Are political songs blowin' in the wind?

The '60s gave us "Blowin' in the Wind," folk-poet Bob Dylan's challenge to the brutal status quo. The '70s served up Neil Young's "Ohio," an anthem of generational rage against the military-industrial machine. The '80s laid down "The Message," Grandmaster Flash's hip-hop jeremiad about the vicious cycle of race-based poverty. The '90s broke loose with Rage Against the Machine's "Bulls on Parade," a rap-rock rant targeting corporate greed.

And the '00s? It's produced some memorably sardonic screeds (Green Day's "American Idiot"), patriotic hell-yeahs out of Nashville like Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue (The Angry American)," and dirges of quiet desperation emanating from "The Suburbs," courtesy of Arcade Fire.

But much of the music that has topped the Billboard charts in the new millennium -- Britney Spears, Lil Wayne, Lady Gaga -- might suggest that America has been one big party since 2001, despite the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, two wars, a wobbly economy and a bitterly divided government. Likewise, the recent popular manifestations of that unrest, the tea party and Occupy Wall Street movements, so far seem to have been largely lost on popular music.

That has left some artists, music industry professionals and listeners pondering how well today's music is serving the restless masses and capturing the essence of times that indeed are a-changin'.

In recent weeks, the Occupy movement has attracted a small number of musician-activists as supporters. Yet many of the high-profile artists who've been speaking out for the 99 percent -- including Lou Reed and Sonic Youth -- started their careers decades ago. Though the movement's first benefit CD, "Occupy This Album," will feature David Crosby and Graham Nash, Jackson Browne and Lucinda Williams, it has yet to enlist a top-grossing act of the past decade.

Crosby, who performed a five-song set at the Occupy Wall Street encampment in November in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park with his longtime friend and collaborator Nash, said engaging with social issues is something he learned about from folk icons like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. "We are supposed to be the town crier, the troubadour who carries the news from town to town," Crosby said of his role as an artist. Weighing in on issues, he said, is "part of our job."

Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons also was among the handful of celebrity supporters, including musicians, who regularly visited Zuccotti Park. "There's not been a lot of political in the last 10 years," said Simmons, co-founder of Def Jam Records. "I'm more concerned with what they're going to do now. There are seeds of a revolution that've just been planted, brand-new."

Getting the message out

But if there is a revolution rising beneath the radar, will it be televised or podcast? And what will its soundtrack be? Countless new mediums and means of distribution may make it easier to get your music out there but harder to push one cohesive message. And sophisticated modern technology may be put to trivial uses.

"There's a certain kind of apathy in our modern times that's hard to combat," said Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder. "Even with social media -- in some parts of the world it's used as a really powerful tool for revolution. Here, it's a powerful tool that people are using to avoid dealing with their own lives. It's a big campfire of gossip."

The relation between political action and peoples' lives also has grown murkier, said rapper Lupe Fiasco (aka Wasalu Muhammad Jaco), in part because today there's no single, focused cause like Vietnam or civil rights to galvanize public opinion. "Politics is probably a little less understood these days, so it's hard to make a song about it," said Jaco, who has rapped about social inequality and has appeared at various Occupy camps over the past few months. In previous eras, he continued, "you could see some type of political action directly affect you within a short period of time," whereas today "a lot of the politics is super-technical."

A number of cultural observers say today's shrinking record industry seems more hesitant to sign acts that may create more waves than revenue.

"The music that's being released by the major recording labels is , sure," said Robeson Taj P. Frazier, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. "They're focused on a profit incentive, which in some ways forces them to take on a narrow outlook."

But, Frazier added, "that's not representative of all the music that people who are organizing now are listening to and what's impacting their consciousness. Youth engagement and interaction through social media allows [consumers] to have access to music that's not limited to being produced and distributed by major record labels."

A mash-up of issues

Others agree with Frazier that the fracturing of the music industry, and the diffusion of political content, could be an advantage as well as an obstacle to contemporary musicians. Today, rather than concocting an analog anthem a la The Who's "My Generation," artists are generating a profusion of political mix-tapes addressing a mash-up of issues.

The hip-hop exhortation "You Already Knew" samples Aretha Franklin, name-checks Wall Street and the tea party, and refers to Texas Gov. Rick Perry as a "serial killer." It was released online last month by the duo Black Star, aka Talib Kweli and Mos Def, who now calls himself Yasiin Bey. It had 62,868 hits on Black Star's site.

Although these artists make specific political references, they favor allusive, stream-of-consciousness wordplay over the straightforward agitprop of, say, Country Joe and the Fish's Vietnam protest song, "I Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Rag."

Crosby says there are talented young musicians articulating today's political issues in an entertaining way, and ticks off the names of Tom Morello, Zack de la Rocha and Death Cab for Cutie. "You know the one who shocked me was Pink," he added, referring to the pop singer's 2006 reproach to George W. Bush, "Dear Mr. President." "This is a politically astute and absolutely fearless song," Crosby said. "I wish I had written it."

To be sure, a handful of contemporary artists have taken provocative political stands in the post-Sept. 11 era, and occasionally paid a high price. The Dixie Chicks went from being Nashville's sweethearts to country music pariahs after their lead singer, Natalie Maines, criticized Bush at a London concert shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Nostalgia may distort impressions of the political content of past musical eras. Danny Goldberg, a music producer and former manager of Nirvana and Sonic Youth, said that "a lot of people have selective memory" in recalling '60s popular music as heavily politicized. The original Woodstock festival in 1969 may be remembered for opening with Richie Havens' antiwar ballad "Handsome Johnny" and wrapping up with Jimi Hendrix's apocalyptic version of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

But the No. 1 pop tune of 1969 -- the year of maximum U.S. troop involvement in Vietnam -- was the classic bubble-gum ditty "Sugar, Sugar" by a made-up comic-book "band" The Archies. "It's hard to bring politics into art -- it has to be entertaining, not boring; it's not easy to do," Goldberg said.

Simmons said he believes that the Occupy movement has signaled the start of a new social dialogue that is "going to be cultural, not just political."

"I think in the spring, it's really going to start to build up," he said. "Expect a lot of support from a lot of cultural heroes, including musicians."