Far Out 40: The best political anthems of the 21st century
“Music’s so woke now! I miss when music wasn’t so political…” It’s likely a statement you’ve seen across social media more than once.
Lost in a confused, nostalgic fug of sorely missed ease of living twisted into culture war bullshit, an imagined musical past is indulged in with fiercely reactionary whimsy by a significant chunk of the comments below many an independent culture magazine’s Facebook posts, lambasting today’s ‘virtue signalling’ bands not holding a candle to the supposed apolitical stars of their youth.
Who would that be exactly? Could it be Billie Holiday’s haunting exorcism of Black lynching on the chilling ‘Strange Fruit’? John Lennon’s wry jab at the British class system in front of the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, telling the richer sections of the Royal Albert Hall to “rattle your jewellery”? Perhaps it’s Jimi Hendrix’s scorching attack on the US war machine with his blistering ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock, or Public Enemy’s middle finger to white America on the explosive ‘Fight the Power’?
What would Motown/Stax soul, punk rock, the 1960s flower power, golden-age hip-hop, and folk revivalism in the cultural memory be without their fierce bedrock of political challenge? A legitimate longing for a time when working-class people felt respected and had far greater material security has found a perverse expression, stoked and engendered by a billionaire-backed press and corporate media machine, in much of the country and beyond in harbouring seething contempt for today’s artists who refuse to stand on stage as inoffensive dancing jukeboxes, lest they offend the feelings of a bloke wearing a safety-pinned Queen Sex Pistols shirt lambasting the loss of patriotism in a generation economically fucked to oblivion.
“There were no Palestine flags,” Brendan O’Neill was relieved to report to Spiked after catching Oasis’ massively expensive London show. “No trans flags. No solemnly issued lies from the stage about how transwomen are women. No climate-change bollocks. No ‘Fuck the Tories’. If Led By Donkeys had rocked up with one of their shit light shows telling the crowd what a disaster Brexit has been, they’d have been lynched, or certainly told to piss off back to their snug in that poncy Stoke Newington pub they hang out in.”
Didn’t you know? It’s actually marvellously countercultural to acquiesce to the status quo and royally twist your knickers when faced with the faintest political action or sentiment that rocks your slavishly pro-establishment, phoney populism.
It’s all bollocks, but you knew that. The day music is politically neutered, as seems to be the bland fantasy of so many, is the day that popular music is well and truly dead. There’s plenty to scream and shout about. Dismal political failure across the Western world, turned backs on the bloodshed meted out on Gaza, top-down hysteria and persecution toward our most marginalised neighbours, right-wing ooze exploiting liberal failure, austerity ruin, and an online sewer capitalising on the exhausting rage economy. It’s absurd to demand that such stakes don’t shape our contemporary songbook.
So, let us at Far Out present our collection of 21st-century rebels and dissenters who’ve stuck their heads above the parapet and penned numbers that attack the establishment of today in the great rock and pop tradition. Let our playlist serve as an antidote to the idiots who were let down by ‘Born in the USA’s lack of pro-America rigour, or who think Rage Against the Machine have ‘sold out’ by, well, raging against the machine.
The best political anthems of the 21st century:
- Bob Vylan – ‘GDP’
- Grove – ‘Fuck Yr Landlord’
- Jarvis Cocker – ‘Running the World’
- Nadine Shah – ‘Out The Way’
- The Gossip – ‘Standing In the Way of Control’
- Mandy, Indiana – ‘Pinking Shears’
- Enola Gay – ‘PTS.DUP’
- Benefits – ‘Traitors’
- Ebony Bones – ‘No Black In the Union Jack’
- Declan McKenna – ‘British Bombs’
- Mdou Moctar – ‘Afrique Victime’
- Fontaines DC – ‘Starburster’
- IDLES – ‘Danny Nedelko’
- Taqbir – ‘Aisha Qandisha’
- Amyl and the Sniffers – ‘Capital’
- Kevin Morty – ‘Beautiful Strangers’
- Depeche Mode – ‘Where’s the Revolution’
- Angry Blackmen – ‘Grind’
- Petrol Girls – ‘Baby, I Had an Abortion’
- Arch Femmesis – ‘Rejectile Dysfunction’
- Kneecap – ‘No Comment’
- Goat Girl – ‘The Man’
- Alagara – ‘Expulsados’
- Paramore – ‘The News’
- Run The Jewels – ‘Kill Your Masters’
- Childish Gambino – ‘This Is America’
- Yves Tumor – ‘Noid’
- D’Angelo -’The Charade’
- Karl D’Silva – The Butcher
- clipping. – ‘Chapter 319’
- The Linda Lindas – ‘Racist, Sexist Boy’
- Molly Nilsson – ‘Jackboots Return’
- Findom – ‘The Living Standard’
- PC World – ‘Private Targets’
- Special Interest – ‘Young, Gifted, Black, in Leather
- BLXPLTN – ‘Start Fires’
- The Chisel – ‘Class Oppression’
- The Pop Group – ‘Citizen Zombie’
- Panic Shack – ‘I Don’t Really Like It’
- Eminem – ‘Mosh’
