Songs About Places 2022: Songs of Protest

You might have missed the discussion about the year’s biggest protest song.

Leave it to a band called Chat Pile, accurately described by music blogs as “stuttering noise rock with heavy sludge and occasional death metal influences” and “a dilapidated shack of sludgy violence,” to broadcast a direct challenge to the collective morality of the planet’s richest country by calling out the ubiquity of homelessness.

The song, titled “Why,” repeats the titular incantation for an effect that feels a little like the band holding our collective heads in place, forcing us to see and acknowledge the problem, not allowing anyone to look away until we answer for our failures.

Here's the first verse:

Why do people have to live outside
In the brutal heat or when it's below freezing?
There are people that are made to live outside
Why?

Later in the song, the lyrics make a more human connection to the experiences of homelessness.

Why do people have to live outside?
I couldn't survive out on the streets
Why?
Why do people have to live outside?
I couldn't survive out on the streets
I've never had to push
All my shit around
In a shopping cart
Have you?
Have you ever had ringworm?
Scabies?
Have you ever had to live outside?
I don't wanna live outside

An estimated 500,000-plus people to live in homelessness on any given day. That number is certainly an undercount. President Biden and the mayors of the two largest cities in the country recently issued dramatic policy proclamations intended to help lower these numbers and right the moral balance of this country. Given how little regard we collectively as a nation have shown the most vulnerable among us up to this point, it’s enough to suspect it won’t be enough.

While some critics have described “Why” as embarrassingly earnest, and a YIMBY could find fault with the vacancy truthing in the first verse (“Why do people have to live outside/When there are buildings all around us/With heat on and no one inside?/Why?”), I’m willing to forgive these foibles for the rare expression of brutal honesty—the point of the song stands, regardless, which is to confront, rather than avoid, the truth. This is rock ’n’ roll serving its higher purpose.

“Why” is also just one of the most conspicuous manifestations of a blockbuster year for songs about places. Like in years past (see lists from 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018, for example), I collected songs about places throughout the year and supplemented my collection with selections from various end of the year “best of” lists, such as best albums lists provided by Bandcamp and The Quietus and the best songs list from Pitchfork.

Interestingly, both The Quietus and Pitchfork topped their lists with a description of the power of place in music. For The Quietus it was the album I love You Jennifer B by the band Jockstrap (the song “Concrete Over Water” is featured in the playlist below, but the album includes a few additional songs about places). For Pitchfork, the song “Belinda Says” by the band Alvvays conjures up “vivid scenes,” such as “a warm vodka cooler chugged behind a hockey rink” and “a forlorn move to the countryside soundtracked by Belinda Carlisle’s ‘Heaven Is a Place on Earth.’”

Back to Chat Pile—the band attracted plenty of attention for the album that debuted “Why” from their hometown press in Oklahoma City. The band makes a direct connection between their hometown and their music. In the great tradition of bands from Memphis, Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York City, among others, the music of places is a music of social protest.

I found it exceedingly easy to absolutely stuff this playlist with songs about places in 2022. I will add to the playlist as I discover more songs about places in the coming weeks and months, but for now, here are 139 songs, running for over nine hours, about places.

The playlist opens with songs that I think fit a narrative about music and place and wanting the world to be better while recognizing how it falls short, before genre hopping a little through various genres of rock, hip hop, pop, and EDM. I conclude the playlist with a stretch of instrumentals—because place doesn’t always need to be sung with words.