'But our families, our community, our ancestors suffered at the hands of this monarchy.' 'She never came to my house personally and took food out of my fridge,' the rapper and songwriter said. ''Cause England's ending, death's still pending/Where's that money you spent?/Work all week, still work on weekends/Still can't pay my rent/Times are tough/I've had enough.'īob Vylan frontman Bobby Vylan (the other band member, who plays the drums, goes by the name Bob Vylan) said the late monarch still owes a debt to Britain's Black and brown families. Slowthai's ' Nothing Great About Britain' and ' England's Ending' by the band Bob Vylan criticize the monarch's greed.įor example, the Bob Vylan track begins with a direct, f-bomb-laced order to kill the queen, and goes on to explain why: These tracks are even more direct than their punk and alt-rock predecessors. 'And so there's a little less of that deep anger, much as there's still plenty of poverty in Britain,' he said.īut the financial pressures and racism faced by the country's many citizens with roots in Britain's former colonies largely continued to grow.Ī new batch of songs targeting the queen by acts like slowthai and Bob Vylan have emerged in recent years from the UK's hip-hop community. McEwan said this wave of anti-monarchy music, largely driven by white people, subsided in the 1990s as this segment of the population's economic prospects started to improve. The 1986 track views the monarch as the figurehead of a dissolute empire. Including a comical scene that references a real-life break-in at Buckingham Palace ('So I broke into the palace with a sponge and a rusty spanner/She said, 'I know you, and you cannot sing'/I said, 'That's nothing, you should hear me play the piano'') 'The Queen is Dead' by The Smiths pokes fun at Elizabeth. McEwan said a slew of songs that followed in the 1980s - a time of high unemployment and unassailable class divides in the UK - continued to attack the queen for her symbolic status. 'By using the title, 'God Save the Queen,' obviously you're invoking the national anthem and making it about more than just her.' 'It really is an indictment of the system,' said Paul McEwan, a professor of media and communications at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, where he teaches a class on pop music history. The song, which the punk band released in tandem with the Queen's Silver Jubilee, equates the monarchy with a right-wing dictatorship. The sentiments changed after The Sex Pistols released ' God Save the Queen' in 1977. The Beatles' ' Penny Lane' is a case in point, with the whimsical lyric, 'Penny Lane, there is a fireman with an hourglass/And in his pocket is a portrait of the Queen.' Until the 1970s, the Queen of England pretty much only made innocuous cameo appearances in British pop songs. Elton John, for instance, paid tribute to the queen at a concert earlier this week.īut the relationship between British pop and the late monarch has long been much more fraught. The death of Queen Elizabeth II has elicited empathy from some British pop artists.

Punk wars lyrics