Music And Its Relationship With Politics & Government Through The Decades: The History Of Anti-Establishment Songs, Its Reflection On Society & Relevance With BLM & Public Policy In 2021–22
When legendary British rock band Pink Floyd released their politically charged new album, ‘Animals‘ which landed like an atomic bomb on January 23rd 1977, the world had only just burgeoned from the unforgettable era of the ’60s; the emergence of rock and roll which came to the fore and its cultural impact on society which dovetailed the music from the decade. In turn, the beginning of the ’70s saw the slow emergence of the punk rock movement, the off shoot & evolution of the ’60s sound, that would go on to captivate the new generation.
Punk rock or simply punk, had made it’s leap out of the shadows of garage rock in the ’60s with its faster paced, driving sound with heavier drumming and stripped-down louder guitar parts and angry, vocal anti-establishment lyrics.
So when Pink Floyd released their studio album ‘Animals‘ in 1977, their iconic album cover of a floating blimp designed to represent a giant pig, hovering over London’s massive Battersea Power Station became the oppressive symbol of a dystopian society, which was so allegorically depicted by the mercurial band.
The album Animals was based loosely on George Orwell’s book Animal Farm. But strikingly, while Animal Farm was a rebuke of communism, Animals was an angry indictment of capitalism and emerging consumerism.
The album itself, which used metaphorical representations of animals, namely: pigs, dogs, and sheep, symbolising the aristocracy, military, and working classes, respectively, was driven with the purpose of sending out a vocal disregard of the British government, political propaganda and society at the time.
On the album, on the track ‘Pigs(Three Different Ones)‘ Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters sardonically attacked Mary Whitehouse, a censorial British moralist, who Waters referred to as a ‘charade‘ in the song. While the lyrics ‘Big man, pig man, ha, ha charade you are‘ that can be heard as the song opens, after the long instrumental intro, served as an outburst and scathing attack to those in high ranking posts in the British government, with a direct reference to pigs.
The name dropping of ‘Whitehouse‘ in the song, where Waters sings ‘Hey you, Whitehouse Ha, ha, charade you are‘ went on to be misconstrued by Pink Floyd’s American fan base, as an attack on the White House in Washington, which Waters would eventually go on to do decades later.
Waters performed the song in the United States in later years of the ‘2000s accompanied by visual depictions of the White House and prominent American politicians as pigs on a giant screen during his concerts.
Waters most recently attacked former US president Donald Trump by picturing him in his concert visuals calling him a ‘pig’ and a ‘charade’.
Music, has had a long lasting, strained relationship with politics which has seen the art form defy, question, disregard and oppose government, policy and propaganda through the decades.
In the first half of the 20th century, as the blues and American folk music(genres which would, eventually, serve as the roots and foundation of rock and roll) began emerging in pockets around the United States, musicians of the time began sowing the seeds, rather unknowingly, of the music which was to come in the future.
You can read a previous article of mine, looking back at the history of the blues here: Blue To The Bone: The History Of The Blues & The Relevance Of The Blues Today With Racism & Its Impact On Modern Music
At around that time in history, there was Woody Guthrie who championed American folk music in its infancy, with his unique sound played only on an acoustic guitar (long before the invention of the electric guitar).
A journeyman from Oklahoma armed with his six-string and anti-war and songs disregarding government policy, Guthrie managed to capture the essence of the climate of America at the time during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era.
While, during WWII, Guthrie was famous for performing with the slogan, “This Machine Kills Fascists,” scrawled across his acoustic guitar.
As All Music recounts, “Guthrie defined an era in his Dust Bowl ballads, his outlaw tales, his work and labor songs, anti-war songs, children’s songs, political songs, and a host of love songs and songs that touched on philosophy, geography and the hard work of living day to day in an emerging industrial world.”
Guthrie is widely regarded as the most important American folk music artist of the first half of the 20th century and he would serve as an inspiration for a diverse range of musicians who would emerge in the swinging ’60s, which was to come.
What started as the counterculture movement of the ’60s which was in itself, at it’s core, a vociferous anti-establishment movement that developed throughout much of the Western world between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, made the rejection of order and governance a way of life for teenagers and young adults during that era in history.
Music provided the fuel to the fire for the movement in the ’60s and the music from those years became a medium of expression and a voice for musicians springing up during that time, in the way artists, authors, poets and eminent thinkers during the era had their art and books respectively to express their views on the government and their policies. Music, art and books from the time were largely, all akin to subvert and question the state and policy.
