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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

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MATTHEW COOLEY. IMAGES IN ILLUSTRATION BY GIE KNAEPS/GETTY IMAGES; TIM MOSENFELDER/GETTY IMAGES; MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES, 3; AL PEREIRA/GETTY IMAGES/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES, 2; PARAS GRIFFIN/GETTY IMAGES; KEVIN MAZUR/WIREIMAGE; ERIKA; GOLDRING/GETTY IMAGES; GILLES PETARD/REDFERNS; LINDSAY BRICE/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES; SCOTT DUDELSON/FILMMAGIC/GETTY IMAGES; RAYMOND BOYD/GETTY IMAGES; EARL GIBSON/BET/GETTY IMAGES; HERITAGE ART/HERITAGE IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES, 3.

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.

50

Phil Ochs, ‘Love Me, I’m A Liberal’

Part Pete Seeger, part Tom Lehrer, part Lenny Bruce, this excruciatingly ironic song is a leftist indictment of the conditional compassion exhibited by mainstream liberals. Phil Ochs is scathing as he sings in the voice of the type of LBJ voters who cried about the Kennedy assassinations but thought Malcolm X “got what he asked for.” And his closing verse, though aimed at Cold War-era liberal hypocrisy, rings out just as ruthlessly today: “Sure, once I was young and impulsive/I wore every conceivable pin/Even went to the socialist meetings/Learned all the old union hymns/Ah, but I’ve grown older and wiser/And that’s why I’m turning you in.” 

49

Peter Gabriel, ‘Biko’

Peter Gabriel’s perennial set-closer opened untold eyes to the horrors of South African apartheid, serving as both a stirring retelling of activist Steve Biko’s death in a Port Elizabeth prison cell and an emphatic call to action: “You can blow out a candle/But you can’t blow out a fire.” A deeply experimental turning point for Gabriel, the song features actual recordings of South African folk songs recorded at Biko’s funeral, alongside synth bagpipes, lyrics in Xhosa, and the pulse of a Brazilian surdo drum played by Gabriel’s former Genesis bandmate Phil Collins. The soaring anthem lit the fuse for anti-apartheid activism in the United States and the U.K., educating U2 and inspiring Artists United Against Apartheid founder Steven Van Zandt. 

48

Black Sabbath, ‘War Pigs’

“Masters of War” meets the Masters of Reality in heavy metal’s defining anti-war tirade. Originally called “Walpurgis” — a title deemed too evil by the record company — “War Pigs” was, according to bassist Geezer Butler, made to show that war is “the big Satan.” Recorded amid Vietnam-draft anxiety, “War Pigs” mixes tense pockets of uncomfortable silence with roaring air-raid sirens and blazing riffs, a metaphorical assault used to describe a literal one. Over it, Ozzy Osbourne unleashes a timeless screed that connects the dots between Phil Ochs and System of a Down: “Politicians hide themselves away, they only started the war/Why should they go out to fight? They leave that all to the poor.” 

47

KRS-One, ‘Sound of da Police’

“Whoop! Whoop!” Only the reigning master of “edutainment,” KRS-One, could turn a song about police oppression into an undeniable, party-starting club chant. When he wrote this scathing indictment of police brutality over a throbbing Grand Funk Railroad sample, KRS intended it to be a point of shared experience between young people in the Black community. In later years, though, it slowly took on a life of its own. Despite being a merciless breakdown of systemic racism comparing police officers to plantation managers, it ended up a Hollywood staple — with even the Angry Birds Movie getting hyped to the sound of the police.

46

Fela Kuti, ‘Zombie’

Afrobeat architect Fela Kuti spent a career railing against the Nigerian government through venomous barbs and undeniable bouts of long-form funk. The 12-minute “Zombie” is perhaps the peak of his powers in both provocative resistance and tireless polyrhythmic groovage, attacking the Nigerian military by comparing its troops to the mindless traipsing of the walking dead: “Zombie no go stop, unless you tell am to stop/Zombie no go turn, unless you tell am to turn.” After the wild success of the song, the military responded by sending more than 1,000 troops to wreak violent revenge, destroying Kuti’s Kalakuta Republic compound and fatally injuring his mother.

