If music really changed things in any tangible sense, it would have been made illegal by now. But that hasn’t stopped generations of songwriters defining the zeitgeist, soundtracking the times and generally socking it to The Man. Here’s half a dozen agit-pop artists who liked stirring shit up – maybe the unrest at the moment will encourage a new generation to revive the protest song.

BILLIE HOLIDAY
‘Strange Fruit’ (1939)
Hardly ‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘Strange Fruit’ in the hands of Billie Holiday is one of the most harrowing records of all time. In performance the blues queen looks and sounds like she’s going break down, explode in anger or be sick. And for good reason. You don’t need to dig too deep behind the gentle, melancholic melody to find the horrific subject matter, lynching: “Black body swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees”. Upsettingly powerful stuff. (JK)

EDWIN STARR
‘War’ (1970)
Possibly an even more powerful anti-conflict rhetoric than Culture Club’s ‘War Song’, Edwin Starr’s defining moment was a big, bad-ass sucker punch for Nixon’s out-of-control Vietnam fiasco. It was in fact originally recorded by the Temptations but lacked the sheer lung-busting vitriol Starr brought to the party. For such a polemic to reach number one on Billboard in the conservative USA of 1970 is incredible, and it remains probably the most famous protest song ever. (NC)

ROBERT WYATT
‘Shipbuilding’ (1982)
Written by Elvis Costello but given its definitive poignancy by the haunting voice of Robert Wyatt, ‘Shipbuilding’ was a thinking man’s Falklands protest song, at a time when the genre had all but dried up. What it lacked in a shouty, picket line chorus was more than made up for by the quietly intellectual paradox of providing steelworks employment replacing sunken vessels and then sending those same local men off to die in them. Suede covered this for the ‘Help’ benefit album, but their version was no good. (NC)

THE SPECIAL AKA
‘Free Nelson Mandela’ (1984)
27 years ago Nelson Mandela wasn’t the happy, waving bloke in a loud shirt we know today, he was doing stir for standing up for black rights in apartheid-ridden South Africa. Jerry Dammers of the Specials wasn’t having any of it though, and penned this African music-based protest classic, sung by Stan Campbell. It would take six more years for Mandela to be freed, but for many this was their introduction to his prison plight and a galvaniser in his campaign for eventual freedom. (NC)

MORRISSEY
‘Margaret On The Guillotine’ (1988)
Not a hit single or even a particularly well known title from Moz’s canon, but this frank and eerie album closer from his solo debut ‘Viva Hate’ encapsulates much of the nation’s feelings towards the Iron Lady, in the wake of a decade’s protest and persecution. He presents his message simply, an iron fist in a velvet ballad glove: “People like you make me feel so tired/When will you die?” A haunting Spanish guitar refrain tails the lyric, fading to the absolute finality of the weighty blade sounding its deadly and decapitatory descent. (NC)

PUBLIC ENEMY
‘Fight The Power’ (1989)
Chuck D described PE’s music as a black CNN – a media voice for the hitherto disenfranchised. Bus seating was no longer a legal issue, but young black America still wouldn’t have dared imagine an afro comb in the White House bathroom. This clarion call from ‘Fear Of A Black Planet’ called for the audience to organise in order to revolutionise, chastising ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ for its lie-down-and-take-it rhetoric and Elvis and John Wayne’s national reverence despite extolling redneck racism. Black America had fought hard for its freedom and relative equality, this was a harsh reminder not to sit back and relax. (NC)

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WORDS BY NICK COQUET AND JAMES KENDALL