The long lost art of the protest song has been missing from modern music for far too long. From its height in the '60s and '70s, songs with political content slowly became less and less cool thanks to douchebags like Bono and Eddie Vedder whining about stupid shit like Africa and Ticketmaster. It got so bad that the only relevant songs to blast from the window of your beat-up, sticker covered Jeep in righteous political anger were those same damn songs from the '60s and '70s. True, "Fortunate Son" is great but where was our generation's angry statements and keen wit? In place of the protest song all we got were awkard 30-somethings getting in touch with their stunted teenage emotions. For years. What a bum fucking deal emo was. But this season the protest song is back and better than ever! Just in time for the election, BBW presents a guide to some of the best and worst protest songs since Bush's stolen election in 2000.

In the great spirit of protest, we say "fuck the RIAA!" That's right folks, we'll be hosting every single one of these protest songs until November 3rd, the day after the election. So please feel free to download any or all of them. There's just enough music to completely fill an 80 minute CD-R, thus we encourage -- nay, we beg and plead you -- to burn your very own post-millennial protest mix to blast from the windows of your previously mentioned crappy punk-rock Jeep. The songs are listed in the suggested playing order, but this is the internet, so do whatever you want.

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Radiohead
"2 + 2 = 5 (The Lukewarm)" from Hail to the Thief
Genre: Radiohead, Rating: 5
Ah, the classic Orwellian reference. From 1984: "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows". Thom Yorke has said time and time again that Hail to the Thief has no political connotations. I think Thom Yorke is full of shit. What are lyrics like "I'll stay home forever / Where two & two always makes up five" and "All hail to the thief / But I am not! / Don't question my authority or put me in the dock / Cozimnot!" supposed to mean, then? The song starts softly with the feedback of a guitar being plugged in. Thom sings quietly over quietly picked guitar chords and a softly chopping electronic beat before reaching a great trembling breakdown that harks back to the days of OK Computer. Then, suddenly the song explodes and the drums, bass and keyboards put out an insane rhythm for Thom to put his nearly wordless vocalizing over. It's the most rocking song Radiohead have recorded in years -- power chords and everything -- and Yorke sounds like a lonely destitute man, lost and confused amidst the blinking lights and blaring horns of the impersonal city.
-austin

David Byrne
"Empire" from Grown Backwards
Genre: Mature pop, Rating: 4
David Byrne made a great comeback this year, putting out a solo album that was not only his best in years but that also name-checked Bornbackwards. Give us a break, we had to like it. Like Sonic Youth, the most political of Byrne's songs is also his most subtle. With its total lack of percussion, you might not even pay "Empire" much mind while listening to Grown Backwards, but as its own entity the song packs a powerful satirical punch, both musically and lyrically. At its beginning the song is just a soft bed of organ swashes that support Byrne's deep baritone, but as it progresses the song's rhythm is kept by the soft strumming of a nylon-string guitar. A brass section appears, subtly mimicking the organ before building to a powerful wave that gives the song an epic swell. Gentle trumpet solos fill the middle of the song, providing a calm, classical counterpoint to Byrne's powerfully satirical delivery.

He captures the patriotic mood of post-9/11 perfectly, and in just eight lines, "In national elections / In songs raised on high / With stirring emotions / As tears fill your eyes / In democratic fever / For national defense / I am a mountain / Like birds upon a fence." He is calm in the midst of chaos, but Byrne quickly shows how easily the Bush administration twisted this national consensus for its own agenda, "Young artists and writers / Please heed the call / What's good for business / Is good for us all / And as it is in Nature / So it is in life / The weak among us perish / The strong alone survive". With no real chorus to speak of, "Empire" does its job admirably, working both subtlety and wit into the equation for a wonderfully potent piece of music that expertly channels sarcasm and woe instead of the predictable rage found in most political songs.
-exadore

Green Day
"American Idiot" from American Idiot
Genre: Pop-punk, Rating: 2
Hey, Green Day. What's the deal? You never wanted to put political commentary in your songs before. What, were you too busy copying Stiff Little Fingers to realize you had your own stiff little fingers up your collective asses? Sorry guys, you came into this game too little, too late. You make some good points in your song, like "Well maybe I'm the faggot, America / I'm not a part of a redneck agenda / Now everybody do the propaganda / and sing along in the age of paranoia," but really, is anyone listening to it now? You used to sing about masturbation and sniffing glue and now you want to put politics in there as well? You aren't the Dwarves, so I don't think you can pull that off. The song itself sounds like the band could have written it over a decade ago, back when they were popular. By the end of the song I've heard the same fucking guitar riff about 40 fucking times, and I'm damn tired of it! So much for evolution, huh guys? Your music is standard, your voice is annoying, and your heyday is past.
-austin