45

Bronski Beat, ‘Smalltown Boy’

The falsetto hook, keening synths, and irresistible pulse made “Smalltown Boy” a Number One dance hit in 1984, but its evocative lyrics — a Hemingway-esque short story about a gay youth forced to leave his hometown with all his belongings in a small black case — has made it one of the most enduring LGBTQ+ anthems of all time, discovered and rediscovered across generations. Bronski Beat’s Jimmy Somerville consciously made the song universal to anyone who felt unwelcome in their suffocating surroundings, but certainly didn’t shy away from its implications as an emotionally rich exploration of growing up gay. “‘Cause everyone knew,” said Somerville. “We didn’t make any secrets about our sexuality, but we didn’t want it to seem like it was too gay. Although the part [of the music video] in the swimming pool is incredibly gay.”

44

The Equals, ‘Police on My Back’

“Police on My Back” is fairly vague when compared with Equals songs like “Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys” — is the narrator a victim of mistaken identity, racial profiling, or simply an outlaw? But the song naturally assumed a political tack since it came from one of the few mixed-race groups from London’s beat era and was released in an era of discrimination against British immigrants. Naturally, the Clash dug its anti-authoritarian message, anti-racist implications, and Caribbean lilt, and turned it into a 1980 rager. Equals vocalist Eddy Grant would ultimately get a more unambiguous moment of protest with the 1982 New Wave smash “Electric Avenue,” written about the 1981 Brixton riot.

43

The Temptations, ‘Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World is Today)’

The Temptations didn’t get a single release for their anti-Vietnam screed “War”: Fearing controversy around one of their most popular acts, Motown gave it to B-teamer Edwin Starr, who turned it into a Number One hit. Still, the Temps would have their moment on the front lines with this peak moment of their psychedelic-soul era. “Ball of Confusion” crams a litany of social ills — white flight, drugs, guns, taxes, unemployment, suicide, segregation, aggravation, humiliation, obligation to our nation — into a four-minute pop song that was radical in both its politics and its acid-rock Funk Brothers backing track. The mix of timely references and timeless anger would make the song a precursor to rap music, ultimately rewritten into an early-Eighties success for the Treacherous Three. And the band played on.

42

Woody Guthrie, ‘All You Fascists Bound to Lose’

“This machine kills fascists,” Woody Guthrie famously scrawled on his acoustic guitar. The Oklahoma boy grew up amid the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression of the 1930s, radicalizing him into America’s most legendary folk singer. “All You Fascists Bound to Lose” is a fight song he wrote during World War II, soon after his classic memoir, Bound for Glory, was published. In a 1944 radio broadcast, Guthrie begins by announcing, “We’ll show these fascists what a couple of hillbillies can do!” It’s a rowdy sing-along with bluesman Sonny Terry on harmonica. With the end of the war still around the corner, Guthrie sings about the long, tough battle ahead — not just beating Hitler and Mussolini, but oppression closer to home, from racism to union busting.

41

Syl Johnson, ‘Is It Because I’m Black’

Born in Mississippi, soul-blues singer Syl Johnson had started off on a successful recording career in Chicago during the late 1960s. Moved by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he co-wrote “Is It Because I’m Black.” The slow, smoldering song was the perfect match for his gritty, plaintive delivery. Johnson poured his heart into lines like, “Looking back over my false dreams, that I once knew/Wondering why my dreams never came true,” offering a stark departure from the more hopeful tone of Civil Rights-era hits like “People Get Ready” and “Respect” and mirroring a shift toward a more confrontational tone in Black politics at the time.

40

Merry Clayton, ‘Southern Man’

Canadian-born folk-rock star Neil Young took a glance at the American South in 1970 and wrote an anti-racist rant that helped piss off Lynryd Skynyrd so badly that they wrote a Top 10 hit in response. However, the definitive version of Young’s “Southern Man” comes from the astonishing pipes of funk-soul virtuoso Merry Clayton. Best known for her soaring vocals on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” Clayton turns Young’s stern observations into an anguished warning: “Southern change is gonna come at last/Now your crosses are burning fast.”

