Don't start me talking/I could talk all night

If there’s one thing I love, it’s the way that every few years, the Australian public decides that a song which has an overt political message should be in the music charts.

I’m never sure how this happens, because a lot of what seems to define what is popular musically is against the grain of being beaten around the head with a political message. I mean, this is the country that spawned “Shaddapayaface”, after all.

So here, in no particular order, are my favourite pop music tributes to social justice.


Solid Rock – Goanna

Didn’t we all get sucked in with this one? It’s the mid-80s, there’s a bit of a kicking riff and all of a sudden we’re all land rights activists. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Plus, I pretty much wanted to be Rose Bygrave or Marcia Howard (I didn’t much care which) when I was six.


Parade – Pretty Girls Make Graves

What a bloody ace song. I may or may not have emailed the Rights at Work team suggesting it should be the Rights@Work anthem. I got no response. I’d like to think they’re too busy fighting the power. I’d also like to think they haven’t saved all their emails and aren’t in the process of revealing my secret identity right now.


Oliver’s Army – Elvis Costello

It’s basically ABBA with a political message. In fact, Costello and music writers pretty much agree that it’s the jangling piano line that got a song which includes the line

Only takes one itchy trigger
One more widow, one less white n*****r

to a major chart position in the UK and Australia.

Costello wrote it after seeing British soldiers in Belfast who were little more than kids in the 1970s. The military recruiting office at the time was putting most of its resources into recruiting 16 year old school drop outs as "cannon fodder" in major skirmishes around the world.


Help is Coming – Crowded House

Atmospheric, haunting, sad refugee story. I love it for this:

Escape
The anger of our past
And pray
That peace will come at last
And stay…

It's the kind of song you would like to know how to play on guitar, if Neil Finn wasn't such a task-master when creating chord structures.


Big Yellow Taxi – Joni Mitchell

Oh how I love this song. I love the dippiness of it. And oh how I sing it, every time I go to Melbourne Museum, where in fact they have practically “cut down all the trees, put ‘em in a tree museum” in their rainforest display. Okay, so their trees are growing, but still, it does set you to humming.


Like a Dog – Powderfinger

I got in trouble for having this quote

If you treat me like a dog
And keep me locked in a cage
I’m not relaxed or comfortable
I’m aggravation and rage

at the bottom of my work email in 2001. I took it off, but I wasn’t sorry/happy.


Treaty – Yothu Yindi

It’s the organ riff. It’s Tim Finn endlessly looping the word “treaty”. It said basically everything we thought was hopeful and possible in the early 90s. Now we have a 40 year anniversary of the 1967 referendum, true reconciliation is being pushed further and further from the agenda and Howard swanning around like he was personally responsible for the years' long struggle of Indigenous people to win their basic rights as citizens (unfinished business, if there ever was any).


One Country - Midnight Oil

Interestingly enough despite their immense popularity Midnight Oil were never on Countdown. Fact*! So even then the ABC had to look out for lefty bias? 'One Country' talks to my uneasiness about nationalism, and thinks about unity of nation in a way that is both cynical and hopeful at the same time.


From Little Things, Big Things Grow - Paul Kelly

This song just makes my eyes water and a big lump form in my throat. Every single time. It's Vincent Lingiari being a ground-breaking activist! It's Gough helping to right the wrongs! It's Paul Kelly with Ernie Dingo on didgeridoo!


What are your favourites? Or is politics mixed with music just too much to bear?



* sourced from Peter Wilmoth's excellent 'Glad All Over'