God Bless The Eagles

I really like the Eagles. There, I've said it. I don't care who knows. I think they've played some of the greatest rock music, written some of the best crafted songs and sung some of the finest harmonies.

In a roundabout way, I was reminded of one of their best lines when an old friend and newspaper colleague posted the fact that he'd finally been made redundant after 40 years by a company whose bottom line is... the bottom line.

Good old boys down at the bar,
Peanuts and politics.
They think they know it all,
They don't know much of nothing.
Even if one of them was to read the newspaper
Cover to cover,
That ain't what's going on.
Journalism dead and gone.

And rock lyric writing with any real meaning seems pretty much dead and gone too.

The papers and magazines are generally full of confectionery... and so is the music.

The Eagles may be jaded old rockers, but at least they bothered to write about America's ignorance, arrogance and greed, about what presidents really mean when they talk about "freedom", and about the quagmire of Iraq.

Which hip young songwriters with that kind of mass audience did anything similar?