It’s all well and good for performing artists to kvetch against ‘the man’ in a protest song or two. But if you’re hoping to get signed to a major label, you may feel reticent to get specific. Not if you want to go from TikTok to vinyl to SuperBowl halftime, that is.
In other words, songs about conspiratorial topics from mainstream artists are pretty thin on the ground. I had to dig a bit to find some worthy samples of toe-tappers for tinfoil-wearers (and I say that as a proud wearer of highly reflective headgear).
Anyway, away we go. Curl up in the listening room of your decommissioned missile silo and turn up these tracks to a Nigel Tufnel ‘eleven.’
Marianne Faithfull, That’s How Every Empire Falls
Padlock the door and board the windows
Put the people in the street
"It's just my job, " he says "I'm sorry."
And draws a check, goes home to eat
But at night he tells his woman
"I know I hide behind the laws."
She says, "You're only taking orders."
That's how every empire falls
In this tragic ballad originally written and performed by Tom Prine, a respectable but secretive man with high-level connections has a moment of self-reflection. A very rare kind of song, about how the toxic mix of power and unaccountability can eat a nation from the inside out - from the family outward.
Timbuk 3, Waves of Grain
Now rummaging through the ravaged rubble
I wonder, is it worth the trouble?
Does the slightest trace of truth remain?
Running through the waves of grain.
This Madison, Wisconsin folk-rock band was led by the husband and wife team of Pat MacDonald and Barbara Kooyman, who specialized in caustic social commentary with a beat. Here’s their disturbing but lyrically inventive rendering of a political assassination - and its fallout for participants and witnesses alike. From their 1989 album, The Edge of Allegiance.
Ian Hunter, Weed
Humans are stupid and expensive to breed /So let em all let em all let em smoke weed…
Not that I have anything against weed per se, but over the past decade it’s been astounding to witness the Empire’s farcical ’war on drugs’ shade into a transnational ‘harm reduction’ clusterfuck. (To give just one example, in my province there’s reportedly open use and dealing of hard drugs in hospitals, of all places.)
Such loss of social capital doesn’t hurt the real owners of the world, of course, who might even appreciate a few useless eaters popping their clogs due to their worst excesses (overdose deaths at record highs in my neck of the woods). That said, I may be extrapolating too much from the chorus of Ian’s tune, which name checks the corruptions of power in its many-tentacled guises.
From the ageless 84-year old’s new album, Defiance: Part 2, released just this week.
Patti Smith, Radio Baghdad
It’s always worthwhile to remember that the war on Iraq was founded on a complete and utter lies involving Saddam’s mythical “weapons of mass destruction,” which the mainstream press recited as holy writ. Patti Smith was among the few artists of the time who spoke out musically on the war and its fallout. This epic 12-minute song comes bundled with a bitter historical perspective. “They’re robbing the cradle of civilization,” indeed.
Rickie Lee Jones, Little Mysteries
Now four years later
Another senator hits the ground
This time the boys make sure
That his wife is with him when he goes down
Sounds like a reference to the mysterious 2002 plane crash that claimed the life of Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone, whose upcoming election was threat to the Republican balance of power in Congress - at a time when the White House was trying to build legislative support for the war on Iraq.
No doubt “the brother from Florida” and the ‘boys from Texas” are references to the election-stealing Bush-Cheney axis of weevils. From Rickie Lee Jones 2003 album, The Evening of My Best Day.
Experiment IV, Kate Bush
Kate was always ready to have a go at any weird song angle - how to cast spells to become invisible, imagining herself as the ghost Cathy from the novel Wuthering Heights, or admiring the abominable snowman. “Experiment IV,” released as a single in 1986 to promote Kate’s greatest hits album, The Whole Story, tells of a secret military plan to concoct a sound powerful enough to kill a person at a distance.
In the video the sound is personified by Kate herself, transforming from an airborne apparition to a horrifying harpy (spoiler alert: everyone at the installation dies).
Fun fact - decades ago, the US defense department began researching acoustic weapon technology, which is now in the armory of police departments across the world for use against public demonstrations. Won’t kill you, but you certainly won’t like the effects.
Michael Franti, Oh My God
In 2001 the former Spearhead singer merged the themes of war, poverty, surveillance and racism into a song that circles from disturbing to mournful to funny - and back. The studio version is sweetened with Temptations-style backing vocals, but the message is as painful as a snake’s venom.
