D-Cup at Politits has been discussing the apparent dearth of protest music on the radio these days. It made me think, because as much as I am into - and write about - music, I really don't listen to the radio anymore. For me, listening to the radio would be like having a craving for filet mignon but eating Cream of Wheat instead.

And as I have made abundantly clear, modern rock stopped commanding my attention at least a decade ago. There's only so long people can feed you shit about Nirvana being meaningful and Pearl Jam being original before you seek originality and meaning in other forms. (And no, this is not an opportunity to convince me how great that stuff is.  This is an entirely subjective matter, after all, and I have listened too recently - thanks to friends-  for fresh ears to make a difference, which they sometimes do.) Therefore, there could be plenty of young artists singing angry, indignant songs for a target audience who are at an age where studies show they won't bother to vote anyway. She seems to have found an example or two to post since then.

She reminded me of a couple of things, though, so I figured I'd share.

First, she reminded me of a video clip I downloaded a couple of years ago. It was from the Tonight show, and featured a fellow named Bright Eyes (not to be confused with Charlton Heston) and attracted my attention with the song title - When the President Talks to God. I'll reverse my usual "the music is more important than the lyrics" attitude for this song for two reasons. One, the lyrics are truly spot-on in their criticisms, and two, the music isn't much at all. It's basically there to keep this thing from being a poem.

Although I have it in storage, I'm posting the YouTube clip because it's the same clip and it's way easier to post this way.



The second thing I remembered is the fact that Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young toured last year with a couple of new protest songs. Man, it's nice to know that some of the old-timers can still be counted on, eh? The songs were Shock and Awe and the more subtly titled Let's Impeach the President. As I didn't actually have anything from that tour (my CSNY pro-shot DVD from the early 70s was quite satisfying overall) I went in search of it. It didn't take that long to find an audience recording that the people in the comments were raving about, so I climbed on board the torrent, which turned out to be without a doubt the slowest download of my collecting career. If not, I'd have posted this last weekend. I finally got it, though, and ended up with a listenable audience recording to share. It is nowhere near deserving the raves it got (if this is truly what these folks call a stellar aud. recording, my collection could enlighten them quite a bit) but I have a lot of recordings in my collection that are a lot worse. When listening to these songs, just close your eyes and pretend that you're listening from a naked heap of hippies in one of the rearmost mud puddles at Woodstock. I've had some happy moments imagining that.

For accuracy's sake, however, these cuts come from the Tweeter Center in Camden, NJ on July 6, 2006.

Here's Shock and Awe.

Here's Let's Impeach the President.

What other modern protest songs do you know??