Perhaps ironically, given the subject, this post has taken three or four attempts to complete. I’ve looked at the suggestions before without success since the suggestion thread was posted back in 2020, finding little inspiration to actually complete the post.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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But this time around, it finally clicked, ten songs were selected, and I found things to write about. This is inspiration in various forms: from muses, to self-determination, to overcoming discrimination and violence, to messages for future generations.

Either way, it’s a powerful set of songs that say important things. Thanks, as ever, to all that suggested songs.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Fleetwood Mac
/Don’t Stop
/Rumours

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Somehow, Rumours works. Despite Christine and John McVie divorcing, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks having a tumultuous, on-off relationship, and Mick Fleetwood’s wife having an affair with his best friend. Or is that it is such a great album because of all that? Songs thrive on the tension created by ex-partners having the other play their songs, such as on Don’t Stop.

Despite not talking about anything but the music they were creating, Christine McVie’s lyrics are fascinating. It’s a song that says “fuck the past, that’s happened”. Look at tomorrow, and how much better you can make your future – presumably without each other…

Rumours sold over forty million copies, and somehow, the core lineup of the five of them remained in place until 1988, resuming again in 1997 and lasting until 2018, until Lindsey Buckingham was fired and sued the rest of the band.

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/OK Go
/This 2 Shall Pass
/Of the Blue Colour of the Sky

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OK Go are best known – and perhaps rightly so – for their astonishing, creative videos that have become their signature, and This 2 Shall Pass had two videos. The second saw the band performing in and around an enormous Rube Goldberg Machine that is absolutely astonishing in its creativity and utter joy that they must have had making it.

But less commented upon is the song itself: the fingerprints of producer Dave Fridmann are all over it (that sunny, pysch-pop maximalism that he does so well), and the song itself is a message of hope and inspiration, written during the carnage of the late-2000s recession that, frankly, felt like a terrible, depressing time – and, it turned out, only a forerunner of the misery that was to follow in subsequent years.

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/Saul Williams & Krust
/Coded Language
/Coded Language

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Saul Williams is quite the polymath these days – a poet, rapper, actor, activist and more. One of his greatest pieces is Coded Language, a lengthy treatise that celebrates and assesses the development and origins of hip-hop, and the origins of black music and the struggles that helped create it, but also reminds that it is vastly more than just the popular clichés. It covers spirituality, politics, the power of the spoken word…but also it is a message of inspiration: that hip-hop culture has influenced and inspired so much more than just new generations of rappers. It has helped to change politics, inspired social change, and picked up where their forebears left off and continues to evolve. He talked about it in 2016, with fascinating thoughts to add context.

And, when put to Krust’s thumping, thrilling drum’n’bass track, sounds even more amazing and inspiring.

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/Bob Marley
/Get Up Stand Up
/Burnin’

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I’m more of an admirer of Bob Marley’s music than I am a lover of it, but even I can appreciate the sheer force of what is generally regarded to be Marley’s greatest song. Over a typically laconic, laid-back reggae rhythm, Bob Marley implores others to stand up and fight for what’s right, regardless of what they are told by others. Marley had form himself, of course – particularly the legendary One Love Peace Concert in 1978, where Marley managed to get PM Michael Manley and his bitter opposition rival Edward Seaga to embrace onstage, as part of an attempt to quell political violence in his homeland.

My dad was long a fan, but my understanding is that he never saw Marley live, while his late brother did – apparently attending that legendary show at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park. My dad has always been jealous of that…

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/Labi Siffre
/(Something Inside) So Strong
/Stand By Me

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One of those songs that has entered the popular canon, such is the force and deep meaning behind a measured, seemingly mellow song from first listen. Labi Siffre initially had a number of hits in the early seventies, before returning to music in the mid-80s when he saw black South African civilians being killed in the street on the news, and this song was the result.

But it’s not just about apartheid: it’s also about his own experiences as a black, gay man in post-war Britain, and the song absolutely burns with the power of someone who has overcome everything thrown at him, and who wants to make it clear to others that it’s ok, and that they can overcome too: it’s not hopeless.

The result was an extraordinary song that has echoed through the ages.

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/Will Haven
/Muse
/WHVN

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Muses came about thanks to Ancient Greece, seen as the inspiration for poets, song and the written word, and the term muse has since become a term for someone who provides artistic inspiration. The muse here is inspiring the thundering roar of Will Haven at their peak, as Grady Avenell weaves a tale of artistic inspiration, as he struggles to paint a self-portrait, until his muse intervenes and provides him with the pep talk and inspiration to succeed that he needs.

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/Dissonance
/Get Through
/Void

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American electro-industrial act Dissonance have a number of songs that feel to be deeply personal songs, and Get Through is one of the most notable. A near-beatless song, instead kept alive across a clouds of gentle synths, Cat Hall implores her own self to keep fighting, initially just to get through the night, and then more generally as she reminds herself that she has support, and that she doesn’t need to go through all of this alone.

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/EMF feat. Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer
/I’m A Believer

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Originally written by Neil Diamond and recorded by The Monkees – resulting in one of the biggest, most enduring hits of the late-sixties – I’m A Believer is one of those songs where cover versions come around regularly. Smash Mouth, for example, did a version that appeared in the closing scenes of Shrek, but a few years earlier, the perhaps past-their-peak EMF got their biggest hit in a while by teaming up with comedy duo Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, for a riotous, chaotic take.

The song itself has a simple premise: falling in love can inspire you to live again, and get out of the doldrums of loneliness. Added to that, this song is such a joy that pretty much any cover will do, really.

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/Talk Talk
/Happiness Is Easy
/The Colour of Spring

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Mark Hollis’s songs under the name Talk Talk were remarkable things, and over the course of their career, they went from intelligent synthpop to barely-there experimentation, and helped prepare the ground for what became post-rock along the way. Happiness Is Easy is something of a halfway house, with a sparse drum beat accompanied by brush strokes of other instrumentation along the way.

This song appears to be a message to his children, about examining and questioning what they see and what they are told, rather than blind acceptance: inspiring them to be better, more rounded people that think before they act. I only hope that the message was heeded.

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/Nina Simone
/To Be Young, Gifted and Black
/Black Gold

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Last Monday was Martin Luther King Day in the US, which is observed on the third Monday of January, being the closest day to MLK’s birthday (15-Jan), and this year’s was the fortieth anniversary of a Federal Holiday that has been resisted or renamed at times by more conservative states of the US.

One of the songs that helped to symbolise the later stages of the civil rights movement was this extraordinary song, that Nina Simone wrote to give hope and inspiration to the young black children of the time that were witnessing momentous change. Reminding them of their importance, and how they could continue to be voices of change and power in the future.

In the last few years, songs like this feel more important than ever. What’s inspiring the young of today as they watch the world crumble around them?