“Oh My God” rhymes off a rap sheet of racial grievances, starting with the US legal system: “Anonymous notes left in the pockets and coats/Of judges and juries from ‘Frisco to Jersey.” A particularly high-tech lynching results from some politician’s careerism: “A lethal injection, the night before the election/’Cause he got donations from the prison guard’s union.”
Franti raises the rap genre from bling-and-bitches bluster to something deeper, with the chorus repeating, “Oh my God, they’ve got us thinkin’ genocide.” He disses the cultural gatekeepers for “tellin’ the youth don’t be so violent,” while their paymasters “drop bombs on every single continent.”
The singer’s imaginings of darker possibilities for his people seemed almost prophetic with subsequent events in Ferguson and other racial hotspots.
Stephen Marley, Mind Control
I include this Rastafarian rejection of propaganda and deceit by Bob Marley’s son because, more than anything else, it rocks.
Eric Clapton and Van Morrison, Stand and Deliver
Stand and deliver
You let 'em put the fear on you
Stand and deliver
But not a word you heard was true
But if there's nothing you can say
There may be nothing you can do
Of all the iconic singer/songwriters out there, very few big names made musical statements in the past few years against the repressive absurdities of the Covid lockdowns and mandates.
Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Patti Smith, Tom Morello, and many others fully bought into the big pharma narrative, becoming enthusiastic mouthpieces for media-massaged groupthink. The rest of the music industry fell into discreet silence. But not Eric Clapton and Van Morrison, in 2020.
And along those lines, from Van Morrison’s 2022 album, What’s It Gonna Take?
Van Morrison, Damage and Recovery
Don Henley, Inside Job
The blistering and bardic title track from the 1999 album Inside Job anticipated the apex predators’ adventurism in the coming millennium, from the canyons of Wall Street to deserts of the Mideast to the conference rooms of Davos. Not a big radio hit for the former Eagle… I can’t imagine why not!
While you were sleeping
They came and took it all away
The lanes and the meadows
The places where you used to play
It was an inside job
By the well-connected
Your little protest
Summarily rejected
It was an inside job
Like it always is
Chalk it up to business as usual
While we are dreaming
This little island disappears
While you are looking the other way
They'll take your right to own your own ideas
And it's an inside job
Favors collected
Your trusted servants
Have left you unprotected
It was an inside job
Like it always is
Just chalk it up
To business as usual
You think that you're so smart
But you don't have a fucking clue
What those men up in the towers
Are doing to me and you
And they'll keep doin' it and doin' it
And doin' it and doin' it
And doin' it and doin' it
And doin' it and doin' it
Until we all wake up
Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up
I know what I've done wrong
I am acquainted with the night
I know how hard it is
To always walk out in the light
And it's an inside job
To learn about forgiving
It's an inside job
To hang on to the joy of living
They know the road by which you came
They know your mother's maiden name
And what you had for breakfast
And what you've hidden in the mattress
Insect politics
Indifferent universe
Bang your head against the wall
But apathy is worse
It's an inside job
It's an inside job
It's an inside job
Yeh, yeah
It's an inside job
It's an inside job
It's an inside job
It's an inside job
It's an inside job
It's an inside job
BONUS SONG
Conspiracy Music Guru, I Told You So
Now for some fun. Can’t say I’m prepared to sign off on everything this dude growls about, including NASA faking shit and “the dinosaur fraud.” 🤣 It’s a nifty rocker nonetheless, with a familiar-sounding riff.
Gil Scott Heron…good call, Glen. Looked up the lyrics. Haven’t listened yet, but words great.
Don’t forget MIA’s middle finger, showing that the Super Bowl is not a foolproof filter.
Great list - Radio Baghdad -
diva-stating.
Agents of empire are masters of obfuscation and rewriting history. Words- the ultimate tool of the conspirators. I was reminded of a lyric by Gil Scot Heron.
“And still we are victims of word games
Semantics is always a bitch:
Places once referred to as under-developed
Are now called 'mineral rich.'
And the game goes on eternally
Unity kept just beyond reach
Egypt and Libya used to be in Africa
They've been moved to the Middle East
There are examples galore I assure you
But if interpreting were left up to me
I'd be sure every time folks knew this version wasn't mine
Which is why it is called 'His story”