Spinner

Political Songs: Top 12 Post-Millennial Anthems That Rallied the Masses

Gino DePinto, AOL

Last week, a little over a year after the Occupy Wall Street movement had its first anniversary, Tom Morello and System of a Down's Serj Tankian rolled out their hard-rocking protest anthem "We Are the 99%."

With its mosh-friendly riffs and chant-friendly chorus, it's a long-awaited return to form by the former guitarist of Rage Against the Machine.

Of course, it's also a reminder that in the dozen years since Rage disbanded, no artist has been quite as politically angry despite the one-two punch of the War on Terror and Great Recession. But we apparently remembered wrong, because despite a relatively lower level of outrage, a surprising number of classic political songs have indeed emerged from this messy new millennium.
With the U.S. election heading into the home stretch as the debates kick off, we thought it high time to take a look back at the best examples of politics infusing popular music over the past dozen years.

View the Post-Millennial Political Songs Gallery
See All Spinner Galleries »

Watch the "We are the 99%" Video

Add a Comment

Sign in »
*0 / 3000 Character Maximum

1 Comment

Filter by:
Concerned

The song in the YouTube video below discusses the cause of the current issues in government (financial crisis, debt, fiscal cliff, etc). Although the cause of the issues is excess influence controlling elections/policy decisions in Washington, the larger point of the song is that the true cause is a flawed system that allows these influencers to force everyone to behave badly (lyric: "Most of them weren't bad, they were just drawn that way"). The full lyrics are printed in the YouTube video description.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNl8rI7UOCQ

December 06 2012 at 10:54 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply