Note: wouldn't it have been kind of funny and ironic if I ran off without finishing this, after swearing I wouldn't?
'Entertainment!' by Gang of Four (1979)
Using music as a way to express distaste about the society that swarms and surrounds you is an age old concept. For instance, the lyrics to perhaps one of the greatest compositions of all time, 'Ode to Joy' are taken from a poem supporting universal brotherhood, and Beethoven added lines that all men are brothers, something that was definitely not the status quo in Vienna circa the 19th century. For all intents and purposes, 'Ode to Joy' was the original 'All You Need is Love', and with a better melody to boot. But really, politics and music didn't really take off until the early 20th century. Take the haunting Billie Holiday song 'Strange Fruit', one of the most poetic songs I've ever heard. Or the songs by Woody Guthrie, like 'This Land is Your Land', an angry protest in response to Irving Berlin who just wrote 'God Bless America.' By the way, as a side note, I hate 'God Bless America', and I think Guthrie's song should be our national anthem.
Then of course there was the 60s. In the early 60s, there was the civil rights movement, and by the end, everyone was railing against Vietnam. And the king of these protest songs was Bob Dylan. He was deemed the head of a movement he really wanted nothing to do with. And then, of course, he raised the question, did these songs really
do anything? Bob Dylan used to call his protest songs 'finger pointing songs', and he famously said that, 'I've only got ten fingers'. Dylan left the movement because perhaps he saw that songs cannot enact any sort of tangible change in the world, and all it amounted to was a bunch of whining. Dylan refused to disassociate himself with the evils of the world by singing about them and profiting off them, while truly doing nothing to actually solve anything.
There were political albums after Dylan, and there always will be. Look at Immortal Technique.
But if you want to listen to a catchy post-punk affair with funk and reggae influences, which also happens to be the greatest political album of all time, Gang of Four takes the cake with 'Entertainment!'. Even the band name is a great political reference to the 'Gang of Four', four leftists within the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong's last wife, who were all eventually jailed and exiled for crimes against the Party. It's weird to think that these guys aren't classically defined as 'Punk', because their attitude is insanely punk. But I guess their chords and music aren't simple enough, so they are Post-Punk, taking the punk attitude and combining it with more interesting things musically. And this thing really is interesting musically, it twitches more than a bug that was half-crushed.
I was reading 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen and there was a scene where a bunch of leftists and radicals were protesting and one of the signs said 'This heaven gives me migraine', a great line from what I see as the best song on the album, 'Natural's Not In It', which rolls on like a bullet train and in each line it describes a new scene, almost protesting through short machine gun sentences. The problem, of leisure, what to do, for pleasure. The main target of this album is capitalism, the sheer amount of times it mentions consumers and buying things it really staggering. Most political albums lose focus or turn into watered down versions of operas with no real concrete message, but 'Entertainment!' has a concise message, and coincidentally, concise music, twitching guitar chords almost never rambling off into a solo.
Protest music and rebel music try and enact change. But it's hard to intentionally enact change. Whenever humans on a massive scale try and intentionally change something and get a desired result, they screw it up most of the time. Think of all the major revolutions that have taken place, they usually end in disaster. The French Revolution is probably one of the greatest examples and a great story overall, ending with the Reign of Terror and the rise of Napoleon.
The reason Animal Farm has stayed with us is not because it's an exact allegory of the Russian Revolution, it's because it tells us a lot about human nature. In the end, the pigs are acting exactly like the humans they just overthrew. Most revolutions just propel a new class of people to the top, and the lower classes are the ones who suffer.
I think the sheer fact that society is still in a moral decay and still selling itself out means that political albums don't mean squat. But it's noble of them to try. And despite all of the nihilist futility I threw at you, 'Entertainment!' is still a hell of a listen.