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?)
I listen to a lot of punk music so obviously it’s strongly political. Here’s just a few off the top of my head:
I tried to include a bit of variety and not all be anti-war songs from/about the Bush era. A couple are about the music industry specifically, and one is a musical rant about kink culture (and it’s not the one you think based on the title!) I’m also a big Rise Against fan so I tried to pull out some non-singles from accross many years since basically any song by them has a good political message. I highly recommend looking up the lyrics to all of these after the first listen or better during the second listen
Nofx is doing their retirement tour right now and it makes me super sad I won’t be able to go