If you’re a National Review reader and care about the music of the rock n’ roll era, you really ought to try listening to Jeff Blehar and Scot Bertram on the Political Beats podcast. And if you’re already a Political Beats listener and have a few bucks to spare, I recommend the Patreon exclusive content episodes. In an episode at the end of May inspired by the death of Gordon Lightfoot and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” Jeff and Scot offered a list of the greatest songs inspired by real events in history or the news. I won’t give away the whole list, but it includes a range of songs from the ripped-from-the-headlines (Crosby Stills Nash & Young singing “Ohio”) to really inaccurate history (Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer” and Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane,” both of which are great songs so long as you understand that they’re lying to you).

I have my own list of songs that didn’t make their cut, and figured I’d present them here.

Jesus Jones, Right Here Right Now

The three biggest events of my lifetime have been the end of the Cold War, the 9/11 attacks, and the COVID pandemic. This is the best song about the first of those three. (Honorable mention to “Winds of Change” by the Scorpions and “Heresy” by Rush). Writing in the moment, Jesus Jones (a two-hit wonder) perfectly captured the feeling of that era of hope:

I was alive and I waited for this
Right here, right now
There is no other place I want to be
Right here, right now
Watching the world wake up from history

Bruce Springsteen, Into the Fire

Following that trio of events, it’s debatable which is the best song about 9/11, but Bruce Springsteen’s album The Rising was the class of the field written in the months that followed it. Maybe the title track was the best, following a fireman’s ascent of the stairs of the towers as it became an ascent to the next life. But I might just as well pick “Into the Fire,” which packs an emotional wallop of its own in its ode to the men who ran into danger. Borrowing the structure of his “Badlands” chorus, Bruce issues a prayer:

May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love give us love

Wallis, Lonely Christmas (ft. The Schriver Sisters)

I’m not sure if the definitive pandemic song has been written or will be, but the closest we got was a Christmas song written and performed in 2020 by a 15-year-old, singing about isolation, staring at the phone, and the wreckage of plans made in January.

Rush, Manhattan Project

Oppenheimer may put us more in the mood for this history classic:

Imagine a place
Where it all began
They gathered from across the land
To work in the secrecy of the desert sand
All of the brightest boys
To play with the biggest toys
More than they bargained for

Which builds to a crescendo at “The pilot of Enola Gay/Flying out of the shock wave/On that August day”

Dropkick Murphys, Tessie

I had to include the best baseball history song of them all. “Tessie” has become the anthem of the Boston Red Sox, and for good reason. It works on multiple levels. The song tells the story of the 1903 Red Sox, the team that won the first-ever World Series. It name-checks the team’s ace pitcher (Cy Young), the pitching hero of the 1903 Series (Bill Dinneen), and tragic star outfielder Chick Stahl, the batting hero of that Series. It retails the story of the Royal Rooters, a rowdy bunch of fans led by Michael “Nuf Ced” McGreevy, the owner of the “Third Base” tavern, and how they once rioted when their seats were given away. The Royal Rooters used to sing a song called “Tessie” (during the 1903 Series, they adjusted the lyric “Tessie, you made me feel so badly” to “Honus, why do you hit so badly” to taunt Pittsburgh Pirates star Honus Wagner). The Dropkick Murphys version, which is very much in the spirit of rowdy Boston Irish, keeps Tessie as an icon of the Royal Rooters, updated with 21st century punk rock and supplemented by a bagpipe.

Warren Zevon, Boom Boom Mancini

If there’s a better sports history song than “Tessie,” it’s “Boom Boom Mancini,” Warren Zevon’s hard-rocking ode to the lunchpail ethos of boxer Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, who killed Korean boxer Duk Koo Kim in the ring in 1982. Zevon turned it into a meditation on combat of all kinds – with a motto any politician could understand:

Some have the speed and the right combinations
If you can’t take the punches, it don’t mean a thing…

They made hypocrite judgements after the fact
But the name of the game is be hit and hit back

U2, Pride (In the Name of Love)

No discussion of music and history is complete without U2’s ode to Martin Luther King jr.’s martyrdom at the hands of an assassin’s bullet; the only thing holding back rankings of this classic a bit higher in such discussions is that it’s more of an impression than a storytelling song:

Early morning, April four
A shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

It is justly one of the signature songs of one of the biggest rock bands in history, and it plants the flag of U2’s philosophy.

Billy Joel, Ballad of Billy the Kid

Billy Joel wrote the story of Billy the Kid as a metaphor for himself (“From a town known as Oyster Bay, Long Island/Rode a boy with a six-pack in his hand”) and it took some liberties with the facts. But it’s still a masterpiece of storytelling:

Well he robbed his way from Utah to Oklahoma
And the law just could not seem to track him down
And it served his legend well
For the folks they’d love to tell ’bout when Billy the Kid came to town

Well one cold day a posse captured Billy
And the judge said “String ‘I’m up for what he did!”
And the cowboys and their kin like the sea, came pourin’ in to watch the hangin’ of Billy the Kid

Black 47 James Connolly

Sure, it’s socialist propaganda, but Irish-immigrant band Black 47’s ode to one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising is a classic of bringing to life the spirit of a historical event:

And now we’re in the GPO with the bullets whizzin’ by
With Pearse and Sean McDermott biddin’ each other good-bye
Up steps our citizen leader and he roars out to the sky
My name is James Connolly, I didn’t come here to die

But to fight for the rights of the working man, the small farmer too
Protect the proletariat from the bosses and their screws
So hold on to your rifles, boys, don’t give up your dreams
Of a Republic for the workin’ class, economic liberty

Mark Knopfler and James Taylor, Sailing to Philadelphia

If you thought nobody had written a good song about the surveyors who drew the Mason-Dixon line, you thought wrong:

Now hold your head up, Mason
See, America lies there
The morning tide has raised
The capes of Delaware
Come up and feel the sun
A new morning has begun

That’s ten songs by ten different artists on ten different events, but it’s my list, so I must add an honorable mention to a second Springsteen song:

Bruce Springsteen, 41 Shots (American Skin)

Bruce’s song about the NYPD shooting of Amadou Diallo was deeply controversial in 1999 – the cops, typically fans of Bruce, turned their backs when it was performed – but it was genuinely heartfelt and fair to all the participants, from the immigrant killed for reaching for his wallet, to the cops who only had one instant to make a life-or-death decision, to the black mother raising her son to fear that he might find himself in Diallo’s shoes:

41 shots
Laina gets her son ready for school
She says “on these streets, Charles
You’ve got to understand the rules
If an officer stops you
Promise you’ll always be polite,
that you’ll never ever run away
Promise Mama you’ll keep your hands in sight”

Is it a gun, is it a knife
Is it a wallet, this is your life