The Jesus of Suburbia: Music as a social critic.

A protest song is a song which protests perceived problems in society. These songs cover a wide variety of topics, and deal with issues and concerns ranging from personal and interpersonal to local and global matters. Every major movement in Western history has been accompanied by its own collection of protest songs, from slave emancipation to women's suffrage, the labor movement, civil rights, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and many others. Over time, songs have come to protest more abstract, ethical issues, such as injustice, racial discrimination, the morality of war in general (as opposed to purely protesting individual wars), globalization, inflation, social inequalities, and incarceration. Such songs tend to become more popular during times of disruption among social groups. [snip]

Some of the most internationally famous examples of protest songs come from the United States. They include "We Shall Overcome" (a song popular in the labor movement and later the Civil rights movement), Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind and Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On".....[snip]....Protest songs are generally associated with folk music, but more recently they have been produced in all genres of music.

Contemporary Protest Songs
Conor Oberst, lead singer/songwriter of the band Bright Eyes, writer of the anti-Bush protest song "When the President Talks to God"
Conor Oberst, lead singer/songwriter of the band Bright Eyes, writer of the anti-Bush protest song "When the President Talks to God"

Modern-day mainstream artists to have written protest songs on this subject include Pink with her appeal to Bush in "Dear Mr. President" (2006), Bright Eyes with "When the President Talks to God" (2005) (which was hailed by the influential Portland, Oregon, alternative paper Willamette Week as "this young century's most powerful protest song."[45]), Dispatch's anti-war underground hit "The General", and Devendra Banhart's "Heard somebody Say" (2005) in which he sings "it's simple, we don't want to kill". In 2003 Lenny Kravitz recorded the protest song "We Want Peace" with Iraqi pop star Kadim Al Sahir, Palestinian strings musician Simon Shaheen and Lebanese percussionist Jamey Hadded. According to Kravitz the song "is about more than Iraq. It is about our role as people in the world and that we all should cherish freedom and peace." [46] The Decemberists, while not normally known for writing political songs (or songs set in the present day, for that matter), contributed to the genre in 2005 with their understated but scathing song "16 Military Wives," which singer Colin Meloy described thus: "It's kind of a protest song, [...] My objective is to make sense of foreign policy decisions taken by the current Bush administration and showing how they resemble solipsistic bullying." [47] Pearl Jam also included two anti-Bush songs ("World Wide Suicide", "Marker In The Sand") in their 2006 album Pearl Jam.

American avant-garde singer Bobby Conn wrote an album of anti-Bush songs with his 2001 collection The Homeland. Conn said of his art that "All the records that I've done are a critique of what's going on in contemporary America" [48], and he is an outspoken critic of the Bush regime. Conn has admitted that while he actively protests what he sees as the evils of American society, he is not always at ease with such a label for himself. "I've always done lots of social commentary that I believe in pretty strongly but I am very uncomfortable with the role of the artist as a meaningful social critic...my whole generation [is] a confused group of people with an ambivalent way of dealing with protest." [49]

That looks like an interesting site, ehBeth, thanks! Do you what username nimh uses there?