Four Protest Songs That Backfired Spectacularly
Music has been a tool of the oppressed since the first caveman beat his fists against a rock and bemoaned the hierarchy of the food chain. These days, however, popular music mostly serves as a beat to which people can rub their crotches against each other, ideally in the club. That makes it really easy for the masses to misinterpret the message of a song that does happen to have a deeper meaning. You know, on account of all the crotch rubbing.
‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’
“Sunday Bloody Sunday” was U2’s call for the loyalists and rebels in Northern Ireland to just stop fighting and hug it out. Weird that it didn’t work, right? One reason it didn’t was because that message isn’t actually super clear. If you want to hear it as a rallying cry for one side, you can, and people did, to the point that Bono had to add the disclaimer, “This is not a rebel song,” when they played it live. He later said that the song “was actually dangerous in the sense that on hearing it, some people wanted to hurt us … from both sides of the sectarian divide,” which you may note is the exact opposite of what he was trying to accomplish.
‘Born in the USA’
Some advice: If you’re going to write a song about how much a country sucks, don’t make the chorus sound like a patriotic rallying cry. For the last 40 years, Springsteen’s subtle sense of irony has been his downfall as people at Fourth of July celebrations steadfastly ignore the verses that describe a Vietnam veteran shunned by the country he fought for in favor of screaming the title through a mouthful of hot dog.
Even people who listened to the whole song back in the ‘80s still came away with the impression of the song as a “grand, cheerful affirmation.” In fact, the writer of that column was the one who suggested the song to Reagan’s reelection campaign, beginning a long series of cease-and-desist letters sent by Springsteen’s lawyers to various politicians. When he plays the song these days, it’s as an acoustic ballad to make sure everyone knows it’s a bummer.
‘Take a Knee, My Ass (I Won’t Take a Knee)’
You might not know the name Neal McCoy because you’re unbearably cool, but he’s a country singer with a 40-year career and two number-one singles under his ostentatiously buckled belt. That put him in the perfect position to record a song protesting the protest by NFL players against police brutality led by Colin Kaepernick in the late 2010s, which many country music fans were real mad about for completely non-racist reasons.
Unfortunately, the song he recorded in 2017 was called “Take a Knee, My Ass (I Won’t Take a Knee),” a title that sounds, as one critic put it, “like McCoy is ordering his own buttocks to drop to the ground and pay their ass-y respects.” Everyone was too confused by the grammar of the title to absorb its message, which was probably just as well.
‘They Don’t Care About Us’
As the 20th century’s most famous Black man, Michael Jackson got political surprisingly rarely in his music, and in 1996, we found out why. That was the year he released “They Don’t Care About Us,” an anti-racism song that missed the mark so badly it actually came right back around to being racist. Specifically, it included several seemingly anti-Semitic lyrics, including “Jew me, sue me,” aaaaaand that’s the only one we can print.
Jackson explained it as seeing himself as “the voice of everyone,” but the offending lyrics were censored in subsequent releases of the song, its message was drowned in the controversy and the controversy itself was drowned by Jackson’s legacy, which is so full of yikes that people barely remember when he sang the slur that rhymes with it.