39

Gente de Zona, Descemer Bueno, Maykel Osorbo and El Funky, Yotuel Romero, ‘Patria y Vida’

The soundtrack to the Cuban uprising of 2021, “Patria y Vida” teamed myriad stars of hip-hop, reggaeton, and jazz for a pointed act of defiance against their government. The title of the cinematic, acoustic ballad (“homeland and life”) controversially twisted Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution signature (“homeland or death”), and promptly became a rallying cry of its own as people filled the streets of Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Miami, and more to protest a lack of food and vaccines. With lyrics detailing starving families and prisoners of conscience, the song pulled no punches, earning the attention of both the government and the Latin Grammys. Demands Gente de Zona’s Alexander Delgado: “¡No más mentiras! ¡Mi pueblo pide libertad, no más doctrinas!” (“No more lies! My people demand freedom, no more doctrines!”)

38

Buffalo Springfield, ‘For What It’s Worth’

When the nascent hippie counterculture exploded in 1966, business owners on Hollywood sidewalks were rankled by longhairs and unsavories flocking to rock clubs like Pandora’s Box and Whisky a Go Go. A 10 p.m. curfew meant to curtail the influx ended up as a collision between tear-gas-chucking police and rock-throwing kids, marking an early battle of the culture war. Stephen Stills, of the Whisky a Go Go house band Buffalo Springfield, wrote the lucid folk-rock rumination “For What It‘s Worth” in response, but it was quickly absorbed by the anti-war movement, another battle being fought in the streets of America. The song became inextricably linked to Vietnam in film and TV, a protest about civil liberties on one Los Angeles street expanding exponentially to represent a worldwide protest for human rights.

37

H.E.R., ‘I Can’t Breathe’

Appearing on the iHeartRadio Living Room Concert Series in 2020, rising R&B artist H.E.R. opened her set with a new song, “I Can’t Breathe,” which she introduced by saying, “Just by the title, you know that it means something very, very kind of painful and very revealing.… These lyrics were kind of easy to write because it came from a conversation with what’s happening right now, what’s been happening, and the change that we need to see.” What followed was a mournful acoustic blues, striking in its somber intimacy. “Praying for change because the pain makes you tender,” she sings, “All of the names you refuse to remember/Was somebody’s brother, friend/Or a son to a mother that’s crying, saying/I can’t breathe, you’re taking my life from me.”

36

MDC, ‘Born To Die’

“No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!” When the self-proclaimed billionaire reality-TV star was elected president on a racist platform in 2016, that chant became a fixture of protests around the country; Green Day once even recited it at the American Music Awards. Dave Dictor, the frontman of Austin punks MDC, came up with those words (with “No war” instead of “No Trump”) in 1982 for the vicious hardcore rager “Born to Die,” which appeared on the band’s debut album, provocatively titled Millions of Dead Cops. At the time, he was blasting an uptick in neo-Nazis at Texas punk gigs, but he’s now proud of how the tune continues to resonate. “America is heading down a very dark road,” he said in 2016. “So, yeah, ‘No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!’”

35

The Wailers, ‘Get Up, Stand Up’

Bob Marley was moved to write this timeless anthem after witnessing poverty on a trip to Haiti — though his teenage years in Kingston’s impoverished Trenchtown neighborhood likely provided no small amount of influence as well. Co-written with Peter Tosh and built off a melody from American funk rockers War, this plainspoken call to arms insists that you shouldn’t wait for peace in the afterlife, but demand it right now. It would be the final song Marley played in his lifetime, but it has lived on as a standard of direct-action music, covered by Santana and the Rolling Stones and sampled in the final minutes of Public Enemy’s agit-pop classic It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

34

Lil Baby, ‘The Bigger Picture’

The superstar Atlanta rapper used his platform to offer what might be the signature protest song of the George Floyd era, full of anger, paranoia, and sorrow, rendered so cathartically because it sounds as if he’s working through his pain before our eyes, trying to find the right words to process the senseless violence brought down on his community: “I find it crazy the police’ll shoot you and know that you dead, but still tell you to freeze.” It’s the voice of America. The song came with a powerful music video that used footage from protests around the country. “I’m definitely proud of it, ’cause it’s like it’s working in a good way for me and for my people,” Lil Baby said at the time. “And it let me know that my mind state is not all the way wrong — the way I feel and the way I’m thinking.”

