People act like musicians standing up for what they believe in is anything new. #FreePalestine [Slyngstad]

The Message must have been lost on these people Born in the USA it's a shame that The Revolution Will not be Televised because it might make it more obvious, but That's Just the Way it is.

When you're a Bull on Parade, you don't care to look for them.

Yeah. Welcome to Paradise, right? Taking the Longview, only a Basketcase would be down with this Dookie.

Well, I certainly don't want to be one of those.

Songs from Paul Ryan's workout playlist

You won't believe the amount of right wingers who believe RATM are right wing. I assume because they sound angry?

what you've described is AI generated music

I'm pretty sure "The Machine" they're raging against is like an annoying office printer or copy machine or something.

/s

I wonder if RATM might have a claim as the most political band of all time. The only song of theirs I can think of that isn't political is Born of a Broken Man. Even the songs they covered were political.

Ironic, the idea that art should just be for fun is its own ideology

Yeah, ask Leni Riefenstahl about it! She knows everything about unpolitical art.

Jesus, somebody slept through art class for literally all of school. Several somebodies, apparently.

I seen people on reddit argue “art is supposed to just be fun, not push any ideologies.”

Right before they blow a gasket because they were forced, against their wills, to play as a Lady Jedi.

Those people are embarrassing. They're probably the same people that say like "Dracula is just a story about a guy who bites people shut up about all this politics and feminism".

Education is difficult and, in the US are least, under funded.

It's a conservative identifier for me. I haven't seen an example that was't complaining about progressive political stances in some medium.

Oh so you saw one of the hundreds of thousands of bots?

System of a Down was instrumental in forming my political views.

The best part is literally all of them are still relevant. Maybe that's the worst part. Sad Statue we are more divided than ever, Cigaro our environmental regulators are removing safeguards for the environment, BYOB we still send poor people to die out in meaningless conflicts by bribing them with education, Prison Song incarceration rates are even higher, etc.

Brueh. Laughs in literally any band in history.

Born in the USA...

According to the demented fool, Fortunate son is about him, he is the: Millionaires son, born with silver spoon in hand, waiving the flag while the band is playing "Hail to the chief".

Rise

…

Same level of media literacy that missed the satire of the Starship Troopers movie.

Watching the US Government unironically propose Starship Troopers-inspired uniforms for the Space Force had me in stitches.

When did they become a bunch of woke libtards? /s

Reminds me of that Green Charlotte song, Lifestyles of the American Idiot.

Is this some other ratm I'm not aware of?

Only thing I hate is their music is still relevant even to today. World's only worse and worse. Love the music, hate nothing has changed.

Agreed about They don't really care about us, but Man in the Mirror is more personal. Black or White has a certain political slant, and Earth Song has a very direct message.

Let's look at some other musicians who might have a claim to "most famous ever": Elvis was not really political - if anything he was pro-establishment.

Mozart and Beethoven however were very political. Beethoven scratched out the dedication to Napoleon in the Eroica when Napoleon made himself an emperor. Previously Beethoven had been a major supporter of Napoleon because he was pushing enlightenment ideals. Mozart was less directly political, but The Marriage of Figaro was very subversive at the time (which I know from the movie Amadeus, but apparently that checks out).

The Beatles didn't start out political, but they became more so over time.

Well he wasn't in the epstein files and he was an odd one. But as far as I know, no proof of the kid diddling has happened.

Nobody has ever made the claim that “musicians” are just now getting political. That’s just the comic artist to make the comic.

It’s literally the definition of a strawman argument.

We're trying here: A friend of mine got unconsentually kissed and by a guy with a... reputation, to say the least, who's been trying to get into her pants for a while. So my roommate/her boyfriend and I of course got pissed off and were like "so when do we smack the little shit?" (FAR from his first time)

However, victims themselves aren't aware of what happened to them. She's already starting to forget as a trauma response and very easily got gaslit by him later that it wasn't that big/deep - til her boyfriend/my roommate reminded her that yes it fucking is.

The situation is kinda on hold, and there's of course a lot of details that make it more complicated and such, but nothing's been done because the state of the victims here are so used to such shit that when it boils over, it seems like less of a big deal than it is.

I'm in Europe, but haven't always been and can very certainly say that where I come from, the bitch would be smacked around by the victim itself and likely socially isolated for a while, no need for help - instead of no social consequence, victim unaware of what happened to them despite having a trauma response they subjectively typically have and unsmacked

Shit's out of whack and more often than not (about this specifically, but in general as well) feel like I'm the crazy one for seeing almost rape and saying "that bad" TT

Seconded.

Oh I’ll happily do it. I grew up in a hockey family. My brothers all learned how to fight early and I learned through uhh… my own experiences with bullies. I hit one kid so hard, he told me how he was disoriented as fuck and we ended up becoming friends.

https://genius.com/Bruce-springsteen-born-in-the-usa-lyrics

I fucking LOVE Woody Guthrie. Start with his political songs, such as This Land is Your Land and Tear the Fascists Down, then pick up the Wilco/Billy Bragg album Mermaid Avenue for modern recordings of previously unrecorded Guthrie songs.

And let's not forget he protested Trump long before it was cool.

Robin Hood and Little John walkin' through the forest...

Unfortunately, punk music does have nazi fans, hence the song Nazi Punks Fuck Off

I knew some dudes who were big into punk and hardcore in the early ‘00s. They seemed decent at first, so I hung out with them for about a month before I figured out they were racist neo nazi shitstains. I dropped that group of friends so fucking fast.