Eminem
"Mosh" from Encore
Genre: Commercial hiphop, Rating: 4
This comes as a surprise, yet I'm really not surprised at all. I mean, Em has taken shots at the government before (more specifically, the FCC), but this is a song specifically aimed at getting people to vote from a guy who once fantastized about killing his mother. And he doesn't just want his listeners to vote, but to vote George W. Bush out of office. The song's beat is really nothing to fawn over, but on the other hand, the beat really isn't the focus. Shady states his aims very clearly: he wants the troops home, he wants people to vote, he wants an end to the culture of fear and consumption, an end to the greed. Since Public Enemy, the commercial viability of political rap has been down the shitter, but "Mosh" seems to be bringing it all back home. Eminem sounds Pissed with a capitol fucking P. These are the lyrics that I knew could come out of him one day. Sure, the moshpit metaphor is a bit hokey, but, that aside, Eminem is on the top of his game. "Let the President answer on high anarchy / Strap him with AK-47, let him go / Fight his own war, let him impress daddy that way". Truer words have never been spoken.
-austin

Decahedron
"Lt. Col. Questions Himself" from Disconnection_Imminent
Genre: Post-hardcore, Rating: 5
Probably the most Frodus-sounding song off of Decahedron's new album, "Lt. Col. Questions Himself" is an indictment of war and using patriotism to manipulate people. The guitar sounds like it was stripped directly from And We Washed Our Weapons in the Sea as Jason Hamacher drums out a constant, pounding rhythm. It's also got familiar Frodian breakdowns. Even the theme of brainwashing through military training rings familiar, reminiscent of the band's previous fascination with science fiction and mind control. The screams are harsh and the layers of jagged, mechanical guitars remind one why the term 'spazz-core' had to be invented to describe these guys when they performed in Frodus. The hardest hitting thing that vocalist Shelby Cinca screams over the guitar breakdowns is, "We cringe paying taxes / Because our money goes/ To pave new trade-routes / With blankets of blood".
-austin

Talib Kweli
"The Proud" from Quality
Genre: Underground hip-hop, Rating: 4
"The Proud" is just Kweli doing what he does best: droppin' knowledge over a beat (this, a mid-tempo one from Ayatollah). This song is a narrative of different events during the year of 2001 from Kweli's view. Before every verse, he sets the scene for his rhymes: the first event is the execution of Timothy Mcveigh, the second is a drunken police officer killing an entire family in Brooklyn. Kweli is poingnant in his description of these two events, but he really hits home when he takes on the third event: 9/11 and the Bush administration. Say what you will about hip-hop but nothing beats hearing someone say, "The President is Bush, the Vice President's a Dick / So a whole lot of fuckin' is what we gon' get / They don't wanna raise the babies so the election is fixed / That's why we don't be fuckin' with politics".
-austin

Trans Am
"Divine Invasion" from Liberation
Genre: Instrumental, Rating: 4
This cut from Trans Am's glorious 80's new-wavish style protest album, Liberation, is probably the best instrumental song from the LP. The track starts off with the din of real Homeland Security helicopters overhead. The band left the studio window open when recording in Washington DC so as to record the urgency of the city post-9/11. Over the helicopter, keyboards fade in, playing the part of a droning air raid siren. The guitar is heavily chorused and each time the drum hits it's like the falling of a bomb. All of this builds to a huge crescendo and then, with the squeal of the synthesizer everything but the siren starts to fade out, as if the planes are bombing something in the distance. The drums return with even more ferocity, and as soon as they are there, they're gone again in the drone of TV static.
-austin

