10 of the Most Powerful Protest Songs of All Time

As a medium of expression, pop music can be somewhat limiting. Songs are supposed to be short and catchy, and the words usually rhyme. They share little in common with, say, political manifestos or position papers, but that’s what makes them uniquely excellent vehicles for communicating powerful messages to millions of people who might not otherwise be receptive.

There’s a long and inspiring history of pop songs being used for protest, and what follows are 10 notable examples of singers and rappers stepping up to the mic and making bold statements about injustices of one kind or another. These songs have what it takes to change the world—and get stuck in people’s heads.

1. Billie Holiday // “Strange Fruit”
2. Woody Guthrie // “This Land Is Your Land”
3. Bob Dylan // “Blowin’ In the Wind”
4. Lesley Gore // “You Don’t Own Me”
5. Sam Cooke // “A Change Is Gonna Come”
6. The Special AKA // “Free Nelson Mandela”
7. Queen Latifah // “U.N.I.T.Y.”
8. Bruce Springsteen // “American Skin (41 Shots)”
9. “Follow Your Arrow” // Kacey Musgraves
10. Lil Baby // “The Bigger Picture”

Billie Holiday // “Strange Fruit”

One of the earliest protest songs is also one of the most lyrically direct and haunting. Written by Jewish school teacher Abel Meeropol and famously recorded by jazz icon Billie Holiday in 1939, “Strange Fruit” was inspired by a famous photo of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, two Black men in Indiana who’d been accused of murder. Meeropol’s lyrics liken the bodies of these men to pieces of fruit hanging from a tree, and his use of phrases like “sudden smell of burning flesh” illustrate the brutality of the incident.

 Holiday performed “Strange Fruit” at the NYC nightclub Café Society, and the recording she made sold a million copies. The song raised the ire of Harry J. Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who arranged the drug bust that ruined her career and her life. Nevertheless, “Strange Fruit” lives on, and in 1999, TIME magazine called it the “song of the century.”

Woody Guthrie // “This Land Is Your Land”

It might surprise some people to see this perennial classroom singalong on a list of protest songs, but when Woody Guthrie penned the lyrics in 1940, he intended the song to be a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” which he found to be jingoistic. His original version contained six verses [PDF], two of which are often cut from children’s songbooks. One decries private property and the wealthy people taking control of America, and the other references the hungry people who relied on government assistance during the Great Depression. When Bruce Springsteen and folk icon Pete Seeger performed the song at Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, they sang the “lost verses,” reminding everyone of Guthrie’s true messages.

Bob Dylan // “Blowin’ In the Wind”

 In many ways the quintessential ’60s protest song, Dylan’s “Blowin’ In the Wind” touches on war and racism without calling out any of the specific issues plaguing America at the time. Repurposing the melody from “No More Auction Block,” an old spiritual, Dylan simply poses a series of rhetorical questions, like, “How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man?” The answer to all of these questions, Dylan sings in the chorus, is “blowin’ in the wind,” a line that’s very much open to interpretation.

When Dylan published the lyrics in Sing Out! in 1962, he offered this explanation of where to find “the answer”: “I still say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper it’s got to come down some,” he wrote. “But the only trouble is that no one picks up the answer when it comes down so not too many people get to see and know it ... and then it flies away.”

Lesley Gore // “You Don’t Own Me”

The Quincy Jones-produced “You Don’t Own Me” is a kind of protest two-fer: The song is decidedly feminist, as it’s sung from the perspective of a young woman who makes declarative statements like “You don’t own me / I’m not just one of your many toys.” But “You Don’t Own Me” also resonated in the Civil Rights era, and John Madara, who wrote the song with David White, says he was partially inspired by the racism he witnessed growing up in Philadelphia.

“I saw how Black people got treated,” Madara told NPR in 2019. “It was horrible, horrible, horrible. My friends and I got locked up in Philadelphia and Mississippi, and they treated us like gangsters. And my Black friends got hit more than I got hit. [The police] had billy clubs and hit you across the legs, but the Black guys got hit across the body. Those are things you don’t forget.”

Sam Cooke // “A Change Is Gonna Come”

Sam Cooke wasn’t known for political songs. But in 1964—inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In the Wind,” as well as by incidents of racism he experienced while touring through the South—the legendary R&B singer-songwriter penned “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a stirring orchestral ballad with gospel flourishes and a hopeful message that still resonates with listeners more than 60 years later: “It’s been a long time coming / But I know a change is gonna come.”

