Songs from the Ashes of Policy and Protest

From Detroit’s riots to London’s malaise and Los Angeles’s hysteria, the burning city endures as a blues and punk lament—an unheeded warning of unrest, neglect, and the working class

The city burns. Detroit, London, Los Angeles — different locations, different decades, but the same old fire licking at the bones of the working class, the same smoke rising from the ruins of failed policy and broken promises. In the blues, in punk, in the howl of guitars and the spit of lyrics, the cities are always burning. The songs Motor City is Burning, London's Burning, and Los Angeles is Burning are chronicles, yes, but they are also incantations, spells cast against the numbness of resignation, the anesthetic of boredom, the poison of racism and neglect.

Motor City is Burning begins with John Lee Hooker, a man from the Delta, transplanted to Detroit, standing on a patch of concrete, guitar in hand, watching the city ignite in the long, hot summer of 1967. Hooker’s version is the blues at its most elemental: confusion, pain, and a sense of helplessness. “It ain’t no thing in the world I can do,” he moans, as the fires spread and the world he knows is consumed by forces he knows all too well. Hooker does not pretend to understand the riot — rebellion, uprising, whatever you want to call it. He is a witness, not a prophet, and his blues are the sound of a man caught in the undertow of history, battered by the waves of policy gone wrong, of poverty and racism left to fester until the city explodes.

Then the song passes to MC5, Detroit’s white sons of revolution, and the tone shifts. The confusion of the individual becomes the certainty of the collective. Hooker’s “I” becomes MC5’s “they” — “There ain’t a thing that white society can do.” The riot is no longer a mystery; it is a rebellion, a reckoning, a match struck for freedom. MC5’s version is louder, angrier, more explicit: “Let it all burn, let it all burn, let it all burn.” The resignation is gone, replaced by a call to arms, a demand for justice in the face of institutional rot. The band claims understanding, even solidarity, with those who set the city alight. Where Hooker’s blues is the music of frailty and bewilderment, MC5’s proto-punk is the sound of will, of rage, of the conviction that the old order must be consumed by fire before anything new can be born.

Across the Atlantic, London's Burning by The Clash is not about literal flames, but the slow, smoldering fire of boredom and alienation. London, in the late 1970s, is a city adrift, its working class suffocating under the weight of unemployment, racial tension, and the deadening hum of television and traffic. “London’s burning with boredom now,” Joe Strummer sneers, the city’s malaise as destructive as any riot. The Clash, like MC5, understand that the real conflagration is not always visible. It is in the hearts of the young, trapped in a system that offers nothing but repetition and stagnation. The city is burning, not with passion, but with the slow, corrosive acid of neglect.

Then, decades later, Los Angeles is Burning by Bad Religion. The literal wildfires of 2003 become a metaphor for a media-fueled apocalypse. The flames are real, but so is the hysteria, the manipulation, the spectacle. “When the hills of Los Angeles are burning, palm trees are candles in the murder wind,” Brett Gurewitz writes, but the real arsonists are the men with cameras for heads, spewing panic and fear, turning disaster into profit. The city burns, and the working class is left to choke on the smoke, casualties of a system that feeds on disaster, that sells fear as entertainment and leaves the powerless to sift through the ashes.

In all these songs, the theme is discord — social, racial, economic. The unrest is not accidental; it is the inevitable result of policies that ignore the needs of the many in favor of the few. The working class, whether in Detroit, London, or Los Angeles, is left to bear the brunt of decisions made in distant offices, by men who will never feel the heat of the flames. Music, in these moments, becomes both witness and weapon. The blues, the punk anthem, the protest song: each is a record of suffering and a refusal to be silent.

I see not only stories in these songs, but omens. I hear in Hooker’s growl, in Strummer’s snarl, in Gurewitz’s warning, the sound of a world on the brink — a world where the only certainty is that the city will burn again, and again, until someone listens, until something changes. The music is the message, and the message is clear: ignore the fire at your peril. The city is burning, and the flames are coming for us all.