Pop Grenades – 8 Political Dance Tracks

Disco was all about hedonism, sexuality and ecstatic abandon – an escape into a nocturnal paradise free of racism and homophobia – so any message in the lyrics was usually an implicit celebration of the right to be yourself despite society’s prejudices. This defiant Philly-style gay rights anthem from 1977 is an out-and-proud exception featuring the preacher-style testifying of singer Carl Bean, who later became a Protestant minister and AIDS activist.

Keith LeBlanc was a member of the Sugarhill Gang who played on Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s inceptive political rap track, ‘The Message’. With ‘No Sell Out’ in 1983, he set clips of Malcolm X’s speeches to a sinuous electro groove. He continued the technique the following year with ‘Strike’ by The Enemy Within, a benefit single for Britain’s striking miners which dropped samples of the pitmen’s union chief Arthur Scargill into a stark, metallic drum track.

Inspired by the Isley Brothers and commissioned by Spike Lee for his summer-of-unrest film ‘Do the Right Thing’, this is the keynote call-to-arms from the most powerful political band of their era, and became a rebel anthem that far transcended its original context in eighties New York. Lee originally wanted a version of the black spiritual hymn ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’, with its lyrics about the “harmonies of liberty”, but instead, Public Enemy tossed him this sonic Molotov cocktail.

One of the more unlikely protest songs of recent decades – a vegetarian anthem created by a self-confessed ‘emotional hooligan’ from Bristol, co-written by Jah Wobble and Keith Levene from Public Image Ltd, and given a loping piano-driven mix by Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne that made it a leftfield post-acid house dancefloor hit in 1990.

House tracks with a ‘message’ mainly tend to express hazy utopian yearnings for unity and togetherness – Joe Smooth’s ‘Promised Land’ and CeCe Rogers’ ‘Someday’ being the classic late-eighties archetypes. This plea for tolerance with vocals by the mighty Arnold Jarvis opens with the words “This is a wake-up call – wake up, people!” and offers a brief insight into the corrosive psychological impact of everyday racism.

With its distorted dustbin-lid jungle break and secondhand Shostakovich string sample, ‘Ill Manors’ was rapper Plan B’s incendiary attempt to psychoanalyse the bloody-minded fury, desperate alienation and kettled frustrations that fuelled the 2011 inner-city riots in London. The riots also inspired Lowkey’s brooding, doom-laden ‘Dear England’, which denounced bankers, politicians and trigger-happy police as the real troublemakers.

The endearingly foul-mouthed Nottingham-based duo conjure a world of curdled hopes and lowering horizons amid the zero-hours contracts and scruffy short-let apartments in the yet-to-be-gentrified districts of a contemporary British city. “I work my dreams off for two bits of ravioli and a warm bottle of Smirnoff,” rants Jason Williamson in this track from their ‘Austerity Dogs’ album, his expletives a perfectly reasonable response to the prospect of five more years of Conservative rule in the UK.

This glorious cascade of invective is an example of the recent renaissance in politically-conscious hip-hop that coincided with the unrest in US cities like Ferguson and Baltimore sparked by police brutality against black youth (see also: Killer Mike, J. Cole). Taking its title from a 1920s novel by Wallace Thurman, its complex and searching lyrics challenge institutional racist violence while chastising “hypocrite” gangbangers who weep for the fallen.