33

Joni Mitchell, ‘Big Yellow Taxi’

One of Mitchell’s most beloved songs, “Big Yellow Taxi” was written on her first trip to Hawaii, when she looked below her hotel window and was devastated to see a parking lot in the middle of paradise. Released at the dawn of 1970, the track helped usher in a wave of environmental protest songs. It’s been covered by everyone from Bob Dylan to Counting Crows, but no one quite captured the urgency like Mitchell, who told the world’s farmers to “put away that DDT now” with a graceful shoo, bop. “The concept is which will win,” she said later, “nature or the concrete jungle.”

32

Tom Robinson Band, ‘(Sing If You’re) Glad to Be Gay’

More than a decade after Parliament legalized homosexuality in the U.K., police were still raiding gay bars and treating their customers like criminals. Singer Tom Robinson — who was out, loud, and proud, and led his band through the punk and New Wave explosions of the late Seventies — decided he’d had enough in 1978. So he wrote a jaunty pro-gay anthem, readymade for pub singalongs. He used the tune to decry the hypocrisies of the police and news media, which still demonized homosexuality, and to recall how a friend of his was beaten to the point of hospitalization by “queer bashers.” In the years since its release, Robinson has constantly updated the tune’s lyrics to address current events, such as the AIDS crisis and gay political prisoners. But through it all, he has taken these horror stories and turned them on their heads in the chorus, calling for unity: “Sing if you’re glad to be gay, sing if you’re happy that way.” 

31

Stevie Wonder, ‘You Haven’t Done Nothin’’

Along with being one of music’s greatest hit machines, pop-soul icon Stevie Wonder also generated plenty of great politically charged songs, including “Living for the City,” “I Wish,” and “Black Man.” This 1974 hard-funk takedown of politicians’ empty promises might be the greatest of them all.  “Everybody promises you everything, but in the end, nothing comes out of it,” Wonder noted when he released the truth-to-power jam “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” a bowshot at the forces of neglect and apathy that resonated with a country reaching the final days of the Watergate scandal. The song came out just two days before Nixon resigned the presidency and became a Number One single.

30

U2, ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’

Though this stomping anthem was named after the deadly 1972 turning point in the Northern Ireland conflict, U2 eschewed speaking to specific events, even trashing an early draft that alluded too closely to the struggle’s major figures. Instead, the band opted for a universal and non-sectarian song about how the specter of war haunted, and continued to haunt, us all. A nonpartisan plea for peace (“How long must we sing this song?”), “Sunday Bloody Sunday” became one of the most iconic pushbacks of the music-video era. The band became the pop world’s heirs to the Clash when MTV gave major attention to Larry Mullen Jr.’s military snare-drum cadence, Bono’s white-flag-waving march, and a soggy Denver crowd screaming back, “No more!”

29

Bikini Kill, ‘Feels Blind’

The riot-grrrl warriors in Bikini Kill set off a feminist punk explosion in the Nineties, with the motto “Revolution Girl Style Now!” They formed in Olympia, Washington, with Kathleen Hanna raging over the band’s primal aggression. As drummer Tobi Vail said, “The significance of our young hearts on fire must not be downplayed.” “Feels Blind” was a rock & roll exorcism of growing up female with misogyny on all sides. “We might even eat your hate up like love,” Hanna snarls. “How does it feel? It feels blind.” “To me, that perfectly summed up being a young girl,” Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein said. “It was the first time someone put into words my sense of alienation.”

28

Bruce Springsteen, ‘41 Shots (American Skin)’

The February 1999 killing of Amadou Diallou — a Black cab driver slain in the Bronx when plainclothes cops fired 41 bullets at him, later claiming to have mistaken the wallet in his hand for a weapon — was so outrageously wrong that anyone with a shred of a soul could see the injustice. That didn‘t include the police organizations who denounced Bruce Springsteen as a “fucking dirtbag” and demanded a boycott of his shows after he debuted this crushing ballad on the E Street Band’s 2000 reunion tour. “It ain’t no secret/You can get killed just for living in your American skin,” Springsteen sang night after night. He brought the song back in the 2010s, dedicating it this time to the memory of Trayvon Martin, as the rest of white America began catching up to the fact that Black lives matter.

