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?
I tried mixing it up, it’s probably more early 2000-2010s for the majority. I kinda lost interest in a lot of rap after that whole trap phase started.
Killer Mikes a bit too centrist for my liking but Reagan from 2012 is an amazing song and one I’d recommend the most from that list.
Try Immortal Technique.
And many more
Reagan by Killer Mike. Samples shit Reagan said
Shots fired by Matt is also great. Oh, can’t forget “what you will”.
On the Hip Hop note I would say Run The Jewels have some amazing lyrical content in their songs about the state of things