Especially with Occupy reaching a crossroads in summer 2012 — a time when it needs to reassess its ideals, its accomplishments, its methods and its artifacts — “Occupy This Album” plays like a state-of-the-field survey of the protest song. From Jeff Mangum covering the Minutemen to the anonymous drum circles that soundtracked the demonstrations in real time, music has been a constant presence in the movement, although it’s not quite clear what role it has played. The new album portrays a movement with a broad scope and an admirably varied constituency, but the same criticisms that have been leveled against Occupy can also be applied to “Occupy This Album:” There is general unease but no clear direction forward. There is outrage but no plan. There is deep feeling but no clear message.

Ostensibly, there should be something on “Occupy This Album” for everyone to love, but that also means there is more than enough here for everyone to hate. It’s an unwieldy tracklist, almost daring you play it front to back. Of course, it’s pointless to review a 100-track release the same way you would approach a studio album, where functionality and some sense of logical progression are crucial. But there’s no consistent development of political or musical ideas weaving these songs together, nothing to link them or to justify this particular sequencing. As a result, “Occupy This Album” cannot make a statement as an album. In one sense, this release mirrors the leaderless ethos of the movement, which stridently preserves the democracy of the demonstrations. While that idea has certainly energized the Occupy protest, it makes for an amorphous blob of music and a messy, often frustrating listening experience.

But they mean well, right? It’s a charity album after all, with each disc sold separately and with all proceeds benefiting Occupy directly. You’d probably be better off contributing directly to the cause and just making your own mix of politically minded music. You might even have some of these songs in your iTunes already, although why you’d want to include Lucinda Williams’ drippy “Blessed” or Mogwai’s interchangeable “Earth Division” is beyond me.

The music that actually is new — that purports to find direct inspiration in either the righteousness of the demonstrators or the plight of the 99 percent — is generally unimaginative, hokey, disappointingly safe. Most of these artists address these economic issues either through narrative or through high-minded rhetoric. The latter produces the most lackluster results: Jackson Browne’s “Which Side Are You On?” which he has been touting for several months now, turns out to be political white noise, a gentle fist bump to the like-minded that barely puts across either side of the debate. At least it’s better than My Pet Dragon’s epiphany on “Love Anthem”: “Only love can save us now.” To their credit, they sing it like they might actually believe it.

The storytellers have more success, if only because they’re willing to entertain a bit more grit, a bit less blind hope. Featuring Joan Baez and Steve Earle, James McMurtry’s “We Can’t Make It Here” sounds downright curmudgeonly as it surveys the state of the working class in an economy that regularly sends its manufacturing jobs overseas. The song, however, goes a bit overboard when the trio decry litterbugs and graffiti artists.

One of the true standouts among these 100 tracks is Richard Barone’s ditty “Can I Sleep on Your Futon?” about a veteran-turned-singer who couch-surfs from one generous soul to the next. The verses are specific and soulful, as through he’s derived them explicitly from lived experience, and in that regard, the song could function as commentary on the music biz. But Barone stumbles over that massively awkward chorus, “Can I sleep on your futon?” It’s hard to imagine a crowd of protesters singing along.

If there is one overarching theme here, it is, vaguely, “history.” The past informs and even defines this music. Even the very idea of this type of compilations seems like a throwback to the CD’s heyday in the 1990s, when seemingly every charity, from NARAL to the Red Hot Organization, had its own release. It’s an impression reinforced by much of the music, especially hip-hop tracks by Born I Music and George Martinez & the Global Block Collective, whose lyrics and beats sound like they were scavenged from 1994. (For a better example of how hip-hop can address political themes, check out Killer Mike’s new track “Reagan.”)

Of course, there is a lot of folk music on “Occupy This Album.” That style has proved one of the most politicized musical forms of the 20th century, as lefties in the 1930s and 1940s adopted labor songs as battle cries. Clean-scrubbed, buttoned-up folkies like the Kingston Trio had some chart success in the 1950s, but they were quickly rendered obsolete by the Village bohemians reimagining the music as a vehicle for countercultural sentiments. That’s the model so many Occupyers are reverently appropriating, never suspecting that it might not be a natural fit for 21st-century dissent. The folk revivalists of the 1960s drew from the past as well, but took pains to update the music to the times: The mere fact that Dylan wrote new songs in this old style was revolutionary, alienating an older generation of folkie purists.