27

Sex Pistols, ‘God Save the Queen’

The Sex Pistols questioned the U.K. monarchy using petulance as high art. The entire campaign of “God Save the Queen” was a masterwork of provocation: tweaking the British national anthem in the title, defacing Queen Elizabeth II’s face on the sleeve, playing it live on the River Thames during her Silver Jubilee, screaming “There is no future in England’s dreaming” over music that sounded like a Chuck Berry 45 being run over by a double-decker bus. The band insists it wasn’t made for shock value (“You don’t write ‘God Save the Queen’ because you hate the English race,” said lead yowler Johnny Rotten, “you write a song like that because you love them, and you’re fed up with them being mistreated”), but it’s nonetheless a classic of the form. 

26

Bob Dylan, ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’

Hattie Carroll was working at a charity gala in Baltimore when William Devereaux Zantzinger, a wealthy white tobacco planter, beat her to death with a cane in 1963. The case made national headlines and moved Dylan to write this angry, mournful song. In four precise verses, he elegizes the 51-year-old Carroll (“Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage/And never sat once at the head of the table”) and condemns her well-connected killer and the legal system that let him off with a six-month sentence. Decades later, in an America that still refuses to recognize the value of Black women’s lives, the song’s indictment rings out with tragic clarity.

25

Green Day, ‘American Idiot’

On the title track of Green Day’s ambitious 2004 album, American Idiot, Billie Joe Armstrong channeled his rage and disgust at the state of American politics during the presidency of George W. Bush into a pounding condemnation of mindless jingoism and pro-war cheerleading. What Armstrong called a “purging” became the Bush era’s greatest rock & roll jeremiad. Two decades later, Green Day proved how relevant the song has remained: Performing “American Idiot” live on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest, Armstrong changed the line “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” to “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda.”

24

Edwin Starr, ‘War’

When it comes to great protest songs, subtlety is entirely unnecessary, as Motown stalwarts Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong demonstrated with their gloriously blunt composition “War”: “What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” The funkier original recording of “War,” by the Temptations, also has its moments, but it took Strong’s forceful, horn-blasting rearrangement — it may be the single hardest rocking Motown smash — and gifted second-stringer Starr’s emphatic delivery (“Huh!”) to really get it across. The song hit Number One at the height of the Vietnam War, with radios nationwide blasting lines like “Induction/Destruction/Who wants to die,” and returned to the Top 10 in 1986 when Bruce Springsteen released his revved-up live cover as a single.  

23

X-Ray Spex, ‘Oh Bondage Up Yours!’

With a voice like an air-raid siren and clothes like a Day-Glo warrior, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex unleashed the boldest shout of feminist aggression to come out of punk rock’s golden era, stabbing a safety pin in the eye of the patriarchy. Opening with a nose-thumbing “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard,” “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” is a raucous cry to be released from the chains of both male oppression and consumer society. Alongside the honking sax of teenage bandmate Lora Logic, Styrene laid the neon tracks for riot grrrl and beyond: Kathleen Hanna heard the band in 1989 and formed Bikini Kill one year later. “It was such a perfect marriage of emotion and technique,” Hanna said. “It seemed better than the Sex Pistols.”

22

Kendrick Lamar, ‘Alright’

The Pharrell-produced single from Lamar’s self-interrogating jazz-rap masterpiece To Pimp a Butterfly became a modern civil-rights standard when its chanted refrain, “We gon’ be alright,” started popping up at Black Lives Matter rallies. Rousing yet bittersweet, it even drew comparison to “We Shall Overcome.” Lamar later said that when he heard the Pharrell track that became “Alright,” he initially struggled to find the right message to fit the music. “Eventually, I found the right words. You know, it was a lot going on, and still, to this day, it’s a lot going on. And I wanted to approach it as more uplifting — but aggressive. Not playing the victim, but still having that We strong, you know?”

