When I came of age, I listened to Joan Baez, Holly Near anti-war songs during the late 1970s and 1980s. Sure, there are singer/songwriters who you would expect to have anti-war/political songs -- Ani Difranco, Holly Near.
Chuck Brodsky's Dangerous Times lyrics catch me every time
These are dangerous times
And so we lose our rights
While these terrorists among us
Do their dirty work at night
There isn't time to read
The contents of the bills
That Congress votes for anyway
Up there on The Hill
There's terror in our midst
It wears the good disguise
Fools alot of people
They seem like such regular guys
Rewriting all the rules
You don't have any say
In fact they even count on you
To look the other way
There's terror in our midst
All over the tv
It's what's behind the words
That scares the daylights out of me
The twisting of the facts
The stretching of the truth
The terrorists among us
They manipulate the news
But....don't count out the other singer/songwriters...hip hop. The Hip Hop community is stepping up to write anti-war/political songs. Take a look at HipHopSlam. Direct, no messing around lyrics that tell the urban African American take on the war, politics. DJs of Mass Destruction are pretty blunt: "What Weapons Of Mass Destruction" and "Nobody Cares (Die for oil sucker)" are two songs.
What they say about how the music is created -- The website calls it "cut and paste music"...
The political cut-and-paste production style that dominants the War (If It Feels Good, Do It) compilation is inspired by Steinski, who pioneered this genre back in the early 1980's along with other artists such as Keith La Blanc, who in 1984 produced for Tommy Boy No Sellout/Malcolm X which drew from Malcolm X speeches over hip hop beats, and Bonzo Goes To Washington whose 1984 single Five Minutes was built around Ronald Reagan's infamous "We begin bombing in five minutes" quote. At this same time Steinski, along with partner Double Dee, was in the midst of recording the classic Lessons trilogy, the first Lesson "The Payback Mix" being released in 1983. But it was after he went solo in 1985 that Steinski (along with his fictional band "Mass Media") began recording the groundbreaking song The Motorcade Sped On which would define the genre of "political cut-and-paste" music. Instead of using just one sample repeatedly to create an abstract message "Motorcade" took the concept of a hip hop driven, sample-based, political/historical commentary to a whole new level with its abundant use of various samples-mostly cut-up TV/radio news reports-all cohesively weaved together over hypnotic beats and breaks to eloquently retell the tragic story of the assassination of JFK. Unfortunately, due to some of the samples, this masterpiece would never be commercially released in the US. It was released eventually in the UK in January '87 on a free 7" EP with NME magazine.Consequently this political cut-and-paste genre, which sometimes employs electronic music as its backdrop, has become increasingly prolific especially in the USA where sampling political figures is copyright free. Hence countless
American politicians have become recording artists without ever setting foot in a studio: the biggest stars of this sample-based genre being presidents. From Reagan, whose aforementioned "Five Minutes" sound bite has
fueled many songs (and even makes a cameo on this Hip Hop Slam compilation), to George Bush senior who pops up on several tracks on the same compilation, to Bill Clinton, and of course Dubya (the backbone of this CD), US leaders have supplied cut-and-paste artists with much material. For some reason Republican presidents tend to be the most popular to sample with State of the Union (S.O.T.U.) addresses and wartime presidential TV news bites ranking as the most recorded sources.[from HipHopSlam War]