Slash and Burn: the music of Stephan Smith.

• Author: Saulnier, Natasha

Stephan Smith is one of the most promising protest singers in America. The thirty-six-year-old Smith has been hailed as the Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan for this generation by The New York Times and The Village Voice.

On the first anniversary of 9/11, Smith released his anti-war song "The Bell," recorded with Pete Seeger, as a free MP3 over the Internet. "The Bell" was one of the first anti-war statements to make national press:

"Oh I'm sounding the drums of war, "said the man at his desk.

"Oh I will not fight your war," said the child and he stood.

"Oh but don't you love your country?" said the man at his desk.

"Yes, I do, but you don't," said the child and he stood.

"Oh but don't you know the truth?" said the man at his desk.

"Yes, you lie and call it truth, "said the child and he stood.

Despite the fact that no major industry company ever promoted it, "The Bell" was covered by artists ranging from Dave Matthews to DJ Spooky and printed more than 200,000 times on various compilations worldwide. "While the publishing and film industries have bankrolled and profited from dissent in the past year, the music industry, once the scion of protest, remains timid," says Smith.

Smith sings in nine languages, including Yiddish and Arabic, befitting his eclectic roots. "I grew up in Virginia, steeped in the American musical tradition, but my mother is Austrian, my father Iraqi with Kurdish origins, and I have a Jewish great grandfather," he says. "So if I can sing harmoniously, I'm sure the whole world can sing in a beautiful chorus."

His father's family lives in Mosul and Baghdad, where four of his aunts and uncles work as doctors in the main hospitals and occasionally report on their daily lives and struggles. They lament the fact that the U.S. media do not relate the level of suffering placed on ordinary citizens. Smith's uncle, Ghazi Kamil, former director of the nation's electrical services, told Smith, "Innocent people, women and children, have been killed and are dying of cancer because of depleted uranium, and for what? For a few individuals to control our oil. But I'm not angry at Americans because I know they don't know."

His new album, Slash and Burn, on the independent Artemis Records started by Danny Goldberg, touches not only on Bush and the war in Iraq, but on unethical globalization and its trail of iniquities. Slash and Burn's twelve songs mix political content and pop music. Smith has called it "popolitical." He explains: "While I am...