Legendary American folk musician Bob Dylan who came to prominence in the ’60s became synonymous for his anti-establishment lyrics, which he so brilliantly encapsulates in the song ‘Masters Of War‘, where he sings ‘”Come you masters of war / You that build the big guns / You that build the death planes / You that build all the bombs / You that hide behind walls / You that hide behind desks / I just want you to know / I can see through your masks.…”.
Similarly on the song, ‘The Times They Are a-Changing‘ Dylan called out political figures, singing : ‘Come senators, congressmen, Please heed the call/ There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’ / It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls / For the times they are a-changin’,”
Meanwhile, in June 1970, Neil Young, the Canadian-born American musician, most well known for his Southern, country sound, exquisite guitar playing style and trademark slick guitar licks, released a song called ‘Ohio‘ as part of the act Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
The lyrics evoked the turbulent mood of horror, shock, and outrage in the wake of to the Kent State shootings where Ohio National Guardsmen shot and killed four students.
The incident draws comparisons to 2020 and the shooting of George Floyd which sparked and ushered in the ‘Black Lives Matter‘ movement in the US and around the world.
In the song ‘Ohio‘, Young repeatedly sang “Four dead in Ohio,” in the chorus, which repeats throughout the entire track, while the lines, “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming” that opened the song, was at the time, a bold and unheard of attack on a government figure as prominent as the President of the United States. It was recounted by Young’s fellow ‘Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young‘ bandmate David Crosby in an interview as “the bravest thing I ever heard.”
The American counterculture movement, that was gaining popularity across the nation & the world at the time, adopted the group CSNY as their own after the song released, giving the quartet an important status as spokesmen of the youth of America, which they would enjoy for the rest of the decade.
As music began to evolve and metal began in it’s infancy, punk rock became the no-nonsense, no bullsh*t, stripped down, in your face attack on society and the government and a stark contrast from the previous ‘flower power‘ and ‘psychedelic’ sound of the ’60s.
Bands such as The Ramones in the United States and The Sex Pistols in the UK came to the forefront of the rock and roll scene and their loud attack on politics and society, along with their driving, faster and harder sound appealed to young music listeners and concert goers across the spectrum during the years that they performed live.
According to The Ramones drummer Tommy Ramone, “In its initial form, a lot of [1960s] stuff was innovative and exciting. Unfortunately, what happens is that people who could not hold a candle to the likes of Hendrix started noodling away. Soon you had endless solos that went nowhere. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bullshit rock ’n’ roll.“
In critic Robert Christgau’s description, punk rock “was also a subculture that scornfully rejected the political idealism and Californian flower-power silliness of hippie myth.“
On 26 November 1976, a few months before Pink Floyd’s Animals released, The Sex Pistols released their debut single ‘Anarchy in the UK‘ which would go on to be featured on their only studio album ‘Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols‘.
The song, a brutal attack on the government and society, while explosively out-crying and proclaiming anarchy, would go on to rank at 56 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and is included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 songs that shaped rock and roll.
Fast forward to the ’90s and Los Angeles rap-metal or alt-metal band ‘Rage Against The Machine‘ hit the big time with their loud, resounding, punk and metal infused self-titled debut album ‘Rage Against The Machine(1992)’ followed by ‘Evil Empire (1996)’ and ‘The Battle of Los Angeles (1999)’. The group’s choice of a band name, was, in itself, an outburst against the ‘machine‘.
Powered by frontman Zack de La Rocha’s powerful anti-political and anti-propaganda infused lyrics, and guitarist Tom Morello’s unconventional yet gripping guitar playing, RATM continued the vocal outcry against government propaganda, capitalism, society and policy with their leftist anti-authoritarian and revolutionary political views.
Pitchfork called RATM’s debut album one of the most ‘essential‘ albums released in the past three decades saying, “Rage Against the Machine’s debut is a radical fistful of funk, rap, and rock. Through its power, now a quarter-century after its release, Rage Against the Machine remains an essential call to activism and a necessary lesson on how to withstand the opposition.”
“For millions, Rage Against the Machine helped shape a spirit of necessary and electric defiance, of yelling out loud and over and over, “F**k you, I won’t do what you tell me.” May it remain relentless.“
Acts such as UK alternative rock band Radiohead also echoed their views on the British government and society in the ’90s with their 1997 release ‘Ok Computer‘ which had the song ‘No Surprises‘ that reflects on alienation, in the latter ’90s that has the lines, ‘A job that slowly kills you / Bring down the government / They don’t, they don’t speak for us‘ in the song.
After the turn of the millennium, American punk band Greenday, went on to release their political hand grenade, ‘American Idiot‘ in 2004, a critically acclaimed effort which proved to be one of the band’s most successful albums to date, which assimilated an all-out assault on George W. Bush’s American regime at the time, with the entire album consisting of songs that echoed disillusionment at the government, society and American way of life in the early 2000's.
