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The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time

From Pete Seeger and Billie Holiday to Beyoncé and Rage Against the Machine, musicians across genres have spoken truth to power through their songs

By ROLLING STONE
Illustration of protest singers

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When Chuck D of Public Enemy famously called hip-hop “the Black CNN,” he was touching on a universal truth that goes beyond genre: Music and protest have always been inextricably linked. For some marginalized groups, the simple act of creating music at all can be a form of speaking out against an unjust world. Our list of the 100 Best Protest Songs spans nearly a century and includes everything from pre-World War II jazz and Sixties folk to Eighties house music, 2000s R&B, and 2020s Cuban hip-hop.

Some of these songs decry oppression and demand justice, others are prayers for positive change; some grab you by the shoulders and shout in your face, others are personal, private attempts to subtly embody the contradictory nature of political struggle and change from the inside. Many of our selections are specific products of leftist political traditions (like Pete Seeger’s version of “We Shall Overcome”), but just as many are hits that slipped urgent messages into the pop marketplace (like Nena’s anti-nuclear war New Wave bop “99 Luftballons”).

This is probably the only Rolling Stone list to ever feature Phil Ochs, the Dead Kennedys, and Beyoncé side by side, but each of those artists is a vital participant in the long story of musicians using their voices to demand a better world.

8

Pete Seeger, ‘We Shall Overcome’

Pete Seeger may not be the original author of “We Shall Overcome,” since the folk song can be tracked back to a 1900 work titled “I’ll Overcome Some Day,” by the Rev. Charles Albert Tindley. But the Weavers singer adapted it as his own in 1947 when he changed the words to “We Shall Overcome” and made it one of the cornerstone songs of the folk revival, sung during marches all throughout the Sixties. President Lyndon Johnson even told Congress “We Shall Overcome” after the violent attacks on Selma-to-Montgomery marchers Alabama in 1965. The song spread to Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution of the Eighties, and has since become a worldwide call for freedom and solidarity. When Bruce Springsteen released an album of songs associated with Seeger in 2006, he could only have named it one thing: We Shall Overcome.

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7

Nina Simone, ‘Mississippi Goddam’

Until 1963, Nina Simone hadn’t been much of a fan of topical songs, calling them “simple and unimaginative.” Then a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four Black children and NAACP official Medgar Evers was shot to death in Jackson, Mississippi, and a song “erupted out of me quicker than I could write it down,” she said. Driven by Simone’s effervescent piano and vivacious delivery, “Mississippi Goddam” feels almost jaunty — “This is a show tune/But the show hasn’t been written for it, yet,” she sang. But its sprightliness is actually more like testiness, with Simone channeling the way that so many at the time, Black and white, were shocked by events and demanding change.

6

Bob Dylan, ‘Masters of War’

“I don’t sing songs which hope people will die,” said Bob Dylan in the notes to his second album, “but I couldn’t help it with this one.” Riffing off an old English folk song, the 21-year-old Woody Guthrie acolyte raised the curtain on the puppetmasters and made the greatest anti-war polemic of all time. Raging against the military-industrial complex in the middle of America’s Cold War escalation, the song’s simple, plainspoken rage connects the dots between folk music’s organizational power and punk rock’s cathartic fury. “Let me ask you one question, is your money that good?” he sings in a song that would galvanize Vietnam War protests across the decade to come. “Will it buy you forgiveness? Do you think that it could?”

5

James Brown, ‘Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud’

Promoted as “a message from James Brown to the people of America,” the Godfather of Soul’s landmark funk-soul anthem of Black pride and self-determination was radical enough for its time that Brown brought in a group of kids to sing on the chorus in the hope that their cute voices might help soften its in-your-face politics. Radio programmers resisted at first, but Brown’s message couldn’t be denied, and the song went to Number One on the R&B charts, where it stayed for six weeks. The song played a huge role in promoting the use of the word Black as a self-identification, replacing more outdated terms, and its incisive beat would be sampled on countless rap hits over the years. Ironically, Brown himself was largely apolitical; but, in 1972, he backed Nixon.

4

Aretha Franklin, ‘Respect’

Aretha Franklin was seven long years and several failed albums into her professional career when she entered New York City’s Atlantic Recording Studios with producer Jerry Wexler in early 1967 to lay down a cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect.” The song was written from the point of view of a man arrogantly demanding respect from his partner, but Franklin flipped it around and delivered it from the point of view of a beleaguered woman, adding in the unforgettable “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” and “Sock it to me” segments. She was demanding respect not just for herself, but for women everywhere. It was a rallying cry that echoed throughout the Civil Rights Movement and the women‘s-lib movement. Franklin was born to be a superstar and icon. This is the song that made it possible.

3

Billie Holiday, ‘Strange Fruit’

In the Thirties, a Jewish teacher, poet, and songwriter named Abel Meeropol saw a chilling photo of a lynching in Indiana. That image became the basis for “Strange Fruit,” one of the earliest and eeriest protest songs of modern times. First recorded by Billie Holiday, who fully inhabited the song’s spectral mood, “Strange Fruit” startled audiences with its graphic imagery: “Pastoral scene of the gallant South/The bulgin’ eyes and the twisted mouth.” It’s since been covered by Nina Simone, Annie Lennox, Jeff Buckley, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Simone’s version was sampled in Kanye West’s “Blood on the Leaves.” The song remains prescient and timely, no matter who sings it.

2

Public Enemy, ‘Fight the Power’

Taking a cue from the Isley Brothers’ funky 1975 single “Fight the Power” and repurposing its refrain — “We gotta fight the powers that be” — Public Enemy crafted an angry yet focused new manifesto of resistance to serve as the intro music for Spike Lee’s 1989 comment on prejudice, Do the Right Thing. For Chuck D, “the powers” were racists, rednecks, superficial liberals, Elvis, John Wayne, and even Bobby McFerrin’s feel-good hit (or was it complacent?) “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” — anyone and anything that has stood in the way of true equality for Black people for the past five centuries. “Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps,” Chuck explains, and he minces no words in saying what he wants: “Power to the people, no delay.”

1

Sam Cooke, ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’

Half a year before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, soul singer Sam Cooke broke off from singing feel-good pop tunes to record one of the most powerful indictments of racism ever recorded — an unparalleled moment in the fusion of pop music and progressive politics. Taking inspiration from Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and drawing from the anger he felt when he was denied a room at a Louisiana hotel because he was Black, he penned heartfelt lyrics, pleading for an end to discrimination. Over a gorgeous orchestral arrangement, he sings plaintively about being turned away from movie theaters and threatened just for walking around downtown. As sad as he sounds, though, he maintains hope. Cooke died only a few months before the single became an unlikely Top 40 hit, but the song has endured. Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Beyoncé have all covered it, and Bettye LaVette and Jon Bon Jovi performed it at President Obama’s inauguration concert in January 2009. 

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