Unless youve spent the past 12 months so engrossed in Serums wavetable editor that the outside world has become but a distant memory, youll have noticed that were living through interesting times at the moment. Of course, by interesting we mean utterly terrifying.

During such turbulent eras musicians have traditionally turned to making protest music, but from Bob Dylans meaningless Blowin' in the Wind to Mike Reids challenging UKIP Calypso, protest songs are exclusively dreadful pieces of music. Theoretically, their musical shortcomings are mitigated by their ostensibly world-changing powers, but in reality, their effect is limited to say the least.

In fact, creating protest music isnt just a waste of time, its likely to be counter-productive to your cause. If that sounds like an alternative fact, prepare to have your prejudices blown away by MusicRadars top 5 reasons why your protest music is actually making things far worse.

No matter how catchy your melodies or funky your beats, dont fool yourself: your opponents arent going to be swayed by your arguments. Even if your message is objectively accurate, itll likely have the opposite effect to that which you intended according to this research paper, which notes that If people counter-argue unwelcome information vigorously enough, they may end up with 'more attitudinally congruent information in mind than before the debate,' which in turn leads them to report opinions that are more extreme than they otherwise would have had."

Lets take this famous saucily-titled anti-cop jam as an example: despite the evidence submitted to the N.W.A. Court, US law enforcement declined to go F themselves. Who could have imagined such a shocking turn of events?

Unsurprisingly, Facebook has become the primary source of news for younger generations, but once youve dropped your 2-step folktronica truth-bomb on your timeline its only likely to reinforce your similarly-minded friends opinions.

This is because - as everyone apart from the supremely naive realised years ago - social media is an echo chamber that can isolate us from opposing political ideas. Whats more, when people like something theyre given the feeling that theyre helping, reducing the likelihood theyll actually do something useful.

On the plus side, perhaps you might radicalise your mum, or at the very least get a couple of SoundCloud plays off someone you spoke to briefly at a party in 2007.

On the plus side, perhaps you might radicalise your mum, or at the very least get a couple of SoundCloud plays off someone you spoke to briefly at a party in 2007.

So, youre fully committed to dismantling the exploitative capitalist system with your freaky breakcore sounds, but who is really benefiting from your supposedly anarchic antics? Youve bought a computer (which is unlikely to be organic and locally-sourced), forked out to your ISP to upload the data, and everyone who finds your music is almost certainly going to be data-mined to within an inch of their lives by unscrupulous tech giants.

Whats more, your incendiary bangers may be bookended by ads, making a mockery of your anti-establishment stance.

If you're reading this - let alone making socially-aware future bass music on a MacBook in your local independent coffee shop - youre not just a regular Joe. Youre a member of the liberal elite, an ill-defined section of society that everyone hates. It doesnt matter that youre working in the service industry and scraping by on an income that your parents would consider a pittance: your snobby, highfalutin attitudes are driving a wedge between the classes and youre indirectly responsible for the rise of right-wing populism in Europe.

Perhaps instead of banging on about identity politics you should write an aspirational song about poppin bottles in the club like everyone else?

In his documentary HyperNormalisation, film-maker Adam Curtis argues that individualistic self-expression is actually antithetical to effecting political change:

I sometimes wonder whether the very idea of self-expression might be the rigid conformity of our age. It might be preventing us from seeing really radical and different ideas that are sitting out on the margins - different ideas about what real freedom is, that have little to do with our present day fetishization of the self. The problem with todays art is that far from revealing those new ideas to us, it may be actually stopping us from seeing them.

Who could possibly have thought that dedicating the entirety of ones life to programming the most anal neuro bass patches possible alone in a darkened bedroom would result in a navel-gazing attitude?

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5 reasons why your protest song is making things worse - MusicRadar