21

Rage Against the Machine, ‘Killing in the Name’

If any good came of the rap-rock wave of the Nineties, a huge part of that good came via Rage Against the Machine. On their 1992 clarion call, “Killing in the Name,” frontman Zack de la Rocha sounds off on racist policing (“Some of those that work forces/Are the same that burn crosses”), before landing on the indelible chant “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” As Rage guitarist Tom Morello told Rolling Stone in 2022: “To me, it relates to Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass said that the moment he became free was not the moment that he was physically loosed from his bonds. It was the moment when master said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘No.’ And that’s the essence of ‘Fuck you, I will not do what you tell me.’”

20

Phil Ochs, ‘I Ain’t Marching Anymore’

Phil Ochs was the burning conscience of the Sixties folk scene, denouncing the political establishment’s hypocrisies long after many of his peers lost interest in topical songwriting. This anti-war broadside, where he tallies up the human costs of the American military machine from 1812 onward, is a fine example of his pointed truth-telling: “It’s always the old to lead us to the war, always the young to fall/Now look at all we’ve won with a saber and a gun/Tell me, is it worth it all?” As resistance to the Vietnam War and its draft grew, Ochs’ song became a counterculture anthem, with a starring role at the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests and the trial that followed.

19

Plastic Ono Band, ‘Give Peace a Chance’

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were at their second Bed-In for Peace in 1969 when the Beatle decided to record this counterculture classic. Hunkered down in Room 1742 at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, the newlyweds recruited Tom Smothers, Timothy Leary, and Petula Clark for the track, which bracketed its simple anti-war chorus with some vintage Lennon nonsense about “Minister, sinister, banisters, and canisters/Bishops and fishops and rabbis and Popeyes and bye-bye, bye-byes.” Released as Lennon’s solo debut single, the song became an anthem sung by protesters as the war in Vietnam raged on.

18

The Honey Drippers, ‘Impeach the President’

The Honey Drippers were a band of Black high school kids from Queens, New York, convened by Georgia-born songwriter Roy C. Hammond. When no record label would touch their anti-Nixon banger, Hammond released it himself. Along with being sampled across rap history, it remains a timeless piece of funk punditry; in 2019, when the House of Representatives announced its first formal impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, streams of “Impeach the President” shot up more than 1,000 percent.

17

Bob Dylan, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’

“This here ain’t no protest song or anything like that, ’cause I don’t write no protest songs,” Bob Dylan said before playing “Blowin’ in the Wind” for the first time in a Greenwich Village club. Indeed, “Blowin’ in the Wind” was much more: a zen meditation, a political polemic, a riddle, and a once-in-a-generation call to arms. Nonetheless, its themes of pacifism (“How many times must the cannonballs fly before they’re forever banned?”) and equality (“How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?”) struck a chord in the Civil Rights movement. Peter, Paul, and Mary made it a pop hit, Sam Cooke took it as inspiration for “A Change Is Gonna Come,” Christian folk masses added it to their songbooks, and protesters across multiple American wars put it on their playlists.

16

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, ‘The Message’

Rap was still a fringe art form largely confined to the streets of New York City when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five dropped “The Message” in the summer of 1982. Unlike the handful of earlier rap songs that had pierced the public’s consciousness at that point, like “Rapper’s Delight,” this one packed a serious political point. “It’s like a jungle sometimes,” Duke Bootee raps at the beginning. “It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under.” The song then paints a bleak portrait of urban blight, failing inner-city schools, the prison-industrial complex, and how all that fuels an endless cycle of violence and despair. Nobody had ever heard anything like this, and it sent shockwaves across the music industry. Rap was suddenly a mainstream art form and a means to convey crucial political messages.

15

Marvin Gaye, ‘What’s Going On’

On May 15, 1969, California Gov. Ronald Reagan sent hundreds of police officers to bust up the People’s Park in Berkeley, a sort of autonomous zone of young protesters. The cops’ methods were so violent and abusive that the day became known as Bloody Thursday. Renaldo “Obie” Benson, the Four Tops’ bass singer heard about the clash and it sparked the timely-yet-timeless “What’s Going On,” a song he’d end up finishing with Motown staffer Al Cleveland and, eventually, Marvin Gaye. Gaye, who’d been hearing harrowing tales from his Vietnam-vet brother, infused it with his own anguish (and an unfathomably great vocal performance). Motown Records initially refused to release “What’s Going On,” but its success ended up inaugurating a new era of musical freedom and social awareness for the label. 

