Minutes to Midnight was practically a protest album in itself.
A lot of the songs have started becoming appropriate again, but this one in particular…
…I still can’t believe Chester is gone.
I wish these guys had Youtube clips, but Bandcamp will have to do.
Australia’s best Irish band, Trouble in the Kitchen:
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See thread…
My mood today
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The Task of the Artist in the Time of Monsters
We come to know monsters early in our lives. Our childhoods are filled with scary things that “go bump” in the night. A ferocious fire-breathing creature with bulging eyes, fangs, and foaming at the mouth stands over us. We pull the covers over our head; pray and pretend that the monster is just a figment of our imagination.
Monsters are real. History is peopled with millions of corpses left in their wake. Monsters—indeed—are not rare. We rattle off monsters’ names with great ease and compare them to our present brutes. Monsters carry out individual atrocities and conceal our complicity, which is far more sinister than the monsters themselves. Not only do we hide from monsters, we hide behind them. Nations have always bred monsters; and nations love monsters but not artists. Artists know that all nations are morally bankrupt and that politics are diseased. They remind nations that monsters are not new.
Albert Camus pleaded with the artist to never side with the makers of history but rather the victims of it. And the victims will be legion —Muslim, Black, queer, young, undocumented, old, female, differently-abled, and all of the poor. Artists must be lobbyists for the languishing. While monsters spew vile words, artists do not take any delight in such talk because demonization cannot defeat demagoguery. Audre Lorde taught that using the master’s tools makes us the master’s tools. Artists do not shame those living in the night; artists shine light.
James Baldwin—the greatest amongst us—called artists to quarrel with their nations as lovers do. Artists are not politicians. They are legislators of hope, parliamentarians of possibility. To be sure, the past is a guide, but melancholy can be a nation’s undoing. Nostalgia is a form of mourning for a past that never was, because the present is unbearable and the future is unforeseeable. When the present obscures the future and undermines the past, artists are diplomats between the world that was, the world that is and the world that is to be. So then artists’ allegiances can never be to a flag, a party, or a state. Love is their government.
When monsters say that we should lie down and die, the art of loving and living is the sacred task of artists—making home from rubble held together by the very thing that monsters have sought to snuff out for ages—joy. Artists are architects of being; building communities where there are no strangers only neighbors. And monsters fear that.
-Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou
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Oh, can I play?
More of a metalhead than a folkie, but we got some pretty cool protest tunes as well.
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Of course. It’s why I resurrected this thread.
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Pretty much anything on Rage Against The Machine’s self-titled album from 1992, but I kinda like Wake Up (especally Brass Against’s cover of it)
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this takes me back to my angry days, a place i never wanted to go back to.
“and that’s all I have to say about that.”
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I’ve always found this scene in bioshock quite something. The cover of the song, contextualized in the scene, makes for very great worldbuilding.
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