“Occupy This Album” obviously represents a counterculture, but too many of the artists are too caught up in role playing the past, which seems like an especially boomer enterprise. Michael Moore (yes, that Michael Moore) performs the most chipper version of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” imaginable, one that seems wholly unaware of the gritty realities of 2012, much less of 1964. (The less said about his skiffle version of the song, a hidden track on disc four, the better.) Perhaps the one artist who understands how to plumb history for present-day relevance is Loudon Wainwright III, whose wry “The Panic Is On” updates an 80-year-old tune originally penned by Hezekiah Jenkins (the cover originally appeared on Wainwright’s album “Ten Songs for the New Depression”). It’s an unusual artifact from the early 1930s, but there’s a sneaky observation about class disparity that sounds more disgusted and potent than anything else on the album.

Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about “Occupy This Album” is that the music is deeply conservative. There are so few moments that grab your attention or make you see the world differently. When Occupy already seems to be in danger of losing momentum, it’s hard to say whether the movement has failed to inspire these artists or the artists have failed to document the movement.

Summer, who was strikingly beautiful, made some very steamy — some would say X-rated — music, most memorably with her first hit, 1975’s “Love to Love You Baby.” With Summer’s groans, moans and gasps powering the track, it broke new ground in its sexual explicitness. Promoted by her record company in explicitly sexual terms, and giving performances that made Tina Turner’s look tame, Summer soon found herself tagged the “Linda Lovelace of pop music.” She had seen this coming. In fact, she had not wanted to be the singer on that track, and agreed only to record the demo, and only then in a blackened studio where she sang, imagining that she was Marilyn Monroe giving herself over to orgasmic ecstasy. After producer Moroder convinced her to let him use her vocal, her record label president, seeing its bedroom potential, demanded a long-playing version that left the media debating whether the singer came 22 or 23 times. Rock critic Robert Christgau poked fun at the record with a review that consisted of three questions, “Did you come yet? Huh? Did you come yet?” Other reviews were more disparaging. But “Love to Love You Baby,” like much of her music, put female desire front and center in a way that it wasn’t in most rock music. Indeed, Summer’s music is inseparable from second-wave feminism’s emphasis on women’s sexual empowerment.

There is so much to say about Summer, who could have been a full-fledged personality had she not been pigeon-holed and dismissed as a disco tart. I was once on a radio program with her and, believe me, she was nobody’s fool. She described the “star-making machinery” as well as anyone. After she had already became famous she told Rolling Stone that her career sometimes felt like “this monstrous, monstrous force, this whole production of people and props that you’re responsible for, by audiences and everything that rules you until you take it upon yourself to be a machine… And at some point a machine breaks down.” Fame, she observed, diminished her, making her feel like nothing so much as a “commodity.” After falling into a debilitating depression and attempting suicide, she took control of her life again through Christianity.

In a way, I think one hears Summer confront her own commodification on her marvelous record “Bad Girls.” Although the music in the final, released version suggests otherwise, Summer isn’t celebrating prostitution on “Bad Girls.” Rather, she is confronting what she shares with those streetwalkers. “Now, you and me are just the same,” she sings.  And if Summer sounds unusually exuberant as she yells out to a john, “Hey, mista, have you got a dime?” perhaps it’s because Summer understood what it meant to be made into a commodity and reduced to a seductive whisper. Tellingly, in a television interview some years later, Summer noted that “Bad Girls” marked the moment when she stopped being an object and became a subject. Let’s hope that in her death she inspires more writing that fully acknowledges the intelligent subjecthood of this disco diva and kick-ass rock and roller.

In the words of noted musicologist Steve Jobs, “It was the chemistry of a small group of people, and that chemistry was greater than the sum of the parts. And so John kept Paul from being a teenybopper and Paul kept John from drifting out into the cosmos, and it was magic. And George, in the end, I think provided a tremendous amount of soul to the group. I don’t know what Ringo did.”

If Jobs had to ask what Ringo did, well, it proves every genius has a blind spot. But the ineffable mystery is this. There are many precedents for single geniuses that spontaneously combust into existence (see Dylan, Bob, or Hendrix, Jimi), but how do four extraordinary elements come together to produce a world-changing hydrogen bomb of musical genius? I’ll leave the Texas School Board to explain that to me. Or, watch the two films in this week’s double bill.

