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19 nov 2022 · There is no shortage of great protest songs—in fact, we’ve covered Canada-specific protest songs from their last tumultuous election, contemporary protest songs by people of color,...
19 mag 2024 · The greatest songs about debate, protest, struffle and fighting the power: from John Lennon to Green Day, Public Enemy to The Cranberries.
- 4 min
- Billie Holiday – Strange Fruit
- Woody Guthrie – This Land Is Your Land
- Bob Dylan – Masters of War
- Sam Cooke – A Change Is Gonna Come
- Nina Simone – Mississippi Goddam
- Buffalo Springfield – For What It’S Worth
- Aretha Franklin – Respect
- James Brown – Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud
- Creedence Clearwater Revival – Fortunate Son
- Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Ohio
Written as a poem by Abel Meeropol – a white, Jewish teacher and member of the American Communist Party – and published in 1937 before he set the lines to music, “Strange Fruit” exposes the sheer brutality of racism in the United States at the time by way of a stark, powerful description of a postcard Meeropol had seen depicting a lynching. Juxtapo...
It’s remarkable to think that a song as entrenched in the American psyche as Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” started life as an answer song. Guthrie had grown increasingly irritated with what he considered to be the smug complacency of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”(inescapable in the late 30s, thanks to radio playing Kate Smith’s ver...
While plenty of Dylan’s early forays into politicized writing leave room for interpretation, “Masters Of War” sees the then 21-year-old at his most pointed. On the release of its parent album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, he told Village Voicecritic Nat Hentoff, “I’ve never really written anything like that before… I don’t sing songs which hope peop...
This early 1964 track was a departure for Sam Cooke, who hadn’t previously addressed the Civil Rights Movement in his music. But the times were a-changing and he’d been inspired both by Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. (Cooke wrote the song after his band was turned away from a whites-only motel in...
You can hear the moment on Nina Simone’s 1964 album recorded at Carnegie Hall: After winning the crowd with some show tunes she announces another show tune, “but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.” Then she launches into “Mississippi Goddam” and the laughing stops. Written in the wake of the murder of Emmett Till, Civil Rights activist Medgar...
Though the song’s outlived the circumstances, this Stephen Stills landmark was inspired by a specific event: During 1966 the Sunset Strip police got impatient with hippie kids hanging around, and imposed a 10pm curfew – initially targeting the Whiskey a Go Go, where Buffalo Springfield were the house band. The result was two months’ worth of nightl...
“Respect” certainly wasn’t a feminist manifesto when Otis Redding sang the original version, though Otis wasn’t anti-feminist either: In his version, his partner could do whatever she pleased with her time as long as she showed a little respect when he got home with the money. Aretha’s version is very much a demand to be treated right, and she slig...
Though he’d changed the face of black music a few times by 1968, that year’s “Say It Loud – I’m Black And I’m Proud” was the first song on which James Brown made an overt statement on civil rights – and it was a typically mold-breaking way of making his feelings known. The tone of the civil-rights movement had so far been one of a request for equal...
Few political songs have been subject to more misunderstanding than John Fogerty’s Vietnam-era treatise. Most everyone got what Fogerty meant in 1969: The song pointed a finger at the class-centric nature of the draft system, calling out the “senator’s sons” who managed to avoid service. (A President’s grandson, David Eisenhower, apparently inspire...
While the old saying claims that a picture is worth a thousand words, in the case of a photograph taken by student John Filo and later printed in Lifemagazine, a picture also inspired one of the best protest songs of its time. The photograph was taken in the immediate aftermath of the Ohio National Guard opening fire on students protesting the Viet...
- 3 min
8 dic 2021 · Best protest songs. 1. “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday. When Billie Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit” in 1939, it became the first song by black artist to ever be released with such...
- Tolly Wright
100 Great Protest Songs · Playlist · 95 songs · 511 likes.
13 ago 2020 · Whether you’re on your way to physically protest or looking for a song to inspire you to do so, here are the best protest songs by Black artists you should listen to right now. “Don’t Die,”...
19 giu 2020 · Fight The Power: 11 Powerful Protest Songs Advocating For Racial Justice. From Childish Gambino's "This Is America" to James Brown's "Say It Loud," these racial justice protest anthems demonstrate the ongoing—and still deeply relevant—sound of activism. Ashley M. Coleman. | GRAMMYs / Jun 19, 2020 - 08:00 pm.
