Why Nirvana and Midnight Oil made the cut in Songs that Changed the World

In the new book Songs that Changed the World, author Andrew Clarke was aiming for a top 40, but couldn't do away with any two songs.

Here he tells the ABC's pop culture journalist why some songs made the list and others didn't.

You start the book with Strange Fruit. I want to talk about artists paying a personal price for their songs that change the world. You write in the book about Billie Holiday's final moments as well as some of what she went through in life. Tell me about that.

She did become public enemy number one. I mean, a Black woman singing about lynching in the United States was very confrontational, but she was a huge star and she had the power to do it. But the FBI and all the entities didn't really like that. So, she spent a lot of time being interviewed by police.

And you wrote that she didn't receive the medical treatment that she was due when dying in hospital.

Absolutely … the evidence is there to say that she could have got lots of things to help her, but no-one was willing to do that for her, and a lot of it was the pressure from the FBI.

It's pretty obvious why this particular song is on the list, but can you tell me what's going on in this song and why it's so powerful?

It is [written by] Abel Meeropol, who [was] a Jewish poet in New York City, and he saw a photograph of lynchings in Indiana, and he was so taken by that that he wrote this poem, which was later turned into the song Strange Fruit … the fruit is actually the Black people swinging in the trees as they're being lynched and the visual imagery of it is quite confronting.

When you go from that to something like Smells Like Teen Spirit, it seems like quite the jump. Why do both songs belong side by side in this book and tell me why the Nirvana classic made it in there?

I think the beauty of this is that the 42 songs tell different stories in most cases. Smells Like Teen Spirit is really about a disaffected youth finding a voice and finding some power, and maybe just understanding that they are a bit cranky at times … and that's the teen spirit because "you might think I'm just a stoner or lazy, but that's just the way we are and you guys need to understand it because we've got the power".

Would you describe this as a song that doesn't really have political messaging but still has an impact socially?

Oh, absolutely. And there's a couple of songs in this book like that that weren't designed to be political but the message in it was so strong and connected so strongly. Smells Like Teen Spirit [is a] song that connected to a generation in many ways. People I know who don't like that style of music still love that song. And … it gave people [the] feeling that it's OK to feel disaffected. But let's just get people to understand that we can still be productive, useful, and loved.

It appears in a lot of different places in pop culture. I hear the riff every day when I tune into The Breakfast Club — a radio show out of New York on a station that plays mostly hip hop and R&B — but I did go back and listen to the song after reading that part in your book because you mentioned that the lyrics, a lot of them don't even really make sense, and you're absolutely right.

It's pure genius when you think about it. It's just that great abstract way of thinking that older people didn't understand at the time.

Let's jump on to Beds are Burning. Tell me about this song and its impact, as well as the impact of Midnight Oil.

It's an interesting one because Midnight Oil had always been political to a degree, but this ramped it up. It's written specifically around the dispossession of the Pintupi people and it was the first time, I think, in Australia that anybody had really in a public way spoken about Aboriginal land rights, so something that we'd buried and hidden and didn't even want to talk about suddenly became something that we were singing along with … so it really brought that way of thinking into the mainstream.

There's something about having a catchy tune you're singing along to, but then it has this potent message.

It is good, isn't it? That's where some of these songs in the book, not just this one, hook you in without you knowing. You get entrapped by the music or entrapped by the melody, and then underneath it all are these great lyrics that are telling you a story and trying to ask you to think. And subconsciously, whether you like it or not, if you like the sound of that song, you are going to start to take in the lyrics in a way that you don't even understand.

It did make me wonder though why a song like Treaty by Yothu Yindi didn't make the list. Are there songs, Australian songs, that could have made the list but just missed out?

Oh, absolutely. Treaty is one of them, clearly. There's I was Only 19 by Redgum, Khe Sanh by Cold Chisel — they were all on the list that we considered. And hopefully we get to a point where we do a second book and they'll be in there.