Today marks the DVD release of “George Harrison: Living in the Material World,” the four-hour Martin Scorsese dissection of the life and offhand times of George Harrison. The film’s compiler — not really director (more on that later) — Martin Scorsese, knows from musical genius and genius in general, being something of one himself. His last core sample on this subject, “No Direction Home,” spent four hours getting as close to the genesis of Bob Dylan’s genius as the artist would allow, which is to say, not very. It wisely did the next best thing, which was just showing Dylan being Dylan, while a chorus of friends and acquaintances tried to figure it all out. Nobody came close, of course, and Dylan’s own interview was conducted by his manager, Jeff Rosen, with all of the hardball questioning one would expect of Fox’s Chris Wallace interviewing John Boehner. Scorsese did the best he could – and that is very good indeed – overseeing a compilation of found objects in something that resembled a narrative structure. But in Dylan’s case, good is never good enough. Essential viewing if you are a Dylan fan, but ultimately, a museum artifact, where Dylan’s infinity of talent is definitely not on trial.

Scorsese’s follow-up, “George Harrison: Living in the Material World,”  is not really much different, though, ironically, one of the very few things left out in this tragical history tour was the impact of Harrison’s long creative and personal association with Dylan. The Beatles Creation Myth is front and center here, and as a duly authorized by the Harrison estate project, the archive material takes the viewer on a ride through the highlights. But only in the back seat. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are both interviewed at length on both Harrison and the journey they took together, but they offer few new insights. Ringo Starr lets down his guard only once, when he remembers his last encounter with his dying comrade, but that guard is soon posted again, and the show goes on. Knowing the forensic details of a magic trick does not do that trick any favors, and there’s little magic to be found in the first half of this film.

The second half of the film that deals with George coping with that ever-so-awful burden of huge fame and unlimited wealth drags on longer than the interminable jams that rounded out Sides 5 and 6 of the vinyl of “All Things Must Pass,” and while Harrison emerges as the hero of his own life, we ultimately agree with him that there were compelling reasons why his private life should have stayed private.

Sometimes, as I am sure Scorsese knows, bootlegs reveal far more than official releases, and the weight of being an “Authorized Release” somehow diminishes the end result. Scorsese doesn’t put much of his own skin in the game, and acts less as a director here than a detached observer, and that detachment prevents us from connecting with a story that defined a cultural renaissance. One longs to see Scorsese on fire, beating the creative process into submission in the way that Nick Nolte’s abstract painter bashed out a canvas to Dylan’s 1974 apocalyptic version of “Like a Rolling Stone” in the underrated anthology “New York Stories.” It takes one to know one, and in “George Harrison: Living in the Material World,” as in his other musical hagiographies, Scorsese seems almost embarrassed to confront genius on his own terms, in that secret language he’s privileged to share with his subjects.

A much scruffier and ultimately more revealing insight into the Beatles Creation Myth comes from the 2009 “Nowhere Boy.” This movie is set entirely in those moments when a strange kind of human alchemy transpired, in the grimy laboratory of Liverpool. No attempt is made to explain how the magic happened, but the viewer gets the distinct sense “why.” It’s ironic that one of the most insightful glimpses into the real George Harrison in “Living in the Material World” comes from a long excerpt from “A Hard Day’s Night,” where George stumbles into an advertising focus group, and returns the cynical condescension he is given with a far more withering detachment. The fact that this scene is wholly fictional does not diminish its insight – and the same thing can be said for “Nowhere Boy.”

Based on a memoir by Lennon’s half-sister, Julia Baird, the film was endorsed and informed at extreme arm’s length by Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney, and is far better for their lack of involvement. Lennon is inhabited, not played, by Aaron Johnson, and at no time does Johnson’s performance descend into mere impression. Johnson just “is” – and within a few moments of his first on-screen appearance, you are transported back to 1955, and present at the creation. Primal rock ‘n’ roll fills the air, and a rough beast slouches on its way to be born, and Johnson’s Lennon puts a face on that creature. The film’s director, Sam Taylor-Wood, married the much younger Aaron Johnson after she completed the movie, and her primal attraction does seem justified.

