Results for “injustice”

Songs

I Shall Be Released

Joe Cocker

Cocker takes Dylan's spare, gospel-tinged prison-of-the-soul ballad and turns it into a slow-building, gravel-voiced testimony…

imprisonment and confinement faith and redemption injustice

Mystery of Iniquity

Lauryn Hill

A dense indictment of the American legal system as a machine of institutionalized corruption, escalating into a broader…

institutional corruption legal injustice spiritual awakening

They Don't Care About Us

Michael Jackson

A protest chant built almost entirely from one repeated grievance, this song stacks fragmented images of police violence, media…

police brutality institutional neglect racial injustice

A Change Is Gonna Come

Sam Cooke

A first-person testimony of endurance under racial oppression, built around a single hope that refuses to die even as evidence…

racial injustice endurance faith and doubt

Saturn

SZA

SZA imagines an escape to another planet as a way of processing exhaustion with earthly suffering, spiritual doubt, and cyclical…

existential despair spiritual doubt escapism

Part of Me

En Vogue

This is a socially conscious ballad built around a rain-and-cloud metaphor for spiritual and social interconnectedness. En Vogue…

interconnectedness social responsibility spiritual unity

Wildfires

SAULT

A stark protest chant built from short, direct accusations against police violence, paired with a defiant refrain about…

police violence racial injustice collective grief

When the President Talks to God

Bright Eyes

A blunt protest song built entirely around one recurring rhetorical question, imagining the private conversations between a…

religious hypocrisy war and empire racial injustice

Percy's Song

Fairport Convention

A first-person narrator learns a friend has been sentenced to ninety-nine years for a fatal car crash and travels to plead his…

injustice and arbitrary punishment powerlessness before institutions loyalty and friendship

I Shall Not Be Moved

Public Enemy

Chuck D uses the title of an old gospel/civil-rights standard as a manifesto for artistic and political endurance, framing…

longevity and refusal to be silenced corporate control of music and media racial injustice and neglect of the poor

Wrote a Song for Everyone

Creedence Clearwater Revival

A protest song about the failure of protest songs -- or at least the failure of direct speech -- built around a narrator who…

failure to communicate social unrest and protest alienation from self and others

Right On for the Darkness

Curtis Mayfield

Mayfield takes on the voice of a blind man to critique a society obsessed with appearance and status while ignoring structural…

blindness as moral clarity social hypocrisy institutional corruption

Corona

Minutemen

A terse, two-minute political sketch that moves from a stark statement about poverty and inherited injustice to a small, almost…

economic inequality inherited guilt survival

Mathematics

Mos Def

Mos Def builds a dense, statistics-driven indictment of American racial and economic injustice around the conceit of numbers,…

mass incarceration systemic racism economic inequality