"non-political" music that is political

[ed miliband]

so for example cam'ron is a "mainstream" hip hop artist mostly famous for party tunes like 'oh boy', but he's also released this little number called 'i hate my job'...

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which is 10,000,000,000x more political, relatable and admirable than anything released by a self-conciously "political" rapper like immortal technique. and the beats are much better too.

lil b has released a lot of stuff like this too. the wire, a british magazine that writes about experimental music, did a feature on lil b where they claimed, rather excitedly, that he was "subverting notions of gender, race and religion", or something like that. class also comes up in his music, and songs like 'the agre of information' function as a critique of technology (one used by uc berkeley, lol). when i saw him for the second time he made a point of chanting "fuck money", later he made a post on facebook/twitter saying he was sad about america becoming a "communist country". confused lad.

[Panda Tse Tung]

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Like this?

[I.Drink.Your.Milkshake]

The Stone Roses are seen as an Oasis-style "let's just fookin' 'ave it" hedonistic band, but the first album contains a number of overtly political sentiments.

Waterfall contains comment on American hegemony; Made of Stone containts indictment of the cash nexus; Elizabeth, My Dear is as anti-monarchy as the Pistols 'God Save the Queen'; I Am the Resurrection is a condemnation of the catholic church; Bye Bye Badman is about the 1968 Paris student riots, as is the album cover.

I always hate it when people call them 'lad-rock', like theyre brainless beer swillers. There's nothing laddish about John Squire.

[Ocean Seal]

Everything Jon Lajoie writes is more or less a social critique of wealth, sexism, homophobia, etc. He recently wrote a song about the Quebec student protests as well, but as he admits most of his songs are about penises and farts at least on the surface.

[Pretty Flaco]

j cole: problems

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i think when it comes to "nonpolitical" artists touching on issues, 2pac takes the cake. he rapped about like fuckin everything.

[Althusser]

Jon Connor - Poison

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[Os Cangaceiros]

GG Allin's music.

[bricolage]

I always find country music interesting as it seems, at least from an across the pond observer, to really hit the intersections between class anger and nationalist/religious ideology that appears to be pretty common amongst a lot of the rural american working class/poor. so I remember there's this song called 'this is country music' or something, anyway he has one line about anyone that still had pride in those that died for the flag but another one about if you'd like to tell your boss to shove it. anyway it's not a very good song and I reckon I could find better examples but as a genre it seems pretty representative of a large demographic. could be I've just got it all wrong though, I mean I'm solely looking at this through the internet.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I always find country music interesting as it seems, at least from an across the pond observer, to really hit the intersections between class anger and nationalist/religious ideology that appears to be pretty common amongst a lot of the rural american working class/poor. so I remember there's this song called 'this is country music' or something, anyway he has one line about anyone that still had pride in those that died for the flag but another one about if you'd like to tell your boss to shove it. anyway it's not a very good song and I reckon I could find better examples but as a genre it seems pretty representative of a large demographic. could be I've just got it all wrong though, I mean I'm solely looking at this through the internet.

This exact subject is discussed in "A Renegades History of the United States" (which I've been meaning to make a thread about at some point)

The chapter is called "Almost Free: The Tragedy of Hippies and Rednecks", and it talks about how "hillbillies" from Appalachia were some of the most hardline partisans against work in the late 60's and the 70's (esp. in the auto factories of Detroit), yet many of these same people who caused such headaches for their employers were some of the most fervently nationalistic/patriotic participants in and supporters of the Vietnam War.

[Hit The North]

The Stone Roses are seen as an Oasis-style "let's just fookin' 'ave it" hedonistic band, but the first album contains a number of overtly political sentiments.

Waterfall contains comment on American hegemony; Made of Stone containts indictment of the cash nexus; Elizabeth, My Dear is as anti-monarchy as the Pistols 'God Save the Queen'; I Am the Resurrection is a condemnation of the catholic church; Bye Bye Badman is about the 1968 Paris student riots, as is the album cover.

