: But like many Americans, Maria was hoping for the best and preparing for the worst … just like in 2016.
Maria: And when I did find out it was like, I guess we’re back, right? It brought me back to 2016.
Julia Mayer: But this time, Maria says the situation feels more urgent. And so, Maria and a group of undocumented worked with UC Berkeley’s student government to ask the university to issue a public statement of support.
Maria: Because they haven’t released one yet and other universities have.
Julia Mayer: In January, the UC system officially reaffirmed its Statement of Principles in Support of Undocumented Members of the UC Community.
The document explicitly states that UC will continue to admit students regardless of immigration status and will not share student information with federal agencies without a warrant or court order. Maria says UC Santa Cruz issued a similar campus-wide email.
Maria: For some reason Berkeley hasn’t done that.
Julia Mayer: What UC Berkeley has done is issue a video declaring support of its values, including support for undocumented students. Here’s UC Berkeley’s chancellor Rich Lyons.
Rich Lyons: We will continue to confront discrimination at every turn. We will support our community members without regard for their immigration status.
Julia Mayer: But Maria says Berkeley’s decision to tuck the support in a three minute video stands in stark contrast to 2016. Back then, former Chancellor Nicholas Dirks issued a statement called “Support for Undocumented Students.” In it, the university pledged to do “everything in its power” to support undocumented students.
Maria: Right now, then why are things a bit different?
Abigail L’Esperance: The consequence of doing that is this threat that federal funding will be pulled.
Julia Mayer: That’s Abigail L’Esperance, she’s with the East Bay Community Law Center. She says, what’s different is that the Trump administration is retaliating against Universities.
Abigail L’Esperance: So this doesn’t exist in a vacuum of morality of like, should we or shouldn’t we? It has real life consequences as well.
Julia Mayer: Last week, the Trump Administration has threatened to take away federal funding to Harvard University unless it complies with its hiring and admissions demands.
And with the UC system receiving more than a 100 million dollars in federal funding … well… L’Esperance says they have a lot to lose.
In addition, the Trump Administration could come after undocumented students too. With these real dangers, she says the university’s concern about “unwanted attention” has merit.
As Maria prepares to graduate this semester, she finds strength in her family. Her mother encourages Maria to face challenges head-on.
Maria: Not like, ‘Don’t worry, everything’s gonna be fine.’ More so of, ‘You’re gonna be able to handle anything that comes your way.’ Because that’s just what we’ve always had to do.
Julia Mayer: And Maria recognizes that the university is facing a difficult balancing act and that shining a light on undocumented students could be risky … but she says…
Maria: They think it’s too risky, but like our whole lives are based off of risk.
Julia Mayer: … and Maria says if you aren’t willing to take the risk, nothing’s going to change. For the California Report, I’m Julia Mayer.
Nava Rawls: Staying on the topic of immigration, we’re also seeing a huge increase in enforcement under Trump. Asylum seeking has been halted completely at the border and those with pending cases are uncertain of the future. Reporter Renée Bartlett-Webber tells us what’s at stake.
Renée Bartlett-Webber: Hola, como esta?
Edward Tenorio is getting off a long shift at a pizza shop … when he meets me outside of his house in Oakland.
Edward Tenorio: This is my house. Let me put my bike inside, okay?
Renée Bartlett-Webber: He puts the bike he rode from the pizzeria in South Berkeley on the side of the house – and invites me in.
Edward Tenorio: Esta es mi casa.
Renée Bartlett-Webber: Tenorio works two jobs…
Edward Tenorio: I have to take care of my mom, my son. I’m a single father, también tengo a mi hermana.
Renée Bartlett-Webber: His family is still in Nicaragua and as the sole income earner, he works six days a week to send them money.
While Tenorio’s ultimate dream would be to one day return to his country … after taking part in political protests nearly seven years ago he had to flee. Tenorio remembers the moment his whole life changed, down to the hour: April 18, 2018 at 6:00 pm.
Edward Tenorio: El 18 de abril del 2018, a las 6 de la tarde, estaba en una protesta en la calle en Managua y la policía llegó a reprimir las protestas y empezaron a dispararnos.
Renée Bartlett-Webber: Tenorio still has the scar where a rubber bullet grazed his arm. He was at a protest in Managua, which he says was peaceful, until the police came … and started shooting.
That was the beginning of a long struggle against President Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas. Ortega has continuously ruled Nicaragua for nearly 20 years and has become increasingly authoritarian.
