music

Chumbawamba

Godspeed you! Black Emperor.

I like a lot of folk music, so Woody Guthrie, Utah Phillips, Phil Ochs, David Rovics and Sarah Ogen Dunning. Old folk music was the most lefty American genre. Leadbelly had a lot of left wing songs too, I understand he was skeptical of white socialists but he was very popular among the movement. He's also like one of the greatest musicians of all time. Oh and if you've never listened to Victor Jara, absolutely just stop what you're doing.

A little more country, but John Prine is absolutely essential listening, unrivaled in the songwriting category. Kris Kristofferson was a lefty, and for a more modern take, Sturgill Simpson is a really unique artist with good social messages. Earl Scruggs also has a lot of pro union/pro worker/pro working class songs, and is one of the greatest living country/Americana musicians.

Gang of Four is really good and underrated, one of my all time favorites. I used to.really think the clash were lefty, and they certainly had left/anarcho sympathies, but Joe Strummer almost always wrote a final cringe verse into his political songs, like Washington Bullets. I'll always dig his sympathy for homeless and outlaws, but geopolitics he was kinda moderate. Over time I've come to appreciate Mick Jones's poppier less political stuff. But Gang of Four never drops the ball, and I've come to favorite their first two records, Entertainment and Solid Gold. While we are listening to punk music, I'd throw in The Minutemen as honorable mentions. Less explicitly left-wing political, but D. Boon was such a prolific and intensely thoughtful writer, that I think he was a comrade.

Another super underrated pick is The Refused, the Shape of Punk to Come. This record is undeniably a work of situationist Marxist theory, this is my favorite pick of the bunch. Napalm Death is another heavy selection, many of their songs are about solidarity and anti imperialism.

Boots Riley and the Coup are fantastic, explicitly Marxist, and actively organizing.

He's a smaller artist but I'm partial to Bambu as well, who I believe is a Filipino American Maoist.

There's a lot of good artists if you're into hip-hop.

Bob Vylan

All of the Rise Against discography.

Somebody mentioned it in a reply, but wanted to put it on a top level comment, Flobots

Sum 41 has songs like 45 and The People Vs.

Anti-flag

alex cox funneled hollywood money to the sandinistas while filming walker.

Take the power back - Rage Against the Machine.

But a lot of other songs they have feel leftist and anti establishment.

I refuse to learn anything about musicians so I can consider all of them leftist.

Propaghandi

Lambrini Girls

Protest the Hero. They certainly have a tendency toward being hamfisted, but I guess you kind of need to be. I guess the same could also be said of Dead Kennedys, though they were a bit more elegant (according to the Lore as far as I remember, the first album was written by Biafra and another guy who was more interested in just trying to be "shocking," making the songs really inconsistent in quality and subject matter and values, but then he left and it got better)

I'm also surprised at the relative lack of leftist rappers mentioned here.

If you look at the non-English speaking world you have whole artistic movements built on explicit anticapitalism and anti imperialism

Modena City Ramblers - Fischia il vento (rock version of the partisan song that inspired katyusha)

Silvio Rodriguez - Canción urgente para Nicaragua (a song about the coup that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz)

Pablo Milanés - Amo Esta Isla (a love song to revolutionary Cuba)

Piero - Para el pueblo lo que es del pueblo (a song recounting the junta years in Argentina, with the refrain "render to the people what is the people's, as the people have earned it")

Victor Jara - Ni chicha ni limoná (a song criticizing comfortable urban centrists who were ambivalent about the possibility of Allende/a socialist in power. Victor Jara would later be captured during the 9/11 coup, taken to the Santiago stadium, have his hands broken before being handed a guitar to play as a sick joke for his captors, and later killed and buried in a unmarked mass grave during the massacres of the following days)

Mercedes Sosa - Todo cambia (she wrote this heartbreaking song while she was in exile after escaping Argentina because the junta was going to kill her for being a prominent leftist artist)

Calle 13 ft. Totó la Momposina - Latinoamérica (make sure to read the lyrics to this one, it's a Latinoamérican anti imperialist and extracrivist anthem)

Fela Kuti - Expensive shit (listen to the whole album it's a banger)

@Angel@hexbear.net

Havok (and most thrash bands i think)

Killing Joke

I recently discovered a Turkish Circassian rap artist called Surhay. I don't speak Turkish or Circassian, but based on the machine translations, comments, and thumbnails, my understanding is that a number of Surhay's songs are in honor of people like Emma Goldman or Yusuf Aslan^[Yusuf Aslan being one of the leaders of the People's Liberation Army of Turkey founded by Deniz Gezmiş.], talk about organized labor action as necessary resistance against the power of bourgeois capital, etc.

This is the song dedicated to Yusuf Aslan, "İhtilal" ("Revolution"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPMW9Uv3YBc

{Cēterum|Furthermore} {cēnseō|I think} {iūs auctōris|copyright} {esse dēlendum|must be destroyed}.

Dead Kennedys

Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Charlie Haden, Horace Tapscott, Wadada Leo Smith, Matana Roberts, Jaimie Branch, Sons of Kemet, and a ton of other jazz artists. I could be wrong but I like to assume that pretty much everyone in the A.A.C.M. inclines toward leftism if they're at all political.

The Chapo subreddit used to have a Sun Ra flair but despite his anti-colonialism I'm not sure he really counts. He was a lot like Frank Zappa in that he had some good priorities but also some reactionary and tyrannical tendencies.

Noname - Song 33 is pretty dope among many other Noname songs that are also good and mention colonialism, socialism, racism and many other modern problems.

Hazel Dickens - they'll never keep us down

Jesse Wells

Carsie Blanton

Dawn Ray’d is an anarchist leaning anti-fascist band that falls under the black metal genre

There’s a lot of fascists in black metal so there’s an entire subgenre of it that opposes fascists, RABM, or “Red/Anarchist Black Metal” or “Red And Black Metal” depending on who you ask, if you search for RABM you will find more.

Haru Nemuri is one of the most outspoken Leftists I've ever seen on stage. Multiple breaks in the show to talk about capitalism and her rider explicitly demanded no products from a list of companies that clearly aligned with BDS

Lady Lamb is very outspoken in support of Palestine

Flobots is also good

A few hardcore/metalcore bands that are explicitly leftist:

Stray From the Path (RIP)

Stick to Your Guns

Fever 333

The Armed

Fucked Up

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