Radio 4
"Nation" From Stealing of a Nation
Genre: Dance-punk, Rating: 2
Taking a break from the tepid dance beats of the rest of Stealing of a Nation, Radio 4 tackle a weird kind of industrial dub that's only minimally more interesting. A Jamaican dub bass line and a programmed beat that sounds a little too similar to "Straight to Hell" by the Clash support the song as everything else piddles away into cheap reverb effects. Guitar stabs echo out into the darkness and vague electronic sounds add a certain unnecessary 80s industrial vibe that'd make Trent Reznor smile. Vocal Anthony Roman delivers a sing-speak barely-melody and rarely modulates his delivery, stretching out a word here or shouting another one there. The most interesting part of the song comes at the very end though, when the song actually does embrace true dub and everything is subsumed in delayed echoes with vocals and guitar fragments floating out of the muck for brief seconds, previously buried elements come to the fore and that stolen beat retreats to the back of the mix. Not exactly an anthem or a rallying cry, but the song's most exciting moment comes with the repetition of the album's title, "Stealing of a Nation", which can be interpreted as either the 2000 election, the illegal war in Iraq, or the Bush administration's slow co-option of American values to support their radical agenda and stifle dissent. Whichever it is, we all lose.
-exadore

Le Tigre
"New Kicks" from This Island
Genre: Punk, Rating: 1
Wow, Le Tigre sure fucked up with this, their first major label single. Rather than following their typical modus operandi of wrapping deadly feminist political screeds in danceable candy-coated electro-pop, the band chooses to just sample political speeches, slogans and news reports over a repetitive drum machine for three and a half minutes. Instead of logical arguments or some interpretation of the modern war, we merely get shouted slogans, Susan Sarandon quoting Eleanor Roosevelt, and irresponsible simplistic answers. I appreciate the fact that the band wants "Peace! Now!" but shouting it 30 times over the course of three minutes isn't really convincing me of anything. Because of their rejection of organized religion, perhaps Le Tigre has never heard of 'preaching to the choir'. I don't think anyone at this point still believes Iraq was just about 'blood for oil' except for Le Tigre. It cost me $2.11 per gallon yesterday! Besides a lack of lyrical depth of any kind there's not even very much happening on the musical end of things either. While the song certainly is a little exciting when the guitars kics in and the band chants protest-style, "This is what democracy looks like, this is what democracy sounds like," the song is largely ineffective, far too simplistic, and destined to be a total bomb as a debut single for Universal.
-exadore

Q and not U
"Book of Flags" from X-Polynation/Book of Flags 7"
Genre: Funk-punk, Rating: 5
Following the September 11th attacks was a consumer run on flags of all stripes (puns, however, did not sell well). Anything with a flag on it sold better than lubricant at the neighborhood orgy; and not just flags themselves but stickers, t-shirts, magnets, posters, babies … fucking ANYTHING! Just slap a flag sticker on the back of your car -- maybe a tiny Old Glory raised from the window or antennae of your Ford Explorer H2 Expedition Earth-killer -- and everything was gonna be all right, the terrorists would surely be defeated by America's powerful display of armchair patriotism. Of course the president and his defense ministers wouldn't manipulate the new era of good feelings for their own agenda, of course they wouldn't stifle dissent by calling it unpatriotic, of course we would catch the great ape Osama bin Laden and his evil helper monkeys.

Well here's a big fuck you from Q and not U: "Your flags are waving dishonestly / a pining plaything … your flags are aching to bloom from distant grounds / drowning out every sound." In all the pro-American noise, we let this Iraq war happen with almost no opposition. Susan Sarandon does not count. Over a big beat and a trembling Prince-like funk guitar, singer Chris Richards spews his powerful indictment, "Ten generations, ten thousand nations redistributed like a lost and found." Although the song was rerecorded for their third album Power, this early 7" version is far superior in both production values and maintaining the band's famously punk energy level. In response to the mindless American flag-waving, Richards reacts, "We're keeping our flags at home / We're keeping our flags indoors / We're pulling them from our clothes / We're spending some time alone." In the end, the band even takes on the voice and attitude of the society of fake patriots with a group vocal that threatens, "You better not child."
-exadore

Jadakiss featuring Anthony Williams
"Why?" from Kiss of Death
Genre: Commercial hip-hop, Rating: 2
American history is a landscape littered with seemingly unanswerable questions. Critical, engaged minds may also feel the same way as they wade through the mass culture detritus that seems to insulate citizens from freely accessing the realities of politics, of economics, and of the power structures around them. Only when estrangement is possible can a citizen begin to take in the design and meaning behind the seemingly meaningless spectacle. Simply put, sometimes the only way to see the forest for the trees is to walk out of and away from the forest, and look back on it from outside. When we cannot do this ourselves, we often seek the counsel and wisdom of those who have succeeded. The trouble is that more often than not, they return not with answers, but with deeper, harder-to-answer questions. We have one of these crucial outsiders in Jadakiss, and we should extend our gratitude to over-produced mainstream hip-hop for giving us his voice.

