A song about oppression and struggle can be trying to do lots of different things, speaking to different people sometimes.

It can be for people who know what is going on and who are involved in te struggle. A way of building solidarity helping people make some sense of what is happening.

Or it can be an expression of grief, a lamentation.

It can be for sympathetic outsiders, putting them in the picture, giving them the facts that get left out of the papers and the TV, and submerged in the ocean of the Internet.

And it can be aimed at people who aren't sympathetic, who might even be hostile, maybe with some hope of changing a few minds.

I'm sure we can think of songs that would fall into all these categories. It's late at night where I am, so I won't try. But the point is, these three types of songs may need a different type of language and approach.

Building solidarity means there's room for direct appeals for action, and "slogans".

Putting friends in the picture means just that - showing them what is happening, so they can make their minds up that they should do something about it.

When you want to win someone over, you might be trying to find some way of showing them that the injustice that is going in conflicts with some deeper value that they actually hold, or claim to hold. So, for example, you might hold back some relevant fact, such as the race of the victim, until late in the song.

And part of that also can mean helping people see that the actual killers aren't some different kind of monsters, so that we can sit back and feel it's nothing to do with us. The paratroop brigade on Bloody Sunday, or the butchers who wiped out MyLai were our brothers who'd taken a horribly wronmg turn at some time in their lives.

Or to take a more current situation, Albanian Kospvars who were victims have now become now killers of their innocent Serbs and Rom neighbours. The wheel of hate roplls round and round.

I wrote a somg about that once, and I called it The Endless Roads

Hope you get your band together again, InOBU. If they're all like you, that'll be a formidable bunch.