In the process of making American Idiot after their juvenile and premature Dookie days, Greenday were in a transitionary phase when it came to their sound, but their account of America in 2004 reflected the mood in the country at the time, with the ongoing war in Iraq and fresh disillusionment after 9/11.
While describing American Idiot after it just released, Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield wrote “American Idiot could have been a mess; in fact, it is a mess. The plot has characters with names such as St. Jimmy and Whatsername, young rebels who end up on the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” But the individual tunes are tough and punchy enough to work on their own. You can guess who the “American Idiot” is in the bang-up title tune, as Armstrong rages against the “subliminal mind-f*ck America” of the George W. Bush era: “Welcome to a new kind of tension/All across the alien nation.”
A decade later, Radiohead have also since continued their outspokenness about politics, albeit in a more subtle way in their 2016 album ‘A Moon Shaped Pool‘ which had the song ‘The Numbers‘ which was a call to arms, for the people, which has lyrics that reflect upon society & the system and perhaps was influenced by the uncertainty of the UK’s ‘Brexit‘ motion (which was in it’s infancy at the time) and the environmental issue of ‘Climate Change‘, with the lyrics: “And we’re not at the mercy / Of your shimmers or spells/ Your shimmers or spells“, “We call upon the people/ People have this power / The numbers don’t decide / Your system is a lie” and “We’ll take back what is ours“.
Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke said that if he tried to write a protest song about the issue of Policy & Climate Change, “it would be shit”, however, the song ‘The Numbers‘ comes close to a protest/environmental outcry and it’s a pretty good one at that. It’s an essential reflection on how the power is always with the people.
While not exactly politically motivated, but rather as a contemplative take on modern society, Maynard James Keenan led American alternative-rock band A Perfect Circle had their own reflective and contemplative song ‘Disillusioned‘ which they released in January 2018. The song was largely based on the emergence of the internet and the era of mobile phones and laptops, which have ‘overrun‘ the world, referring to it as the ‘silicon obsession‘ and it’s permanent effect on modern society making us more ‘disillusioned‘ as the song’s title suggests.
The song and the eerie video accompanying it, depicting wires everywhere and devices with screens in a dark place, called for society to reclaim the love of natural surroundings and each other, with their powerful lyrics ‘Time to put the silicon obsession down / Take a look around, find a way in the silence / Lie supine away with your back to the ground / Dis- and re-connect to the resonance now / You were never an island / Unique voice among the many in this choir / Tuning into each other, lift all higher‘
As the world is poised to go into another lockdown with the coronavirus pandemic continuing because of the omnicron variant in 2021 as it turns to 2022, while also dealing with the repercussions of ‘Brexit‘ in the UK, and with the ‘Black Lives Matter‘ movement that unfolded in the United States and around the world in 2020 gaining momentum, speaking out about such issues, will never cease to be more important.
Music, which also serves as a medium to raise a voice to express disappointment, anger and concern, while questioning policies and the governments responsible for them, is at its most relevant time, just like it was back in the decades of the ’40s, ’60s, ’70s and ’90s.
Music and its power to unite people and act as a vehicle to alert people about injustice in the way of policies propagated by governments around the world, won’t cease to be more relevant.
In providing a creative voice and take on what we see unfolding around the word everyday, music bridges the gap to reach through and penetrate every kind of social distinction to speak to millions around the world about pertinent issues that need addressing.
In using lyrics that are outspoken about governance and policy, artists can usher change, while also leaving a lasting impression on the youth of the world, who take a liking to their music.
It’s a time where creating a conversation out about issues that arise from unjust and callous governance by taking to the streets to protest like in 2019 and 2020 just before COVID, draws parallels to the ’60s.
In this day and age, the internet and social media is the new way of starting that conversation and the most convenient and popular means of doing so, at the click of a button.
Nevertheless, in its true way of standing the test of time, politically motivated songs and albums spanning the decades, ensure that music remains a vehicle of change that will never fade through time.
“So called facts are fraud
They want us to allege and pledge
And bow down to their God
Lost the culture, the culture lost
Spun our minds and through time
Ignorance has taken over
Yo, we gotta take the power back!
Bam! Here’s the plan
Motherf*ck Uncle Sam
Step back, I know who I am
Raise up your ear, I’ll drop the style and clear
It’s the beats and the lyrics they fear
The rage is relentless
We need a movement with a quickness
You are the witness of change
And to counteract
Yeah, we gotta take the power back.
Come on, come on!
We gotta take the power back”
— Rage Against The Machine ‘Take The Power Back”