"Why?" is a song that will have you applying it's title word to nearly everything about what the song says, represents, and intrinsically is. "Why is the industry designed to keep the artist in debt," Jadakiss demands answered. An interesting question indeed - perhaps he has read Steve Albini's classic 1993 article for The Baffler, "The Problem With Music" (but I seriously, seriously doubt it). An MTV and hip hop radio staple, "Why?" drips with the kind of intestine-wrenching guilt that can only come from someone enmeshed in a system they know is pointless - or does it? When one couples lines like "why the whole world in love with my voice" and "why I say the hottest shit but we sellin the least" Jadakiss comes off delusional, contradictory, sloppy, or perhaps a weird combination of all three. Still, he presses on -- "Why did Bush knock down the towers?" significantly one-ups Michael Moore's insinuation-to-evidence ratio, via a simple insinuation without any evidence whatsoever. "Why they come up with witness protection?" Gee, I was wondering that same thing, as there's nothing I'd like more than being able to easily track down and kill the snitches who sold me out. This song will likely inspire many listeners to also ask why -- "Why am I watching this channel?", "Why does this guy have a record deal?", "Why is his name a combination of Ja Rule and Ludacris, and who does he think he's fooling?", "Why DID Bush knock down the towers?"
-r. johnson

Sonic Youth
"Peace Attack" from Sonic Nurse
Genre: Indie rock, Rating: 4
In a somewhat ironic twist, the most directly political song on Sonic Youth's latest album is also its most gentle. "Peace Attack" lives up its name as it softly rolls by on a bed of intricately interwoven guitar lines and a mild snare rhythm. Thurston Moore laconically sings his disconnected, impressionistic lyrics, taking the song through several crescendos that build tension but never break the soft and breezy atmosphere of the song. "Peace Attack" is about as far as you can get from the days of Sonic Youth's noisy, explosive past, but the title sums up the nature of the song perfectly: it's peaceful, relaxing even, but despite its subtle but frequent buildups, the band still has a lot of attack power left.

The song is meant to protest the war-mongering of the current and former Bush administrations, though you wouldn't know it from the lyrics, "Three feather three-piece / Peace attack / Early book whistling / Whistle at earth". Although it makes for an wonderfully understated ending for "Sonic Nurse", the vagueness of the song's lyrics makes for a middling and relatively ineffective protest when "Peace Attack" is taken on its own. Thurston and company do seem to nod to the generation of protestors before them though, recalling images from the optimism-infused '60s when peace and rock music briefly coalesced: "Remainder / Of the great anti-hate / Springtime is wartime / I'll rise to the crime-boss / Electric guitar string / A bed of flowers".
-exadore

NOFX
"Idiot Son of an Asshole (live)" B-side from The War on Errorism
Genre: Pop-punk, Rating: 3
What NOFX lacks in musical talent, they make up for in hilariously moronic lyrics. Sure, all their songs sound the same, but every once in a while, Fat Mike and company hit the nail right on the head. This is one of those times. The music here is, of course, standard pop-punk fare. You know, bass first, then power-chords and fast drums. The lyrics, however are witty, humorous, and biting. Mike spouts, "He signs stuff and he executes people / Maybe that's why, he doesn't have any friends", and later in the song, "He's too dumb to eat pretzels/ apparently smart enough to fix an election". The chorus is just repeated shouting of the lines "Idiot son of an asshole. He's the idiot son of an asshole". Kind of annoying and pretty standard stuff, yes, but not too bad, either. This NOFX song is as simplistic and repetative as the previously discussed Green Day song, but the band is willing to make its point in under 2 minutes and end the song before the I-VI-V power-chord riff gets really annoying. What's really surprising, though, is that NOFX can stay halfway relevant after all these years of playing the exact same stuff.
-austin

Beastie Boys
"It Takes Time To Build" from To the 5 Boroughs
Genre: Commercial hip-hop, Rating: 4
Maybe I'm being unfair, but at some point in their career, the Beastie Boys may have experienced massive pangs of guilt and consequently turned the entire ship of their career around -- or maybe they just started smoking more weed. What did they have to be guilty about? Not Paul's Boutique, you can't touch that (according to All Music aka THE POP MUSIC Koran). Yet they were the first popular white hip-hop act, and don't forget that as such, they also were the first hip-hop act to have a #1 selling album on the charts. In doing so, they bequeathed such frat-rock staples as "Fight For Your Right (To Party!)" and "Girls" to the collective memory. These gems may well forever rattle around inside of whatever cultural vacuum we occupy, like tiny pebbles in a tin coffee can. God that was lame, so I will now move on.

