DALLAS – Jamie Laurie, one of two frontmen for the suddenly successful alt-rock/rap outfit Flobots, is onstage at a crammed Pontiac Garage, the smaller room at the House of Blues, explaining his choice of neckwear: an American flag. “It’s not about blind patriotism or desecrating the flag,” says Laurie, who also goes by the more lyrical name Jonny 5. He then quotes the late poet Langston Hughes’ Let America Be America Again and says it’s all about the America of the future.

“We are building a movement!” he shouts.

Such sloganeering might be easily dismissed as rock ‘n’ roll bravado, but the Denver-based Flobots are doing something that hasn’t been seen in a while: bringing overtly political, message-oriented music back onto the Top 40. Their outwardly upbeat Handlebars single – with its lyrics warning of guided missiles, political assassinations and nuclear holocaust – has just broken through that threshold. Flobots’ full-length album, Fight With Tools, has already hit the Top 15 on the albums chart.

Handlebars stands out at a time when pop radio reverberates to the teen-scream shenanigans of Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers, the post-crunk club grooves of Flo Rida and Lil Wayne, and all things American Idol.

From listening to pop radio, few would know that the U.S. is involved in two wars and a hotly contested presidential election, or that economic worries abound. The most pressing issue on Katy Perry’s mind seems to be telling everyone I Kissed a Girl, the song that has dominated contemporary-hit airwaves this summer.

Changing times

It’s a far cry from the late 1960s and early ’70s, when Top 40 made room for explicit social-issue songs from both ends of the political spectrum, ranging from Edwin Starr’s War and the Guess Who’s American Woman to Barry Sadler’s Ballad of the Green Berets and Gordon Sinclair’s The Americans.

In the ’80s, the Clash climbed into the Top 10 with a swipe at a Middle Eastern crackdown on rock ‘n’ roll (Rockthe Casbah), Band-Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? (the inspiration for USA for Africa’s No. 1 We Are the World) went Top 15, Midnight Oil’s plea for Aboriginal rights (Beds Are Burning) hit the Top 20, and U2’s Martin Luther King Jr. tribute, Pride (In the Name of Love), went Top 40. More recently, Styx’s Show Me the Way became an anthem for the Gulf War in the ’90s and reached No. 3.

Aside from such post 9-11 tunes as Alan Jackson’s Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning) and Paul McCartney’s Freedom in 2001, and Toby Keith’s 2002 fist-pumper, Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue (The Angry American), not much else dealing with our jittery life and times has crossed over to mainstream pop success.

It’s an omission that many people have noticed: “Radio serves you meatloaf, and you know there’s steak back in the kitchen,” observes socially conscious Cleburne rapper Scott Johnson, who has a haunting unreleased track, TheMessenger, about a soldier whose duty is to tell families their loved ones have died in Iraq. “But no one wants to bring the steak out.”

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