I feel like there are lots of parallels between the eighties and now (recession/inflation, yuppies/inequality, skin-heads/fascists, hot-cold wars etc.) but there used to be protest music! Where is that stuff now? Music that’s intelligent and outraged - like we should be!
I’m out of touch now, so if it exists, educate me! Or have the protest songs been removed from tiktok by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act (UK specific, but suppression of protest seems to be everywhere)? (I’ve linked to the Levellers - maybe it really was better back in the day?)
edit: Maybe not the right audience, but if the song is old enough to vote then I might already know it! What’s happening now? Any songs from the last 10 years!
edit: Thanks for everyone’s insights. I’ve spent the day discovering music that I’d never have found otherwise. Really enjoying a load of these, but thanks to everyone! It seems like protest music is confined to certain genres/places, and lots of older songs - maybe they just last longer… which is maybe a little interesting.
Well, not sure about “good” but punk is and always has been about politics.
Personally, I love the folk punk end of things like AJJ’s ‘Normalization Blues’: https://youtu.be/0EDVM73bU-w?si=_mtGGyFhrmeMRlpZ
In a similar vein, Matt Pless’s “where the frayed wind blows” is 5 minutes of angry goodness.
There’s also a lot of protest hip hop but I don’t know the newer stuff particularly well.
This is great! :D
edit: Anyone know about hip-hop? Would be great to know where to start on that
A lot of rap is political/social, for more mainstream stuff you’ve got songs like ‘This Is America’ by Childish Gambino, ‘Reagan’ by Killer Mike, or even ‘Fuck the Police’ by N.W.A.
You’ve got even more leftist groups/rappers like ‘The Coup’, RATM/Public Enemy supergroup ‘Prophets of Rage’, hardcore shit like ‘Immortal Techniques’ or ‘Non Phixon’, ‘Dead Prez’, ‘Nas’, ‘The Fugees’, ‘Tupac’, ‘De La Soul’ just to name a few more.
There’s also more tankie shit but I’m not gonna promote that authoritarian garbage.
It’s almost harder to find non-political rap than it is political rap when you start breaking down the messages of many songs.
Thanks! Childish Gambino - is a great example!
I didn’t know some of these, so I’ll check them out, but they aren’t exactly new - the rest are from the ninties, right?
Bro Killer Mike just won a Grammy
Well, NPR did an entire article of 20 protest songs that came out in 2020. Looks like they might have made a Spotify playlist of them at one point too.
Here are 30 protest albums that came out in the first half of 2022
Here are 50 protest songs from 2023.
These are just results from pretty simple Google searches. ‘protest songs year’.
I’m a big fan of Rise Against. Try these tracks out:
- Architects
- Welcome to the Breakdown
- A Gentleman’s Coup
- Megaphone
- Holding Patterns
and Bad Religion:
- American Jesus
- Meeting of the Minds
- The Resist Stance