For at least a solid decade now, the Beastie Boys have brought more than a token's worth of political conscience to both their music and status as pop icons. In 1994, Adam Yauch (MC A) started the Milarepa Fund, now a highly visible and respected flagship for the Free Tibet movement. He and the Beastie Boys also started the Tibetan Freedom Concerts of the late 1990s, featuring (among others) Pavement, Radiohead, Bjork, REM, Sonic Youth, and Beck.

To The Five Boroughs is arguably the Beastie's strongest album since acquiring their elder-statesman status, of sorts, in the mid 1990s. "It Takes Time To Build" is explicitly political, and has a great funked-up electro beat to boot. Consider it a sort of anti-anxiety medicine for liberals/leftists at a time when it is very nerve-wracking (and unpopular) to hold views that are farther to the left than those of watered-down pussies like Paul Begala and Alan Colmes. During the chorus, a sample voice implores that "it takes a second to wreck it, it takes time to build, you gots to CHILL" just as Ad-Rock and crew invoke recent memories of the Kyoto debacle, OPEC dependency, EPA deregulation, and true coaltion building. It's like an issue of The Nation that you could break-dance to: easily digestible, ultimately optimistic and empowering, and very welcome in this disheartening time.
-r. johnson

Black Eyes
"Another Country" From Cough
Genre: Who knows, Rating: 4
In their brief existence, Black Eyes were one of the most potent and exciting forces to burst out of the DC scene with their brilliantly haphazard fusion of hardcore, post-punk, dub reggae, noise-rock, free jazz, funk, dancehall and a ton of other half-dead genres. On their final album, Cough, the band delivered their definitive political statement wrapped in one of their most unrelenting and scathing songs: "Another Country". Starting as a quirky jazz piece -- with a guitar running scales over a soothing saxophone -- trouble comes quickly: just as the drums appear, the song descends into pure unadulterated noise. A coherent tribal beat finally materializes and a sax melody propels the song as both vocalists simultaneously shout two completely different things. It's energetic and exciting and when the two voices match up at various points I'd be willing to say "Another Country" is exhilarating.

In the best punk 'fuck all' attitude, the whole thing is over in less than two minutes, never repeats itself once, and is totally incoherent. While a political statement is hardly effective if you can't understand a single word of it, it's a testament to the band that I actually went to the lyric sheet months ago because I really wanted to know. With impressionistic vagueness the song is actually a strange reflection on the individual citizen's responsibility for the actions of their state in a representative democracy, "These days I'm finding it hard to trust myself / as oil drums carry our nation's blood / blackened by too much summer fun and offshore spills … our nocturnal emissions touching the face of god / a new kind of rain to worry us." What's strange is that a band with such good lyrics would render them incomprehensible. The frantic shrieks finally join together at the song's ending, amidst simulated dog shouts, to lay the blame for the eternal division of the world's people into warring nations on the Tower of Babel and God himself, "Moving backwards through native tongues … speaking tongues is our separation."
-exadore

Xiu Xiu
"Support Our Troops (Black Angels, Oh!)" from Fabulous Muscles
Genre: Experimental noise, Rating: 4
Never one to follow anyone's lead in terms of traditional subject matter, it's not surprising that the most overtly political song in Xiu Xiu's oeuvre isn't about the political implications of war at all but rather about its personal effects. "Support Our Troops, Oh! (Black Angels, Oh!)", which is more of a sound piece than a conventional song, opens with bits of disconcerting feedback and what sounds like an engine revving up, setting the stage for Xiu Xiu leader Jamie Stewart's interrogation of a callous American solider, his deadpan voice quivering with emotion:

"Did you know you were going to shoot off the top of a 4-year old girl's head and look across her car seat down into her skull and see into her throat? And did you know that her dad would say to you, 'Please, sir, can I take her body home?' Oh, wait. You totally did know that that would happen! Because you're a jock who's stupid and too greedy and too unmotivated to do anything else but still be the biggest and still what other people tell you to do. You did it to still be a winner."