Okay I need some help. Is there a place I can figure out precisely the boundaries of hardcore music because I've been told a few times I should do a hardcore band.

I do blues, folk, jazz, and church music. Hardcore sounds fun but I should know what it is before I try

It was a very popular song with people who just totally disregarded the sentiment entirely.

I was just thinking about how that seems to be a theme. Art has a message. People don't pick it up.

Like, if you'll pardon a genre change, the protagonists of final fantasy 7 are literal eco terrorists who blow up an allegory for an oil plant. How many of those fans love the game and didn't give a single thought to environmentalism? Barret would disapprove

See, it's easy. The lyrics that name foreign entities? Those are bad people. The domestic entities and events their country was involved in? Naturally-occurring events that simply happened. Just history.

Elvis broke segregation laws.

The Beatles refused to play if the audiences were segregated.

Bad example as you're not allowed to like him anymore because of who he was as a person. Allegedly.

How now, brown cow?

Vincent ❤️

Woody Guthrie

Bob Dylan

I saw someone say this about another band I like.

Do we require every band we like to make a song about every injustice in this world? Or can we celebrate that they stood up against some of them?

Ehhh, I think Rise Against gets a pass in this situation. They just haven't been quite as active lately. They released a new album which has songs generically about rebelling against flails arms but they were so so so active during the bush era and during Trump's first term.

Besides, I think the song Nod is a "nod" to the Palestine genocide but I agree it's a little disappointing that there is not more. I just think that saying they're not "living it" isn't really fair when they are known as political legends.

Rise Against is fucking solid.
They also didn't issue a statement or write a song specifically for, say, the genocide in Sudan, but that one doesn't seem to fucking matter for some reason.

For everyone who saw this comment and started having doubts I looked it up on Wikipedia, and they haven't been completely silent.

In August 2025, drummer Brandon Barnes wrote on Instagram: "Fuck Netanyahu. Free Palestine. The Israeli government's genocide against the Palestinian people is horrific and unacceptable." [207->https://www.instagram.com/brandonbarnes_ra/p/DN9J1h0j-zd/?hl=en]

Also I don't think this is being silent against US oligarchy:

"We are coming to Minneapolis where the people have heroically stood up against ICE, stood up against Trump, stood up against this terrible rising tide of state terror" Morello said.

Someone else who knows Chumbawamba music beyond Tubthumping!?

Such a great album too

Not looking to start a debate. But genuinely what would you have them make songs about, if not something they believe in?

Edit: I guess you could listen to only acoustic tracks.

I know a lot of people who have danced along to "Beds are burning" and have no idea what the song is about, even though it's not exactly subtle.

Or the Dixie Chicks.

Or my favourite band, Die Ärzte - they realised that being subtle wasn't good enough, so they had to directly tell a good portion of their audience that they didn't want Neo-Nazi fans, which they did in an awesome song called "Schrei nach Liebe", which starts with "Du bist wirklich saudumm" - "You're really fucking stupid", and has the lyrics "Deine Gewalt ist nur ein stummer Schrei nach Liebe" - "your violence is just a mute cry for love" and "Weil du Schiss vorm Schmusen hast, bist du ein Faschist" - "Because you're scared of cuddling, you became a Fascist".

some are only political, because it gets them more audience/customers

Rich Men North of Richmond went straight to the top of the charts, right up until Oliver Anthony talked shit about Trump. Then his promoters dropped him like a bad habit. AI Art really took off in the wake of that moment, too. Really suspicious. Almost as though it the folks producing the music had some kind of class conflict with the folks promoting it.

That's not limited to musicians.

Yes very apolitical decade 🤤

That's a great take for anyone who wasn't alive in the 90s. Anyone who was there however knows it's bunk.

Its a liberal myth that the end of the Soviet Union somehow brought in an era of peace.

I would give it more to the 80s, as most pop music was overtly Ra-Ra America and good vibes. The political Big Bads were the Soviets and Apartheid South Africa, and then LiveAid was a fund raiser for Ethiopia. Everything was external-facing.

Having lived through the 80s and 90s as an adult, I can confirm that none of it was apolitical or euphoric.

Personally I didn't but I can definitely see how people get fed up hearing about it.

Arlo's still around, man

Is there an appropriate time to stand against genocide? I feel like that's an "always" kind of thing.

If someone wants to kill 10 people, and another person wants to kill 0 people, what is the apolitical number of people to be killed?

apolitical

That's political 💁‍♀️

"apolitical" is a shorthand for "in favor of status quo"

Apolitical should literally mean:

I don’t care what you say during your set, it’s your time.

The problem I see is that Israel is pretty direct about keeping things genocidal.

You may have saw the middle example and thought hey there is a band that broke the South Africa Boycott over Apartheid and played there anyway.

In a pre-concert (Live Aid) interview, (Freddie) Mercury stated: "The point of this concert is to wake people up to starvation and famine... We shouldn't be looking in terms of us and them. It should be all of us. I think when people are starving, ** we are all humans, and we should be looked upon as such.** "

Sort of the joke about this tour. Ed surrounded himself with a bunch of Irish musicians notorious for their support of Palestine and their outspoken politics. And then the people who were always highly political on tour did the things they always fucking did on tour and Ed said "Oh my goodness, I had no idea! We need to fire all of you."

It was the career equivalent of strapping yourself with TNT, then being surprised when it explodes.

The comments speak for themselves.