Two Yutes’ review of the latest Bruce Springsteen album reminded me of an article I read recently about why protest songs these days suck. (The article suggests that “Last to Die” on the Springsteen album is actually one of the better protest songs to come out in a few years.)

Almost all of the bands I’ve listened to heavily in the last year or two—Pearl Jam, Dream Theater, Muse, Nine Inch Nails, Queensryche, Arcade Fire, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, the list goes on—have put out anti-war or anti-Bush songs at some point recently. And while they’re not all as bad as the New Republic article claims, they do tend to suck more often than not. I’d agree that most of the political protest songs I’ve heard since 9/11 have ranged from “meh” to unlistenable. And I swear it’s not just because my political views are the ones typically being protested; I actually have a secret respect for a good socially subversive, countercultural song.

The article argues that most protest songs these days suck because the musicians get so worked up writing Fight the Man ™ lyrics that they forget to write good music to go along with it, which may be the case. Certainly there are a lot of protest songs with good lyrics and bad music (some are cited in the article), and some with bad lyrics and good music (Muse’ “Take a Bow” and Queensryche’s “Thank You”), but a lot of them sound like the musicians just hauled an unreleased-for-a-good-reason tune out of their archives and used their latest angry liberal blog post as the lyrics (Pearl Jam’s subtle masterpiece “Bu$hleager”).

I think a lot of them fail for the same reason that contemporary Christian music so often fails: when you are more concerned with preaching a message than with writing music that people can enjoy and relate to, you rarely produce great art. And there’s also the fact that when you’re preaching a viewpoint that’s shared by 99.5% of the art-producing world, you are not exactly risking your life with a bold, unique countercultural statement, and part of the thrill of a good protest song is participating in something that feels genuinely subversive.

So I guess I’m curious: what good protest music have you heard lately, and what makes it good? I think my favorite piece of recent protest music is the Black Angels’ album Passover; both the music and the lyrics evoke an era of indignant, anti-establishment anger (there’s actually a song on the album protesting the Vietnam War, and by implication the Iraq War), but it never devolves into blustering rage. The album trips up at the end with a painful anti-war song that falls into the “terrible lyrics, mediocre music” category, but the rest of the album is provocative enough that I can forgive it.

What do you think? Who do you listen to when you need to rage against the machine?