In the weeks that followed the protest Tenorio attended … more than 300.. people.. were killed, thousands injured and countless disappeared at the hands of the government.
Tenorio says the Sandinistas burned down his neighbor’s house, with the family in it. Instead of waiting to see what would happen to him, Tenorio fled.
Edward Tenorio: If they catch me, they will put me in a jail por muchos años,…
Renée Bartlett-Webber: Just because he doesnt think them he says he feels that Nicaragua needs its freedom.
Edward Tenorio: … siento que Nicaragua necesita libertad.
Renée Bartlett-Webber: It took Tenorio more than two weeks to get through Mexico. The first time he stepped onto U.S. soil was in El Paso Texas. And he was immediately sent to the “famous…”
Edward Tenorio: hieleras
Renée Bartlett-Webber: These detention centers are packed with migrants waiting to plead their cases. But Tenorio didn’t get a chance and was sent back to Mexico the following morning.
He spent the next month trying to get to another border crossing in McAllen Texas. To get there he had to cross the Rio Grande in the dead of night. His raft hissed as air leaked from a hole, dangerously close to sinking.
Edward Tenorio: Fue bien peligroso.
Renée Bartlett-Webber: In McAllen, border officials let Tenorio into the country and sent him to Fresno, where he had a sponsor. And he was given a telephone.
Edward Tenorio: Ellos nos dieron un teléfono.
Renée Bartlett-Webber: It didn’t have a chip or any way to make calls, its sole purpose for ICE to track his whereabouts.
Edward Tenorio: Solo era para tener un control sobre nosotros.
Renée Bartlett-Webber: Tenorio has since given the phone back and has an appointment for a court hearing to plead his asylum case.
David Hausman: The new administration describes asylum seekers as invaders.
Renée Bartlett-Webber: That was Dr. David Hausman, a UC Berkeley immigration law professor. He says the administration has stopped asylum seeking completely at the border. And that violates both U.S. and international statutes.
U.S. policies were eroding the right to seek asylum before Trump’s second term … But Hausman says the asylum process has now become entirely unpredictable for people like Tenorio.
David Hausman: And that’s intentional. The administration is … trying to spread fear in that way…
Renée Bartlett-Webber: And Trump is pushing the legal boundaries of who can be deported.
David Hausman: There’s a huge amount of uncertainty about how far the administration’s mass deportation’s effort will actually go.
Renée Bartlett-Webber: In recent months, the state department has revoked student visas and detained residents with green cards. As legal battles unfold, many immigrants wait anxiously, unsure which policies will hold.
Tenorio has been in the U.S. for two and half years. He has work authorization and a social security number, and feels fairly confident that his first court date in September will go well.
Edward Tenorio: Entonces, es como fifty-fifty, no tengo miedo porque mis abogados que me están representando van a defenderme.
Renée Bartlett-Webber: Tenorio says if he faces deportation, he’s sure his lawyers will protect him. But he is scared of the new political landscape for immigrants in the future. It remains to be seen if the Trump administration will change the rules and put his asylum claim at risk.
Edward Tenorio: Poco a poco step by step.
Renée Bartlett-Webber: But for now, Tenorio is taking it day by day. For North Gate Radio, I’m Renée Bartlett-Webber.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: We’re gonna end on a more hopeful note. This year is the 60th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. The protests that began on Sproul Plaza helped start a generation of national campus activism. Along with the politics, though, there was always music. Robert Strauss reports.
Robert Strauss: The seminal moment of those protests was when 21 year old senior Mario Savio took to the steps of Sproul Hall and gave a speech comparing students to mere cogs in a machine.
Mario Savio: And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…
Robert Strauss: Days before that Savio speech, a protester was arrested and put in a police car at Sproul Plaza for the “crime” of passing out civil rights flyers.
A famous photo of that day shows thousands of students surrounding the police car, and for more than 24 hours they gave protest speeches on the plaza… sometimes even standing on top of the vehicle…
Mario Savio: the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you are free, the machine will…
Robert Strauss: The protest went on for months and one of the leaders to emerge was Savio, who had been in Mississippi in support of Black voting rights the summer before. He saw Martin Luther King and Malcolm X as his oratorical mentors. Soaring speeches moved people to action, but music of the era was just as important.
Joan Baez: Baby, don’t you cry.
