I feel global political oppression or global wars usually produce great music but Macklemore might be the peak.

Nothing against him, some of his songs are good, but I expected real rage inducing stuff with everything going on. Or is this just the state of music as a whole?

  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
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    23 hours ago

    They don’t exist, at least not in Western mainstream music. Record labels have learned from those artists and will now drop anyone who doesn’t toe the capitalist/imperialist line. Like the singers being cancelled for supporting BLM or Palestine.

    And it’s very specifically just for leftist messages. Kanye straight up calls himself a Nazi and sold shirts with swastikas on it and didn’t get canceled for antisemitism, but tons of pro-Palestine artists did. If an artist straight up calls themselves a socialist like Tupac did it would be career suicide.

    As someone in Gen Z, I have never heard a mainstream song released in my lifetime that actually attacks capitalism beyond useless lip service or calls for any kind of anticapitalist action by the general public. They definitely exist but only by indie artists who will either never get signed onto a label or will be forced to capitulate to the capitalist propaganda machine if they do.

    • discocactus@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      Childish Gambino? Yasiin Bey? Kendrick? Killer Mike? Hip hop alone has never stopped being critical of the machine… You must be living with your head under a rock or in headphones that only play top 40 or something. There is an absolute wealth of music that takes on the various hierarchies that dominate our world…

      Edit: Doechii, ffs… Gorillaz… I could go on.