14

Gil Scott-Heron, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’

Existing somewhere between the wordplay of Langston Hughes and the apocalyptic insight of Allen Ginsberg, the ne plus ultra of proto-rap songs was a response to the Last Poets’ equally incendiary “When the Revolution Comes.” Like some of the best graffiti pieces, Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” collected early-Seventies detritus — ad slogans, cartoon characters, sitcoms, pop stars — and reworked them into a Technicolor act of defiance. The song itself would become a hallowed part of that tradition, reworked into protest signs, rap songs, dance music, and, ironically, television commercials themselves.

13

Creedence Clearwater Revival, ‘Fortunate Son’

The Vietnam War was raging when Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman John Fogerty sat on the edge of his bed and wrote this furious anthem about how elites were perpetuating the war while making sure their own families didn’t have to share in the sacrifice. On the top of his mind was David Eisenhower — grandson of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower and husband of President Richard Nixon’s daughter Julie — who never made it near the battlefield even though he was of prime draft age. The song took on renewed meaning in 2003 when President George W. Bush, the ultimate “Fortunate Son,” led the country to a pointless war in Iraq. Fogerty actively campaigned for John Kerry on the 2004 Vote for Change tour, delivering a fiery rendition of the song with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

12

Bob Marley, ‘Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)’

Bob Marley was an international star by 1974, but he hadn’t forgotten where he came from. This highlight from Natty Dread, the first album he made after parting with the classic lineup of the Wailers, distills his voice-of-the-people philosophy into a pithy warning to the ruling classes of Jamaica and the world: “A hungry mob is an angry mob.” And while Marley delivers the song in the easygoing melodic style that helped him connect with pop and rock audiences — by the bridge, he’s inviting listeners to “forget your troubles and dance” — that only makes it a more effective vessel for his message about economic inequality.

11

Woody Guthrie, ’This Land Is Your Land’

“The greatest song ever written about America,” according to an authority no less than Bruce Springsteen, Woody Guthrie’s perennial masterpiece was the ultimate answer record, a socialist riposte to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” A deeply critical song about the working class not getting access to the same America as the rich, it was canonized by the new folk movement of the 1960s, performed for decades by Pete Seeger (sometimes with new anti-colonialist verses by activist Carolyn “Cappy” Israel), and served as an emotional detour in Springsteen’s legendary live shows of the 1980s. Even without its radical themes, the appealing melody and hopeful message of “This Land Is Your Land” are irresistable enough to soundtrack Super Bowl halftime shows and presidential inaugurations.

10

N.W.A, ‘Fuck tha Police’

Asked what “Fuck tha Police” meant to him three decades after he wrote it, Ice Cube said the song “was 400 years in the making, and it’s still just as relevant as it was before it was made.” After the authorities hassled Cube, his friends, and his family throughout his school years because of their skin color, he decided to exact lyrical revenge in 1988 with a six-minute mock trial. Judge Dr. Dre presides as prosecutors Ice Cube, MC Ren, and Eazy-E present their evidence, accusing cops of racist car searches, frisks, and home invasions. Judge Dre, of course, hits the dirty cops with a ruling that has been spray painted on walls ever since: “Fuck tha Police.” With the rise of Black Lives Matters protests against police brutality, the song has continued to resonate; streams of the track surged nearly 300 percent in the weeks after George Floyd was murdered.

9

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, ‘Ohio’

“We were speaking for our generation,” Neil Young said. He was sitting on a porch with David Crosby when he came across a magazine cover that displayed the tragic events of May 4, 1970, when four student protesters were shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio. Within minutes, he’d written one of the defining songs of the anti-war movement, complete with a churning guitar riff and a chorus that bluntly asks, “What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?” Crosby was reportedly left in tears in the recording studio, and so were many others who heard Young channeling the shock and horror of that moment at Kent State.

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.

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. 

Rolling Stone
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