Essentially popular music is made via assembly lines owned by manufacturers now.

1. People churn out beats.
2. Other people lay down gibberish lyrics to set a melody to the best from step 1.
3. The best from step 2 get, writers, actual lyrics and an artist.
4. Artist records
5. Engineers heavily rework the recorded vocals

The companies that run these assembly lines aren’t going to rock the boat like that. Writers that neither made the music nor will have any part of recording or performing are making a product. It’s not a passion project, so they aren’t going to write protest lyrics either. In the 60s and 70s, there was a lot of popular music that really was made by individual artists and bands.

Today, there is plenty of protest music. It’s just not popular music because it doesn’t have as much industry backing.

Lindsay Ellis did a great video essay on why protest songs in the early 2000s were so different from the protests of the 60s and 70s. In my opinion, American culture hasn’t shifted to make her points less valid today.

The music industry and how the money works now are fundamentally different than how it was back then so keep that in mind while you’re wearing the tinfoil hat

There’s protest music, but it’s also different than back then. Now most of it exists in the more marginalized communities like the queer or poc space, as opposed to the mostly white hippie movement for example

One bigger name that comes to mind now is Kendrick Lamar.

https://www.complex.com/music/a/j-mckinney/kendrick-lamar-alright-protest-song

It’s easy to get stuck in a music bubble. You have to work to find new music.

It was so easy to piss off the Greatest Generation.

Just sing something like “Black people shouldn’t be oppressed” and the would break out the riot gear.

The Boomers were their kids and enjoyed it to no end.

there’s a few different reasons that I can see

• there were fewer people total, so fewer bands - ie: less trash to sort through / increased popularity

• there’s arguably more things to protest about nowadays but because of that there’s fewer things that both resonate with a lot of people and sound good at the same time

• if everyone is protesting, no one is. there’s too many different slogans being called out, too many different groups to support (ie: buy the album or give them radio time), and many of those groups are at odds with each other.

• technological advancement - radio is seen as a dead medium to many these days, there are far more ways to consume media than to listen to the radio. it may be that protest songs just dont air on the radio for that reason alone - their target demographic doesnt listen to radio.

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You’d be surprised what you can find. This one is from a videogame soundtrack. Goes pretty hard.

https://open.spotify.com/track/4SxtjfUfvCe4NoeDAY0YhF?si=zmxs4AE5RsWljbQzKlkhcA

A lot of that energy has gone to rap/hip hop. Listen to NWA.