Songs Of Protest

I thought I had escaped right-wing, conservative governments when I migrated to Australia and left the Bush/Cheney regime behind, but Prime Minister Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party are proving to be just as bad as those two were.  During the 2013 Federal election Abbott promised there would be "no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST, and no cuts to the ABC or SBS."  One by one these promises are being broken, and when you add in this Government's denial of climate change and deplorable treatment of refugees, I feel like I'm back in the Bush/Cheney years.

Of course, extreme governments can lead to great art- especially music and songs of protest.  Two recent examples are as follows:



Joelistics' "Say I'm Good" off his second album Blue Volume is a fantastic take down of the current state of Australia, with a great video done by Oh Yeah Wow.  I love the lyric: "I don't buy the bullshit dreams of an aspirationalist modern Australia."



The Basics' "The Lucky Country" is a play off of Donald Horne's 1964 book of the same name.  It's a blistering attack on the age of entitlement in modern day Australia, with an animated video created by Andrew Mortlock (who also did the clip for "So Hard For You").  "Someone called this the lucky country, where our leadership is second rate" couldn't be a more apt lyric if you tried.