Music to Fight Evil
seek inspiration from 50 years of protest with Jon Ewing
featuring artists like
Bad Religion, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Mavis Staples, Grace Petrie, The Clash, Woody Guthrie, IDLES, She Drew the Gun, Nina Simone, The Specials
Tolerance is good. There should be more of it. And whether you’re from the Left or the Right, don’t be fooled into thinking you have the monopoly on it. But we need to draw a line.
Let’s be clear: tolerance means accepting opinions and beliefs that conflict with your own. It doesn’t mean accepting prejudice in place of evidence, nor injustice in place of equality. And when the opinions and beliefs of others lead to deprivation and suffering – yours or anyone else’s – you don’t have to be tolerant any more. It’s time to rise up and act. The songs in this list shouldn’t have to exist. We should all just get along. Until that happens, seek inspiration from 50 years of protest, by way of a lot of anger and a little love.
Harriet Tubman’s Gonna Carry Me Home – The Long Ryders
26 November 2019
Paying tribute to one of America’s greatest 19th century folk heroes, Harriet Tubman’s Gonna Carry Me Home is a history lesson from a white Southerner sung in the voice of a long-dead black slave – a spiritual in the great oral tradition, giving a lesson in bravery and compassion to a new generation, from the faithful to the faithful…
Superheroes – Skint & Demoralised
10 September 2019
Powerful and cinematic, Superheroes by Skint & Demoralised achieves an epic scope within its economical 2 minutes and 42 seconds by setting a spoken word story about a young boy’s innocent wisdom to a rousingly dramatic score. And as it builds to its heart-splittingly moving climax, it is made all the more poignant by the knowledge that it really happened…
Change – Mavis Staples
4 September 2019
The voice of the legendary Mavis Staples is sounding more soulful than ever on her raw new album, We Get By. And on the opening track, written and produced by Ben Harper, Ms Staples pleads simply and repeatedly for the violence and intolerance of our age to end. “Bullets flying, mothers crying,” she sings in this concise three minute blues, accompanied by a growling guitar riff. “We gotta change around here”…
Aleppo – Leyla McCalla
18 August 2019
“Fists are flying in the name of love,” sings Leyla McCalla on Aleppo, the sobering standout centrepiece of her third album, The Capitalist Blues. “So much violence in the name of love,” she continues as the guitar pierces us with a shriek of obstreperous feedback. “We look on and on, we don’t heed the call / Who knows if we care at all?…
Broken World – The Interrupters
22 July 2019
Lively LA ska punks The Interrupters are calling for greater unity at a time of great division. And their song even contains a few specifics about how we might get there. Unfortunately, it’s going to require a bit of sacrifice, so, you know, just scroll on by if that’s going to be too hard…
Take the Good – Jon Worthy & The Bends
15 July 2019
Inspired by his eye-opening, first-hand experience of extreme poverty in The Philippines in 2018, the closing song from Jon Worthy’s new album, Something’s Gotta Give, is a reminder to himself, at a very dark time in his life, that no matter how bad things seem, you have a lot to be grateful for when you are a young, white, American male…
Woke Up This Morning – Alabama 3
18 June 2019
The song that so perfectly epitomised the dark heart of 21st Century East Coast American organised crime, familiar to millions from the opening credits of The Sopranos, is not even American. It was written in London by an Elvis-loving Mormon from South Wales and a Glaswegian polymath. And it’s not about the American gangland. It was inspired by the true story of a British woman who killed her abusive husband… or was it?…
Killing in the Name – Brass Against
22 May 2019
This new version of Rage Against the Machine’s mould-breaking rap metal explosion of anger – as interpreted by Brooklyn brass band Brass Against – is Rage as you’ve never heard it before…
Charlottesville – Bryan Toney
1 May 2019
Charlottesville by Bryan Toney is a song about watching the media coverage of an appalling tragedy in your own backyard and realising you can no longer pretend that race hatred is something that happens far away to other people.
A Change is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke
9 April 2019
The gentle humility of A Change is Gonna Come, Sam Cooke’s 1964 plea for emancipation, belies the simmering fury that inspired it, a fury that reached boiling point in America where this song became an anthem for millions of disenfranchised black people who took to the streets to make that change a reality…
Head Held High – John D Revelator
26 March 2019
It takes a remarkable sort of songwriter to combine a moral code passed down through the generations with a “fuck you” to a disgraced sibling and turn it into a foot-stomping, uptempo, country-folk barnstormer with a sly sense of humour that can get 1,000 Wurzels fans singing along.
Rollercoaster – India.Arie
5 March 2019
The modern world is dizzying. Mass communication floods our senses with an overwhelming torrent of new ideas and there are countless influencers – celebrities, intellectuals, politicians, business leaders and spiritual charlatans – proposing the path to navigate it all. Indie.Arie’s Rollercoaster is a modern take on the immortal Sixties graffiti gag “stop the world – I want to get off”,…