Minutemen
A brief, blunt piece of political arithmetic disguised as a song. Minutemen reduce the Vietnam War to numbers, bureaucratic…
war and bureaucracy dehumanization by statistics imperialism
Fugazi
Repeater sketches a first-person portrait of someone reduced by drug dependency and social judgment to a statistic, then widens…
addiction and criminalization dehumanization media detachment
King Crimson
A blast of distorted vocals and jagged riffing that catalogues the horrors of modern civilization in fragmented, almost…
dehumanization war and violence political corruption
Kraftwerk
Kraftwerk turn a numbing exercise in counting into a protest song, framing the reduction of a person to a numeral as a kind of…
dehumanization by bureaucracy loss of identity surveillance and control
Wire
A short, elliptical piece built from fragmented statements about breakdown -- of attention, feeling, and communication. It reads…
mental exhaustion alienation failure of language
Richard Thompson
A soldier's-eye monologue from the Iraq War, delivered in the blunt, blackly funny voice of an American GI who narrates the…
war and mortality dehumanization of soldiers media spin and propaganda
XTC
XTC dresses up an anti-militarist satire as a jaunty, whistleable pop song, mocking career soldiers who crave conflict for its…
militarism and glory-seeking satire of authority boredom as a driver of violence