I always hate it when people call them 'lad-rock', like theyre brainless beer swillers. There's nothing laddish about John Squire.

Nah, as great as the Stone Roses album is, the lyrics are pretty meaningless. I mean, in what sense is I Am The Resurrection an indictment of the Catholic church? Taking the occasional phrase like "bad money dies, I love the scene" from Made Of Stone and calling it an indictment of the cash nexus is taking it a bit far, imo. Elizabeth My Dear is the only overtly political song on the album; in general their lyrics are vague, poetic mood pieces.

Of course, the real political aspect of the Stone Roses (and the Happy Mondays) was their advocacy of drug use (particularly ecstacy) and their proselytisation of hedonism as the basis for community. After a decade of Thatcherite cuts and Victorian values, the whole party scene around acid, baggy and mdma reintroduced psychedelic values into late 80s UK culture and disseminated it widely amongst working class youth.

Non-political music becomes political when it clashes with other social forces or fuses with social movements. A good example is Aretha Franklin's 'Respect' which became a rallying call for black feminism within the civil rights movement, but really was just about getting respect from her old man.

EDIT: in terms of non political artists suddenly getting political, there's also Marvin Gaye's powerful protest against the Vietnam war and state of the nation address, What's Going On - one of the greatest albums ever made. Or there is The Temptations' Cloud Nine and Psychedelic Shack albums. Also, coincidently, two of the greatest albums ever made.

[Os Cangaceiros]

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^that band does a lot of shit like that, songs with working class populist themes, but they're not really a "political band" I guess.

[Ostrinski]

Road to Peace by Tom Waits, who doesn't usually do political music.
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[bricolage]

This exact subject is discussed in "A Renegades History of the United States" (which I've been meaning to make a thread about at some point)

The chapter is called "Almost Free: The Tragedy of Hippies and Rednecks", and it talks about how "hillbillies" from Appalachia were some of the most hardline partisans against work in the late 60's and the 70's (esp. in the auto factories of Detroit), yet many of these same people who caused such headaches for their employers were some of the most fervently nationalistic/patriotic participants in and supporters of the Vietnam War.
I think I remember reading a piece by Glaberman where he talks about workers at a rubber factory or something like that going on strike and how it could have caused more damage to the war effort than all the demonstrations but how most of those workers wouldn't have actually have been anti-war... which I suppose is sort of relevant. I found this quote but it's not the one I was thinking of;

Brecher’s failure to see the duality, the contradiction, within the working class and to see consciousness as activity leads him to reintroduce the idea of working-class backwardness. “From 1969 to 1971,” says Brecher (p.290), “workers, like the rest of the population, developed an overwhelming opposition to the Vietnam war.” But that is only part of the picture, the part that deals with verbalized consciousness. The fact is that well before 1969, ordinary American workers, in the pursuit of their “narrow” class objectives, interfered with and prevented more war production than all of the anti-war demonstrations put together. In strikes at North American Aviation in Missouri, at Olin-Matheisen in Illinois, on the Southern Railway System, and on the Missouri Pacific, workers refused to succumb to patriotic pressure ‘from politicians, union leaders, and business executives and went their own way-not because they were anti-war, but because they put the class struggle first. (It was Lenin who said, along time ago, that “We cannot equate the patriotism of the working class with the patriotism of the bourgeoisie.”)

[Dumb]

Anything by Local H.

"One-trick pony in a one-horse town/feeling lonely and the cable's down/feel like the only [freak/fuck] in this town/what's wrong with you?/What's wrong with me?

"Got a life of scratching tickets at the local gas and stop/suck on another whip-it and feel the brain cells pop/I know I'm nothing special and I know I'm nothing great/I know I'm nothing different but I just don't feel the same/what's wrong with me?"
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"Half-life/fake your claim/falling asleep and waking up is the same/half-alive and half-dead too/work is for suckers and the sucker is you!

"You know the lies they tell are told until they're true/you know they hardly ever give a leper a chance!"

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They were never a particularly artful bunch, but that's the point - it's straightforward, honest, meat-and-potatoes blue collar rock.