I have to ask: where have all the sad and angry songs gone?

I heard a French song on the radio the other day. It sounded like one of those lovely bal­lads from around the time of the Sec­ond World War, and it had a melody and lyrics that were sung with just enough melan­choly to some­how have a tinge of hope to them as well. Just as with some songs in lan­guages that are not in our na­tive tongues, it was ex­otic enough to alter my mood and get me think­ing of very re­cent Eng­lish lan­guage com­par­isons. I couldn't think of any.

This French song had the flavour of a kind of protest song. Not a po­lit­i­cally mil­i­tant song, but you could tell that it's world weari­ness came from the de­struc­tion that the singer had seen or pos­si­bly even lived through. You could al­most hear the hunger for a good steak or a roast chicken in her voice. In fact, it could have been hunger for love but I got the im­pres­sion from her frus­trated tones that it was some­thing more than a pri­vate, per­sonal an­guish that was eat­ing at her. She had blame in her voice – ac­cu­sa­tion and the fire of (dare, I use the word) in­dig­na­tion.

“How had things got to this point?” she seemed to be de­mand­ing to know.

This is a ques­tion too for our cur­rent era. As Eu­rope con­vulses with doubt about its own ex­is­tence as an en­tity, I have my own queries about pop­u­lar cul­ture. I want to know why I don't hear songs on main­stream radio that re­flect the tem­per of the time. Today, who is singing about so­ci­ety's ills?

Ac­cord­ing to The Guardian news­pa­per music jour­nal­ist, Luke Mor­gan Brit­ton, “most bands re­gard so­cial com­men­tary as ca­reer self-sab­o­tage [and] al­ter­na­tive artists are in­creas­ingly silent about ac­tivism.” While it's true, as he ar­gues, that in the charts “there have been hits re­con­fig­ur­ing fe­male sex­u­al­ity, videos pro­mot­ing pos­i­tive body image, as well as LGBT an­thems” I have heard noth­ing that re­flects the range of so­cial move­ments work­ing against gov­ern­ment aus­ter­ity, poverty, home­less­ness or jus­tice for tax-avoiders and rogue bankers.

It wasn't al­ways this way, of course. In the last half cen­tury alone, pop­u­lar music has given us the hon­est power of Bob Dylan's early ca­reer and a host of other music-in­dus­try civil rights cam­paign­ers. They must be lis­ten­ing to the ego­tis­ti­cal prat­tle and pos­tur­ing of this cen­tury's brand-name spon­sored hip-hop/R&B acts - who claim to speak for the op­pressed – and the older ac­tivists would have to be won­der­ing where and when it all went so badly wrong.

In the more af­flu­ent years of the 1980s and 1990s, so­cial prob­lems were rep­re­sented with sharp ur­gency through well-known singers like Bruce Spring­steen, Billy Bragg, Sinéad O'Con­nor, Elvis Costello, Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. Even bub­ble-gum pop duo Wham did a ben­e­fit con­cert for strik­ing min­ers back in the Thatcher years.

I am prob­a­bly out of touch with some of the more un­der­ground sides of the cul­tural land­scape but one of my in­ter­ests is music as a source of so­cial change – es­pe­cially in its power to change the minds of or­di­nary peo­ple, be­yond just preach­ing to the con­verted. To do this, main­stream media is nec­es­sary.

When I again hear music on the car radio that gets me ques­tion­ing things I will be (for a few min­utes) a happy man once more.