America, having learned nothing from the ’60s, is now repeating them in bits and pieces. Today’s riots over the police mistreatment of African-Americans harks back to yesteryear’s antagonistic relationship between law enforcement personnel, or “pigs,” as they were known among the country’s disaffected youth, and protesters of various stripes. Pre-social media, the nation’s youth used music as their primary form of communication, so there were plenty of songs addressing this situation. Canned Heat cared a lot more about the blues than politics, but riots in their home base of Los Angeles elicited this snarky response on their 1969 LP “Hallelujah.”
