Last weekend was the 4th of July, but I didn’t do a column for the occasion because I needed the space to do something truly patriotic: Criticizing the government and demanding the people within it do better. Our country exists because people didn’t sit back and wait for their leaders to figure it out, and there’s nothing more American than carrying on that tradition.

But now that I’ve said my piece (for now), it’s time to more formally celebrate the 4th of July by doing basically the same thing. I’m going to list some protest songs.

Protest songs are as old as America. “Yankee Doodle,” for example, was a song British soldiers sang to mock the American troops for being less formal and cultured, so those backwoods Americans adopted it and sang it with pride while defeating what was then the most powerful military on Earth. It’s now the state anthem of Connecticut.

For this column, let’s focus on some that are often misunderstood.

Woody Guthrie — “This Land is Your Land”

This is not a jingoistic song.

If you know anything about Woody Guthrie, you’d know he wasn’t blindly patriotic. He had “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” written on his guitar. The guy was the Tom Morello of his era. He wasn’t singing about how perfect America is.

No, he wrote a response to “God Bless America,” which despite people standing for like it’s the freaking National Anthem had only gained popularity seven years prior, in 1938. Do not stand for “God Bless America.” It’s a song by Irving Berlin, the guy who also wrote “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Show some respect for the actual anthem. While “God Bless America” is all sunshine and rainbows, Guthrie’s response points out that it’s not sunshine and rainbows for most of the people actually living here.

Unfortunately we got dense and our reading comprehension went down the drain, so people think they’re the same kind of song.

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Bruce Springsteen — “Born in the USA”

Speaking of a lack of reading comprehension, this is somehow even worse, because it’s so much less subtle.

You know how I said Woody Guthrie was the Tom Morello of his era? Well Springsteen actually had Morello in the E Street Band when Little Steven was off filming “The Sopranos.” He is not a rah-rah-yay-America dude. I don’t care if he’s got the image of the archetypal working man. He’s the sort of working man who started the union.

The song is about the economic pain of actual Vietnam veterans, not a glorification of the military. This is the actual first verse: “Born down in a dead man’s town/ The first kick I took was when I hit the ground/ You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much/ ‘Til you spend half your life just coverin’ up.”

Yay America, I guess.

Creedence Clearwater Revival — “Fortunate Son”

Martinez’s own John Fogerty managed to write a song with a sneering contempt for the Vietnam War and the rich, and for that I salute him.

The lyrics to this one speak for themselves; there’s nothing I can add. Well… they should speak for themselves, but there was a Levi’s commercial years ago that apparently didn’t. It was a flag-waving, sepia-toned saccharine appeal to patriotism that used “Fortunate Son” as its soundtrack. Seriously. It played the lyrics “Some folks are born to wave the flag, ooh they’re red white and blue,” then cut it off and just played the instrumentals instead of the very next line, “And when the band plays ‘Hail to the Chief,’ ooh, they point the cannon at you.”

I can’t find the ad on YouTube. I can find basically every other ad they’ve ever run, but not that one. I can’t imagine why.

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Nina Simone — “Mississippi Goddam”

This was Nina Simone’s first protest song, written in response to the murders of 14-year-old Emmett Till and civil rights crusader Medgar Evers in Mississippi, and the “Alabama” part is about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.

If you don’t know the Emmett Till story, I want to shame you but I won’t, because I want you to learn. He was a Chicago native visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955 when he was accused of whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. Whether he did—or if anyone—did the actual whistling, was disputed at the time. But regardless, he was abducted by a mob of white people, tortured and lynched.

The men who murdered Till were acquitted by an all-white jury, and shortly thereafter sold the story of exactly what they did to him and why for $4,000, fully confessing in Look magazine. As a journalist, that act of journalistic malpractice stands as one of the most heinous in American history. Additionally, his mother’s insistence that he have a public, open-casket funeral so everyone could see his mutilated body, and photos were published in Jet magazine.

The federal anti-lynching law, which would have potentially held his killers accountable, is named in his honor. It was signed into law on March 29, 2022, just over three months ago and 67 years after the murder.

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Rage Against the Machine — “Killing in the Name”

Let’s end on a lighter note with the greatest protest song ever recorded.

Woody Guthrie was the Tom Morello of his era. Bruce Springsteen had Tom Morello as part of his band. So let’s hear from Tom Morello himself.

I’d like to say that this song is impossible to misinterpret. It should be. Zack de la Rocha repeats “some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses” eight times. In case that was unclear, he repeats “Those who died are justified, for wearing the badge they’re the chosen whites. You justify those that died, by wearing the badge they’re the chosen whites” four times as the song’s chorus.

It’s about police killing non-white people without consequences. The theme is basically written on a brick and thrown through your living room window.

You know who’s dumb enough to miss that? Right-wing extremist and certified weirdo Paul Ryan. He’s said repeatedly Rage Against the Machine is his favorite band and this song is one of his favorites. He was the Speaker of the House from late 2015 until early 2019, in case you were wondering how utterly doomed we’ve been.

Follow editor Daniel J. Willis and tweet column ideas to him at Twitter.com/BayAreaData.