Billy Bragg Quotes

When you break it all down, my punk rock is my dad's blues. It's music from the underground, and it's real, and it's written for the downtrodden in uncertain times.

And I don't expect anyone can bring about a revolution in the way that Bob Dylan did - and really didn't - in the 1960s.

If you see something is going wrong within politics and the world today, then some Hip Hop artist is gonna come along and get straight with it. If they think that there's a lot of racism going on then there's another Hip Hop artist who's gonna come out and speak their mind.

People were talking about songs of the common man in order to make the common man. With Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, they were so common it was just uncommon.

I loved the Woody Guthrie tradition of speaking about what's happening to the country.

In the '60s and '70s, a protest song was a genre in music.

I did admire the comments and the music of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. And that didn't fly too well in the Deep South. It was not quite redneck enough.

We happen to be the vanguard of that revolutionary struggle because we are the most dispossessed.

I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.

Our records, if you have a dark sense of humor, were funny, but our records weren't about comedy. They were about protests, fantasy, confrontation and all that.

My musical heroes are people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie who wrote and sang real songs for real people; for everyone, old, young, and in between.

When I first stepped into literature twenty-five years ago, I wanted to work on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it seemed to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the Jews.

I would say there's a lot of similarity between folk and punk. It's written for the common man.

Reggae music is not an easy music to like when it comes to the power in society. 'Cause it talks about changing society. You won't find it readily accepted.

Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.

For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.

Punk was more based on social change than on music, so it didn't bother me too much. It wasn't really a musical threat.

The revolution... is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

Is it possible that my people live in such awful conditions?... If I had to live in conditions like that I would be a revolutionary myself.

Bob Dylan was more important for my political orientation than Karl Marx.

A political movement is that in which the proletarians as a class exert pressure against the ruling classes.

A protest song is a song that's so specific that you cannot mistake it for bullshit.

The history of all hither-to-existing society is the history of class struggles.

Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People

If you turn your people into bourgeois, you also turn them into pacifists.