The next section of the track consists of a disturbing low-end rumble, controlled squalls of feedback, and some spooky tape manipulation that resemble tortured animals or ghosts screaming like banshees to the heavens. Jamie appears again to ask the solider another question:

"You shot your grenade launcher into people's windows and into the doors of people's houses. But you wanted to shoot it into someone just to watch them blow up. Why should I care if you get killed?"

Soft, staccato washes of noise fill the air while an accordion plays a slow, ominous chord progression. It's incredibly poignant and unsettling how the music mirrors the gruesomeness of the lyrics, and war in general. "Support Our Troops, Oh!" is one of the only songs, at least that I've ever heard, that criticizes the troops. The song reminded me of something Mike Watt told me about the actual expression, "Support The Troops", in an interview:

"My father, the guy joined the navy at 17. He took an oath to defend the Constitution, right? Not to the military or…'Support the troops'. No, the troops are supporting the Constitution. In fact, there's a thing in the amendment -- I think it's the 4th amendment -- 'no quartering of troops'; there's a limit to how much you can support them. You know, 'cause there's always this litmus test- 'You want to leave them'. 'No, buddy, why don't you read the paper?' And it [should be] 'are we living up to them?'"
-jonathan

Wilco
"Ashes of American Flags" From Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Genre: Experimental pop, Rating: 5
The distant breaking of glass and a sharp irregular guitar lick kick off "Ashes of American Flags", which finds Wilco bandleader Jeff Tweedy facing an existential crisis. Sporting some of the best lyrics -- and most oppressive atmosphere -- of any of the songs off Wilco's brilliant Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the song explores issues of identity and meaningless in the consumer world. "All my lies are always wishes / I know I would die if I could come back new." By starting the song off talking about the price of Coca Cola, the ultimate consumable, Tweedy brilliantly sets up the lonely tone of the song, something akin to the Clash's equally excellent "Lost in the Supermarket".

At its heart, "Ashes" reveals that its difficult trying to discover oneself in all the useless filth of modern America, as Tweedy jumps from market prices to philosophy with little hesitation, "I could spend three dollars and sixty-three cents / On Diet Coca-Cola and unlit cigarettes / I wonder why we listen to poets when nobody gives a fuck". The song moves along at a slowly meandering pace -- an acoustic guitar over junky drums, and the distant, quivering electric guitar that opened the song -- until we reach Tweedy's pessimistic take on suburban America, "We want a good life with a nose for things / the fresh wind and bright sky to endure my suffering." The whole arrangement dies off into the spooky, noise that's been underlying it all along and just before the song totally boils away into feedback and looping tones, Tweedy mourns the death of the American dream and the tarnishing of its values, the last true source of meaning he can find. "I would like to salute / the ashes of American flags / And all the fallen leaves / filling up shopping bags."
-exadore

Fugazi
"Argument" from The Argument
Genre: Post-hardcore, Rating: 5
Obviously no stranger to political activism, DC's legendary Fugazi delivered one of their last, and most thought-provoking, protest songs as the title track to what may be their final album, The Argument. The song is one of several on the album that finds Ian Mackaye, a man who's made an entire career out of shouting like a pirate, singing in a tiny, innocent voice. The song starts in a haze of radio signals before breaking into its supple, intertwined guitar lines reminiscent of the material from Red Medicine. Despite being blatantly political, the song's gentle pace and Ian's tiny singing voice give it the same type of introspection as other great Fugazi album closers.

Written years before the current Iraq War, the song's lyrics are strangely prescient of the Bush administrations false evidence and chronic push for war, "How did a difference become a disease? / I'm sure you have reasons, a rational defense / weapons and motives bloody fingerprints / but I can't help thinking it's still a disease." The nature of war is no different than an argument between people really, "It's all about strikes now / So here's what's striking me / That some punk could argue some moral ABC's / when people are catching what bombers release." Before the song briefly mutates into the typically forceful Fugazi barnburner, complete with the more-familiar pirate vocals, Ian assures us in the best punk spirit, that "I'm on a mission to never agree."
-exadore

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