Maybe God Himself Needs All of Our Help, Out Along the Road to Peace

About two years ago, my mother -- who was a young woman during the Vietnam War -- asked me why there was so little protest music today. I told her that the music business has a longer gestation period than it used to, and that songs against the war and talking about social issues were probably on the way.

Well, here we are at the end of 2006, coming up on three years into the Iraq occupation that has no name, and I still don't know where the protest songs are. I know they're out there, but I know they're never going to be on the radio. When I want to get riled up about the War in Iraq and the political mess we're in, I listen to Dylan's Masters of War and It's a Hard Rain Gonna Fall -- great songs, but they're forty fucking years old.

American Idiot just doesn't count. Great album, calls the president a gasbag, references september 11th, but it's a concept album, a punk rock opera, and it works more as a commentary on American culture that actually addressing social or political protest.

So where are the songs that feel how you feel? Where are the songs that are getting into the iPods and ears of people who don't consider themselves "all that political" and have to reconsider when they listen? Where are the songs with anger and intelligence and soul over the state of our world today?

Well, I've got two.

I got Tom Waits' Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards for Christmas, fainted, then got up and started playing it. Road to Peace is a seven-plus minute clear-headed indictment of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict with no fuzzy metaphors and an almost pedantic, repetitve tune that doesn't allow you to wander off from the intent of the song. Listen to it now:

Road to Peace can be heard here on Tom Waits' myspace page.

Road to Peace lyrics are here

A few weeks ago I got turned on to Barenaked Ladies Fun and Games, which, for a group who tends to sing about chimpanzees and bank robberies foiled by nuns, is all the more a vicious and beautifully shocking "Fuck you" to the Bush administration and anyone within a hundred feet of it. We saw them perform it live at Radio City and the audience was silent through the entire thing, then roared with applause.

YouTube video of Fun and Games can be seen here

Anyone else?

As a short aside, I have to say when I heard Beyonce's "Ring the Alarm" a few weeks ago with that blaring horn in the background and Rage Against the Machine-style bullhorn vocal distortion, it was killing me that here was this great song that sounded like a war and she wasn't saying anything. Can you imagine what Beyonce alone could do for pop culture if she had an opinion about anything other than her man or her ass?