Song 18: Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell

Canadian women make up 22% of the House of Commons, and there are 22 women on this Top 100 Political Music Countdown. Joni Mitchell's on this list twice, one of a handful of artists to break that barrier - a soft voice with big music. 

A quote from Mitchell on the meaning of Big Yellow Taxi:

I wrote Big Yellow Taxi on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was this parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart... this blight on paradise.

Song 39: Woodstock, Joni Mitchell

With her call to get back to the Garden of Eden and her bombers that turn into butterflies, Joni Mitchell's Woodstock captured a new consciousness of the late 60's and early 70's.

I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm

Gonna join in a rock 'n roll band

I'm gonna camp out on the land

And I'm gonna try and get my soul free

Song 58: Cuyahoga, R.E.M.

R.E.M.'s album Lifes Rich Pageant has some beautiful songs with perfect tiny messages, if you have the time to translate the code.

Hyena's always been a favourite of mine, for the lines:

The only thing to fear is fearlessness
The bigger the weapon the greater the fear
Hyena is ambassador to here

And these are the ONLY lines for Underneath The Bunker:

I will hide and you will hide
And we shall hide together here
Underneath the bunkers in the row

I have water I have rum
Wait for dawn and dawn shall come
Underneath the bunkers in the row

Cuyahoga, though, is the song from that album that has stayed with me the longest.

The Cuyahoga River flows into Lake Erie where Cleveland sits. It was so polluted, the river would catch fire.

Song 72: Beds Are Burning, Midnight Oil

Midnight Oil's Beds Are Burning is about giving the Pintupi their native Australian lands back. The Pintupi were forcibly moved from their lands during the 1950s and 1960s.

Beds Are Burning is also part of TckTckTck, a climate justice campaign working to draw attention to the urgency of the issue.  People sign a "musical petition" with each song download.

Halifax reader and beer/freedom expert Bobby O'Keefe wrote in about the song:

I was 11 or 12 when Beds are Burning came out, and it was probably the first song I associated with any sort of power or movement in the political sense when I first heard it. I doubt the environmental message of the song was really the message I was getting at that time, and even now I think there's a greater message - that being how can we simply stand by when there are real issues to be taken care of and, more to the point, when the people in charge are making such poor decisions. Reminds me now of a couple of my favourite quotes: Plato's  "The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men" and Martin Luther King's "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." Remain silent or indifferent and run the risk of your bed burning out from underneath you while you sleep. Still a powerful message today, all wrapped up in a great rock song.