The 100 best protest songs of all time

When Chuck D from Public Enemy described the hip-hop as “the Black CNN”, he expressed a universal truth that goes beyond the genre: music and protest have always been inseparable. For some marginal groups, creating music can be a form of protest against an unfair world. Our list of the 100 best protest songs includes almost a century and ranges from jazz from the time before World War II to folk from the sixties to house music from the eighties, R&B from the 2000s and Cuban hip-hop from the 2020s .

Some of these songs denounce oppression and demand justice, others are prayers for positive changes; Some of them pack their shoulders and scream them in the face, others are personal, private attempts to embody the contradictory nature of the political struggle and change from the inside. Many songs in our selection are specific products of left-wing political traditions (such as Pete Seeger’s version of “We Shall Overcome”), but just as many are hits that make urgent messages into the pop market (like Nena’s New Wave hit “99 Balloons “Against the nuclear war).

This is probably the only list of Rolling Stone in which Phil Ochs, the Dead Kennedys and Beyoncé are ever performed side by side, but each of these artists is an important part of the long history of musicians who use their voices to demand a better world .

Nuclear fear never sounded so funny. The mysterious song “Bonzo goes to Washington”-actually a project by Talking head guitarist Jerry Harrison in cooperation with the P-Funk bassist Booty Collins-appeared in the run-up to the 1984 elections and turned a Reagan sound bite into Kleinholz by it the careless joke of the Gipper (“Dear fellow citizens, I am pleased to be able to tell you today that I have signed a law that Russia will forever prohibit. Parody has transformed. The song really became a dance floor destroyer that was re-secluded by the owner of Sleeping Bag Records and dance music visionary Arthur Russell.

When most people think of resistance, remember to take to the streets. Xenia Rubinos-a Cuban-Puertorican artist who grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, brings him to the houses and kitchens of the New York Elite: “Brown Walks Your Baby/Brown Walks Your Dog/Brown Raized America in Place of Its Mom” , she sings against the tight, funky groove and the sharp guitars of ‘Mexican Chef’, a funny memory that the United States would stand to stand without the tedious work of black and brown. The song is a highlight of Rubino’s great album Black Terry Cat, which set up politically charged texts for dance party tracks that mixed R&B, rock and latin sounds.

Is there a better way to protest against Reaganism, Thatcherism, Racism, Nuclear Fears and the Creeping Stark of Fascism than with a loud synth pop hit that rushes past with 150 BPM? Heaven 17, two emigrants of the electropunk pioneers Human League, were a socialist pop mix that was obsessed by American radio bands such as Cameo, the “cut-up” technique of Burroughs, drum computers, disco slang and criticism of capitalism. In combination, this resulted in her first single “Groove Thang”, which singer Martyn Ware described as “this really bizarre mixture of politics and dance and comedy and black American soul influence”. “Groove Thang” was a mixture of loud protest and complete nonsense (“Counterforce will do no good/hot us i feel your power”) and was banned by the BBC, but nevertheless brought the dance floors to burn.

In 1986 the college rock band Midnight Oil from Sydney and the Aborigine Country Rock Group Wohl Pi Band toured through the Australian continent and brought their music to some of the most remote and isolated settlements. The band was moved by the battle of the Aborigines for land rights and wrote a song that seemed to be concentrated on geography in Australia (“Four bikes are startled by the Kakadus/from Kintore in the east to Yuendumu”), but still became an international hit and in Canada and South Africa landed in first place. Although it was about a local concern, the lines about the fight for reparation – “It belongs to them, let us return it” – as universal. “We were determined that our band should be perceived as an Australian band, in an international context,” drummer Rob Hirst told Songwriting Magazine. “Land rights are something that appears in so many countries around the world … but we were determined that Midnight Oil should not be seen as one of these international bands that could write songs that could come from anywhere.”

Inspired by Toni Morrison’s writings about memory and personal stories, the jazz rap newcomer McKinley Dixon processes his childhood in a mind game about the escape from toy weapons that are held by friends, and the escape from real weapons that are held by the police . In the ecstatic song, he combines his mixture of trauma and hope with electric jazz radio, allusions to Zora Neal Hurston and a radiant chorus. “Wearing heavy hearts really makes it worse,” he raps. “Until we found the only way to break this curse/if we flee to a place where they know our value.”

Woody Guthrie had crashed in the media in 1948, after an airplane, the 28 immigrant agricultural workers sloped into Mexico, had crashed in California. The newspapers printed the names of the four Americans who died, but left the names of the immigrants in the dark. The folk icon wrote an outraged poem: “Who are these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?/On the radio it says: ‘You are only deported'” A Californian teacher gave him a melody, Pete Seeger gave him legs, but that Psychedelic folk icons The Byrds gave him the final performance, a trough country rock arrangement accompanied by a sad slide guitar.

“¡Viva México, Cabrones!” The rap rock veterans of Molotov became legends in their home country for their cheeky, young, sarcastic and politically incorrect way-their debut album ¿Dónde Jugarán Las Niñas? was banned not because of his message, but because of his daring title and his cover artwork. But their moshpit manners went hand in hand with a loud and proud revolutionary streak, as their crowning success shows “Gimme Tha Power”. The song addresses economic inequality in Mexico and addresses the goal directly to the government, and all in the ironic style of this band: “¿Por qué Estar siguiendo a una bola de pendejos?” (“Why follow a bunch of assholes?”)

Olympia, Washington, queercore rebel team Dresch set up the intolerance, confusion and daily annoyance of lesbian life in the nineties in this jangle punk cry. In less than three minutes, guitarist Kaia Lynn Wilson dismantled the illegality of gay marriage (“You say that you have a ban on affection, I understood you correctly?”), Says of the inner trauma of undesirable police attention (“Sometimes I think, that I even did something wrong ”) and addresses discrimination at the workplace (“ I am not sure whether I didn’t get the job because my head is on the wrong side or because I am a flaming S&M rubberiva ”).

The death penalty, pop music, presidential elections, Hollywood blockbusters, marketing campaigns-for the folk icon Ani Difranco this is all just oil in the fire of the revolution. Difrancos deliberately unstructured Tirade reflects the information overflowing of the company in the Y2K era and mixes funky chatter, dramatic frustration and casual rapeseed; The coda sung (“There’s a fire Just Waiting for Fuel”) offers the clarity of a solution. Partly all Ginsberg, partly Lauryn Hill, the song has developed over the years without losing his sense of humor: “Maybe I should put a bucket over my head/and put a marshmallow into every ear/and another stupid Work around the week/until another boring hit appears. “

In the flood of anti-George-Bush songs that appeared during the eight-year term of W. Conor Colonel von Bright Eyes, who was already an experienced indie rock veteran at the age of 25, provided poetic meditation on the discrepancy between the religious beliefs of the President and his politics, with concise lines such as “suggests God an oil price increase?” Song – and his solo appearance in a rhinestone suit in the Tonight Show with Jay Leno – was written in a emotional outbreak with only three chords and catapulted the songwriter at a time when he was celebrated as a heir by Bob Dylan.