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If you are asking: ‘Where is all the protest music?’ you aren’t looking hard enough
If you’re prepared to look beyond guitar-based rock music, you’ll see the protest song is still alive and well, says IAN SINCLAIR

Every now and then an opinion piece is published in the press lamenting the lack of political songwriting today.

A couple of assumptions lie behind this much repeated concern about popular music.
First, “political music” is taken to mean music giving voice to left-leaning, anti-Establishment politics — aka protest music.

Second, that the “golden age” of political music ran from the 1960s to the 1980s, from Bob Dylan’s broadsides against the military-industrial complex and US racism to John Lennon’s feminist Woman Is the Nigger of the World and a slew of anti-Vietnam war songs.

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