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Something that I think gets missed in a lot of the more overtly 'political' music so far mentioned is the importance of infrastructure. It's what seperates someone like Bob Dylan singing about political change and a band like say Amon Duul who rarely sang about politics but were infinitely more political, in my eyes, due to the way in which they organised themselves as a band. (I think Genteel Death was making a similar point in relation to Plastic People of The Universe, who managed to be political without using vocals at all and, more tangentially, Notyourfiend's point about 'Starfield Road'.)
Most political music done in the Dylan vein ends up sounding banal because it lacks any kind of self-critique. Dylan told us what was wrong with 'them' and 'us' while rarely thinking to address his own mode of operation. Bands like Amon Duul and Plastic People are far more interesting (and politically useful) in that their first target of critique wasn't something as safely distant as 'the system' but rather the ways in which certain structures that arose simply out of them functioning as a band might've ultimately supported those very ideas they were trying to overturn.
Bands like Crass, Scritti Politti and Gang of Four tried to fuse the two. However I tend to find their approach to the concept of what a band is (or can be) on a structural level far more interesting than any of the often far less thought out slogans that tended to pepper their lyrics.
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