The Special AKA // “Free Nelson Mandela”

Jerry Dammers, leader of the UK ska band The Specials, was known for mixing antiracist messages into his music. He became aware of Nelson Mandela—the South African anti-apartheid crusader who’d been imprisoned for more than two decades—at a concert in honor of Mandela’s 65th birthday in 1983. Afterward, he wrote “Free Nelson Mandela,” a song credited to The Special AKA, which formed after the dissolution of The Specials.

Produced by Elvis Costello and featuring vocals from Caron Wheeler (who’d later join Soul II Soul), “Free Nelson Mandela” is a joyous, “vaguely Latin-African” song, in Dammers’s estimation, that brought Mandela’s plight to pop fans the world over. The single went Top 10 in the UK, and in 1986, after helping to establish a British wing of Artists Against Apartheid, Dammers was instrumental in organizing a Freedom Beat concert in London that drew a quarter million people.

Mandela was released in 1990, and Dammers got to meet him at a concert celebrating the occasion at Wembley Stadium. When Mandela received a 10-minute standing ovation, Dammers went into the audience to get the full experience. “It was reassuring: it made you think the vast majority of human beings aren’t racist and are actually all right,” he told The Guardian in 2013.

Queen Latifah // “U.N.I.T.Y.”

“Who you callin’ a b****?” Queen Latifah asks in the intro to this 1993 feminist rap classic. “U.N.I.T.Y.” was inspired by the frequent use of the b-word in rap records made by male artists at the time, but Latifah isn’t just talking about misogyny in hip-hop. The second verse touches on domestic violence, and the third is about young women who feel the need to act tough.

“I mean, the record was really about a lot of different things, and the point of the record was unity,” Latifah told Fresh Air in 1999. “Let’s bring it all together. Let’s put all this stupid stuff to the side and let’s be together, man. Let’s stop pushing each other away from each other, and let’s be down with each other.”

Bruce Springsteen // “American Skin (41 Shots)”

The Boss could have made this list with any number of songs, including “Born In the USA,” his oft-misunderstood 1984 classic that always becomes a topic of conversation around July 4th. But with “American Skin (41 Shots),” first performed in 2000, Springsteen was somewhat more explicit—and he was writing about something that remains a hot-button issue in America.

The title references the February 1999 killing of Guinean student Amadou Diallo at the hands of NYPD officers, who fired 41 shots at the unarmed man. (He’d been mistaken for a suspected rapist.) Although Bruce’s song is about racism, police brutality, and the ways in which our skin color affects our lives, he was careful to tell the story from different perspectives, including that of the officers. “I knew a diatribe would do no good,” he wrote in Bruce Springsteen: Songs. “I just wanted to help people see the other guy’s point of view.”

Nevertheless, “American Skin (41 Shots)” raised the ire of NYC’s then-mayor, Rudy Giuliani, and the head of the New York City Police Department Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association urged officers to boycott Springsteen’s shows at Madison Square Garden.

“Follow Your Arrow” // Kacey Musgraves

Protest songs aren’t always fueled by righteous anger, and they’re not necessarily about hot-button political issues. Sometimes, they can be pretty little country-pop songs that advocate staying true to yourself and simply living your life as best you can, regardless of what other people say. That’s the crux of Kacey Musgraves’s “Follow Your Arrow,” the third single off the Texas singer-songwriter’s 2013 debut album, Same Trailer Different Park. The song started out as a letter Musgraves was writing to a friend, and it became a proper song with the help of co-writers Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, both of whom are openly gay.

With its lyrics about LGBTQ acceptance (“Kiss lots of boys / Or kiss lots of girls if that’s somethin’ you’re into”) and recreational marijuana use (“Roll up a joint, or don’t”), the song was atypical for the country music world at the time. Kacey’s label warned the song would be “suicide at radio,” but she decided to release it anyway. Sure enough, some radio stations refused to play the song, but it nevertheless reached No. 10 on the Hot Country Songs chart, and it helped to establish Musgraves as a boundary-pushing artist unafraid to speak her mind. 

“Oh my gosh, it was so controversial,” Musgraves told the Hollywood Reporter in 2025. “It ended up tanking—it was banned by country radio. But I would never trade that for the love and the people it brought to my world. I’m not going to present a watered-down version of myself to be accepted.” 

Lil Baby // “The Bigger Picture”

“We done had a hell of a year,” Atlanta rapper Lil Baby raps on his 2020 smash “The Bigger Picture,” which reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. And that’s putting it mildly. In addition to 2020 marking the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, it saw the killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, spurring protests around the country. With “The Bigger Picture,” Lil Baby claims the problem is “bigger than Black and white.” America’s racial problems are systemic, and while they’ll be difficult to overcome, Baby urges us to try. “It can’t change overnight,” he says. “But we gotta start somewhere.”

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