All the bases are covered. The eternal fights with Aunt Mimi, played with prim precision by Kristin Scott Thomas. The strange, almost sexual attraction between Lennon and his uninhibited mother, Julia. And of course, the legendary 1957 first meeting with Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s Paul McCartney. Entire books have been written about this July day at a school fair, where the world turned on its axis. As a card-carrying Beatlemaniac, with a mail-order degree in advanced Moptopology, I noticed that “Nowhere Boy” got all of the details just exactly right, down to the checkered shirt that Lennon wore on that meeting day, and even a brief glimpse of the photographer who took the now iconic picture that is the only record of that day when the world turned inside out. George Harrison’s later back-of-a-bus passage into legend is also documented adroitly, though here, as was sadly the case in the life of the Beatles, Harrison plays a supporting role.

But in ways that no authorized documentary can hope to attain, “Nowhere Boy” gets the human dimensions of the Beatles myth just right. The shimmering brilliance, tragic vulnerability and occasional brutality of Lennon comes through, and the telepathic connection that bound the Beatles together somehow extends to the viewer. Even if huge dramatic licenses are taken, they are not abused. The John Lennon in “Nowhere Boy” is often referred to as a “dick” by his peers – but in this film, the wavering line between “dick” and “genius” is navigated with a drunken precision.

Stanley Kubrick once said that “sometimes the truth of a thing is not so much in the ‘think’ of it, as in the ‘feel’ of it.” “Nowhere Boy” has that feel, and that touch, and brings us as close as we are likely to get to “feeling” the reality behind the myth.

Pussy Riot’s now famous performance of Punk Prayer in Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow’s Kremlin, which earned them the personal ire of both the Orthodox Church’s patriarchate and Vladimir Putin himself, was a call for the Virgin Mary to become a feminist and exorcise Putin. Other feminist and anti-authoritarian performances included disrupting a fashion show by taking over a catwalk, performing unpermitted in a posh boutique, and playing a song called “Freedom to Protest — Death to Prisons” on the roof of a building in a Moscow prison complex to jailed anti-Putin protesters.

Last week a “Party Riot Bus” circled Moscow blasting punk rock and stopping for news conferences and performances calling for the release of the imprisoned band members. Riot grrrl matriarch Kathleen Hannah released a video pledging her support to the band, telling her fans she would “see you out in the streets.” A concert in Tallinn, Estonia, to support the band drew several notable politicians, including President Toomas Hendrik Ilves.

On the flip side, counterprotesters have attacked supporters in Moscow, focusing on removing the masks of female supporters. An anti-Pussy Riot rally was held the same day is Krasnodar, drawing an estimated 10,000 calling for a “moral revival” in the “fatherland.”

The band has derived their success — and scorn — by turning contemporary punk culture on its head. Where punk was once relegated to musky basements, squats and other shabby makeshift venues, Pussy Riot makes all public spaces — the streets, the metro, the church — their stage. While punk bands play for punks, Pussy Riot plays for commuters, police  and clergy. While punk bands seek fame with glamorous pseudonyms and outlandish rock star antics, Pussy Riot is masked. While punk bands engage in nihilistic lyricism, Pussy Riot’s songs are direct attacks on the confines of their authoritarian state and patriarchy. Since punk fell from the pop charts in the early ’80s, it has been sent on a quest to define and sustain its own identity, creating punk houses, venues, record stores and community centers, resulting in the introverted and self-obsessed situation of the sub-genre today. Pussy Riot does precisely the opposite.

It is fitting, then, that one conservative Russian website translated Pussy Riot to “Uprising of the Uterus.” What was once scandalized, forbidden, subaltern, rises from its rightful caste hidden and below and speaks in the very locations of its oppressing power. Who are these women, these punks, to perform, to pray, to protest in sacred locales? To desecrate is one of punk’s existential tasks. The smashing of sacred relics conjures society’s most archaic reactions: in this case, imprisonment, public shaming, flogging, concerns of Satanism, witchcraft, hysteria.

Punk has needed a Pussy Riot for so long. In many ways, it is the literal projection of the riot grrrl movement, which employed satire and third-wave theatrics to intervene in the traditionally macho and misogynist punk scene. It succeeded in creating a new type of punk — the grrl — but, until now, it had never successfully caused a riot.