Robert Strauss: At Sproul, as Savio and other students occupied Sproul Hall, the popular folk artist Joan Baez was outside inspiring the crowd…
Joan Baez: …bound to die…
Robert Strauss: Baez was already a star and a music industry darling. Other homegrown singers rode their protest songs to fame.
Joe McDonald was a military vet and putting out a small satirical newspaper in Berkeley when he picked up the guitar and wrote “Fixin’ To Die Rag.”
Joe McDonald: Now come on mothers throughout the land. Pack your boys off to Vietnam.
Robert Strauss: McDonald’s song was protesting the Vietnam draft. At first, he sang the song on campus and at political gatherings in Oakland. But the song soon became a standard anthem protesting the war and McDonald took it all the way to the Woodstock Music Festival. It was the only song sung twice there…
Joe McDonald: Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box.
Robert Strauss: Berkeley quickly became a necessary stop on the protest song circuit, and drew big stars like folk singer Phil Ochs, whose fame was only eclipsed by Baez and Bob Dylan at the time. It became a place for young people to be.
Lee Felsenstein was in Philadelphia. He was the son of Socialist parents who took him to early civil rights protests, and when it came time to decide on a college, he chose Berkeley for the music. That was 1963.
Lee Felsenstein: I said, “Wow, there’s a place where you can play these illegal songs on the air.”
Robert Strauss: Today Felsenstein runs a website about the Free Speech Movement. Felsenstein remembers as a student he got to strum his guitar with Baez at one of the protests. He says it wasn’t just that the music was inspiring. Back then you could actually make money off it.
During the winter break of his sophomore year, he helped put together a sardonic Christmas album to make money for upcoming trips south to aid the Civil Rights protests.
Group singing Xmas Carol: Oh, come all ye mindless, conceptless and spineless. Sell out your integrity to IBM.
Robert Strauss: Today we are living through another political and cultural moment but on Sproul Plaza, the scene is very different.
When I first came to Berkeley a few years after Savio, you couldn’t step through the main campus trail from Sproul to the Library without being solicited a dozen times for some political agenda. But today here at Sproul it is much more placid. Instead of donating for a political cause, they buy Girl Scout cookies and look at booths touting business clubs. Those coming back to Sproul half-century after Savio could be a little cynical about these times when there seems just as much cause for protest songs.
Eric Deggans is a culture critic on National Public Radio. He says the 1960s and 70s were the halcyon times for protest music. You could hear it all the time on the radio and the music industry suits were making lots of money off it.
Eric Deggans: We think of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Marvin Gaye and James Brown a certain way because of those songs. Now we’ve reached a point where there’s not as many people who have built their careers on those kinds of songs. They are not as commercially popular.
Robert Strauss: Deggans says the music world is too fragmented now. Back then, a handful of radio stations could make protest music popular. Now it is just hanging out on the fringe. But, he says, if you listen carefully, protest music hasn’t gone away completely in popular music. It is just more stealth. He points to Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime concert.
Eric Deggans: What I loved about the performance was that it was a giant invite to people who, if they were intrigued by what he was doing, could dig deeper and find out more.
Kendrick Lamar: The revolution’s about to be televised. You picked the right time but the wrong guy…
Robert Strauss: Deggans says looked at one way, Lamar’s performance was pop culture extravaganza. But if you listened carefully to the lyrics and paid attention to images like Samuel L. Jackson dressed up as Uncle Sam, you could see a critique of the treatment of Black folks in America…
Robert Strauss in Berkeley for North Gate Radio.
Nava Rawls: That’s it for North Gate Radio … Today’s show was produced by Anasooya Thorakkattu and Renee Bartlett-Webber.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: Julia Mayer was our Executive Producer…
Nava Rawls: Rick Johnson was our engineer…
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: Queena Kim and Shereen Marisol-Meraji are our faculty advisors…
Nava Rawls: North Gate Radio is a production of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism … I’m Nava Rawls.
Ellie Prickett-Morgan: … and I’m Ellie Prickett-Morgan … thanks for listening.
Individual Stories From Show
Credits
Anchors: Nava Rawls, Ellie Prickett-Morgan
Newscaster: Robert Strauss
Reporters: Ellie Prickett-Morgan, Anna Zou, Julia Mayer, Renee Bartlett-Webber, Robert Strauss
Executive Producer: Julia Mayer
Producers: Anasooya Thorakkattu, Renée Bartlett-Webber
Director: Renée Bartlett-Webber
Faculty Advisor: Queena Kim
Engineer: Rick Johnson
Air Date
April 2025