Through the 2000s, bands have unsuccessfully attempted to wreck cultural terror. There was San Diego’s the Locust, who wore masks and bodysuits similar to Pussy Riot, played noisy and aggressive punk, but were not actually anonymous, nor were their lyrics directly political. The band shocked a lot of punks and sold a lot of records, but had very little cultural impact outside their genre. Black metal-heads became enamored with the “Cultural Terrorist Manifesto,” which also has had seemingly no effect. In 30 years, punk had perfected only gestures.

Perhaps part of the reason punk has begun to lash out so effectively in the former Soviet Union is the nature of the extreme oppression in Russian society. I spoke to Moscow anti-fascist Kostya about the dual dangers to the Russian anarchopunk — the right wing and the State:

I came up with the scene when it was possible to organize a strictly antifascist show, and you could be sure that only the right people will visit it. But still there was a danger of being attacked by Nazis before or after the show. Today it continues, but the situation is even worse. First of all, nobody fights with the fists, you’re more likely to be stabbed or shot with a traumatic gun. Secondly, and what is worse, there is strong oppression from the state and police. The situation in Russia isn’t stable, that’s why the government tries to control all the young people who can be dangerous today or in the future. They always try to put the same number of Nazis and anarchists in prison.

Kostya tells me Russia has its own anti-activist police force, called the “Department of Fighting Extremism.” Along with the threat of right-wingers burning down political squats or punk venues, the result has been a neutralized public face for the punk scene. All radical politics have been forced underground. It is no surprise, then, to see it return masked.

In 1977 the Ramones toured America like an Armed Struggle cadre of cultural terrorists, all dressed alike, playing the simplest and loudest music yet formulated. They not only invented punk that year, but they planted it everywhere they went. Punk’s success was its virility; reproducing with such ease that soon there were Ramones at every corner of the globe.

Reacting to increasingly technical progressive rock, the Ramones liberated the guitar to the world. Pussy Riot has taken this communization a step farther. To be a “member” of Pussy Riot, you don’t need to be able to play guitar or even to know the original band. As one member, Garadzha, told the newspaper Moskvkie Novosti: “In principle anyone can join.” You don’t even need to sing very well, she continues. “It’s punk, you just scream a lot.”

What would be the shape of punk outside the confines of the world of rock music? If Pussy Riot is any indication, it appears at scenes of intense banality or oppression. They have appeared on the catwalk, on top of a prison and of course at the altar. They sound something in between a streetpunk band (Blatz’s Fuk Shit Up is the first thing to come to mind) and an battle-worn activist giving an impassioned speech through a megaphone. The precarity of their performances gives a new spin to the typical speedy bursts of punk — the songs need to be so short because they could be apprehended any second.

Everything about the band is similarly practical. The rawness of their sound reflects the semi-improvised site-specific nature of the songs. Their masks obscure their identities from police detection. Their bombastic performance (use of fire, flares and the iconic punch-dancing) makes up for the lack of amplification. While other novel punk bands form their own stylized front against the limits of society, society’s limits seems to have fully formed Pussy Riot.

Perhaps antagonistic counterculture, once self-ghettoized within the margins of society, is beginning to coalesce into a new political form, one that transcends both its anti-social roots and the populism that activism too often demands. The Occupy movement is the most obvious example, but disruptive feminist and queer situations similar to those created by Pussy Riot have occurred in the United States over the last several years. The radical queer group Bash Back! disrupted service at a Lansing, Mich., megachurch, making out on the pulpit and dropping pro-queer flyers. Repetitive comments by law enforcement official that rape is a result of women’s attire lead to massive anti-rape and sex-positive “Slut Walk” protests last year. With a new right-wing offensive against women escalating to the withholding of contraception and forced transvaginal ultrasounds, the coalition between the church and authoritarianism is as relevant in the United States as in Russia. Could time be ripe, then, for some of the aforementioned agitators to arrange a Pussy Riot U.S. tour?

The New Inquiry is an online journal of social and cultural criticism. Every month,TNI releases a subscription-based magazine for $2, available for download in both PDF and e-reader formats. The New Inquiry Magazine, No.3: “Arguing the Web” (April, 2012) is available now! Support TNI and subscribe for $2 here.