I’ve often found further inspiration for posts in this series by looking at the flipside of a subject that I ask about, and this week is one of those. After all, if I ask about blame, why not ask about responsibility too?

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That said, things don’t always quite work out as intended. Blame was a fertile subject, as if singers getting their grievances out in song was always going to be a winner. But the flip side turned out to be much harder, with a smaller pool of songs to use.

But I was able to pull ten songs together that do mostly look at personal responsibility (there are a couple of exceptions), and thanks as ever to everyone that still takes the time to suggest songs.

The next two weeks will be another pair of related subjects. Join me next Tuesday to get on with it.

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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 above).

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/Audioslave
/Cochise
/Audioslave

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The mighty first single from Audioslave – the band formed by Rage Against The Machine minus Zack de la Rocha, his vocals replaced by the very different approach of Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell. The result was different, but familiar. Rather than the powerful, political rage of before, this band felt like a seventies-hard rock band brought to the modern day, and Cornell’s powerhouse vocals were the icing on the cake.

There have been various interpretations of the lyrics over the years, but I think I lean towards agreeing with the idea that this is Cornell giving himself a pep talk: stop destroying yourself with your life choices, take responsibility and make it better. While he did heed his own words – he was sober by 2005 – he never fully beat his demons, taking his own life in May 2017.

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/High-Functioning Flesh
/Self-Management
/A Unity of Miseries – A Misery of Unities

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One of the most thrilling of the new wave of industrial artists that flooded out during the 2010s was LA duo High-Functioning Flesh, one of the first to be overtly influenced by Cabaret Voltaire (and Portion Control, to a lesser extent) in particular. Their original demo from 2013 turned heads immediately, and Self-Management was the lead track from the mini-album that dropped the following year, a pulsating track that deliberately blurred the lines a bit to make you work at understanding what was going on (particularly as the lyrics are never totally clear). Amid the rigid tempos and clanging percussion, though, there is a clear message if you only hear the title as a mantra: look after yourself, make things work for you: if you can’t do that, how the fuck can you help anyone else?

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/Depeche Mode
/Get The Balance Right
/The Singles 81>85

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Another band HFF could be seen to be influenced by is Depeche Mode, but in that early-to-mid-eighties period when DM were experimenting and finding their feet. The oh-so-tinny synths and chiming sounds make for a brighter sound that the dark, gloomy power that they’d soon find and settle on, but the lyrics are already darker. Another song about taking care of yourself, Martin Gore’s lyrics point to an acceptance that not everything will always go your way in life: but do the right thing when it is required, whether that is good or bad, but always take responsibility for your actions regardless.

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/Thee Faction
/Responsible
/Singing Down the Government, or The War of Position and How We’re Winning It

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As I’ve noted before, Thee Faction were for a short few years, one of the most thrilling live bands in London: their self-monikered “socialist R&B” truly came alive in the live arena. Their whole concept, really, was around the idea of personal responsibility – how do you take part in ways to make things better for everyone, through the lens of left-wing politics? This track came from arguably their best album, and is the song that is solely about the idea of taking responsibility for change by, to start with, actually giving a shit and agitating for change.

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/Nothingface
/Make Your Own Bones
/Violence

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There were a lot of bands in the Nu-Metal era that perhaps never got their due. One such band was Nothingface, but that might also have been because they were a band with a sound that was unlikely to ever cross over to the mainstream. By the time of album Violence, they had nailed their sound, and it was one that was absolutely ferocious. A fearsome low end dominated their sound – it was like the unstoppable rumble of a tank about to run you over, frankly – but it was Matt Holt’s raging vocals that dominated the show. And on the opener to Violence, Holt unleashes hell on an adversary, standing up to their accusations and taunts by pointedly noting that they should take ownership of their own failings before pointing fingers.

Violence was the high water mark for the band, with an array of disasters affecting members of the band in subsequent years, before Matt Holt died aged just 39 from a degenerative disease in 2017.

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/The Wildhearts
/It’s All Up To Me
/The Wildhearts Must Be Destroyed

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The Wildhearts have had a surprisingly lengthy career for a band that at points seemed so bent on destroying themselves, and they had a number of chart hits thanks to their ability to make their hard rock songs so damned catchy. 2003 song It’s All Up To Me sees Ginger in a more reflective mood, as he accepts his failings and his habit of lashing out of others, and making clear that for at least most of the time, it’s actually all on him rather than others.

Ginger Wildheart announced earlier this year that he had mantle cell lymphoma, and would not be going through treatment: saying he had “2-3 years to say goodbye to everyone”. He’s still touring this autumn, too.

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/Zola Jesus
/Fault
/Arkhon

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The remarkable work of Zola Jesus has been championed repeatedly on this site over the past fifteen years or so: there is genuinely no-one like her work. The latest full album from her was the intriguing ARKHON, where she collaborated with Randall Dunn and Matt Chamberlain, and allowed her to overcome severe writer’s block. The sparse Fault echoes out of the speakers as if it was recorded in a cavernous space, and sounds enormous despite there being only a few elements (a trademark of Dunn’s production), and the song sees Zola Jesus reckoning with herself: there’s no-one to blame for whatever has gone wrong other than themselves, owning past mistakes in the process.

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/Bob Marley
/Get Up, Stand Up
/Burnin’

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The popular image of Bob Marley as a dope-championing Rastafarian, as the poster that adorned so many student dorm rooms usually showed, is reductive and frankly somewhat insulting to his memory. While he did stridently campaign for legalisation of cannabis, he was also a political campaigner aiming for peace, better government and an end to imperialism in his native Jamaica and beyond (most famously, his actions at the One Love Peace Concert in 1978, where he got political rivals Michael Manley and Edward Seaga to shake hands onstage, an almost unthinkable action during a period of (partially CIA-inspired) political instability and violence.

Get Up, Stand Up was first recorded by Marley and Wailers in 1973, and it absolutely seethes. Marley kicks into religion and personal responsibility, the key line being “Stand up for your rights“, reminding that change starts from standing up for yourself, before then joining the wider fight, but also the concept that waiting for your God to reward you in the afterlife means nothing if you don’t do something before then.

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/C. W. Stoneking
/The Love Me or Die
/Jungle Blues

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A song that has been suggested no less than seven times over the years (by the same person!), so it is high time that it gets used. And it is such a different sense of responsibility being explained here than any other song on this list, too…

On this gloriously retro-blues track (while it is from nearly twenty years ago, it sounds like it was recorded a century back), C. W. Stoneking admits he has fucked up. He’s got some charm in his possession that he uses to manipulate the object of his desire, but she still says no, and dies in mysterious circumstances – presumably as a result of things not working out as he’d initially expected. He even faces judgement for his actions: a rare case in this post of the protagonist actually experiencing consequences for their actions…

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/Michael Jackson
/Man In The Mirror
/Bad

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For all his faults, Michael Jackson’s philanthropy was vast: by some estimates he gave away approximately $500 million to a variety of causes across his career. One particular song sums up his views on such responsibility, and that is Man In The Mirror from his 1987 mega-hit Bad, where he explains that he is looking at himself first to make a difference: “If you wanna make the world a better place / Take a look at yourself and then make a change“.

Unlike some other pop stars of his era, and most of the new breed of tech-billionaires in the present day, he did make a difference through his philanthropy. Like Dolly Parton and George Michael, too, other megastars that did good things with their vast wealth, without making a big deal of it: with vast wealth comes a responsibility to others, or that’s how it should be. That these three are noteworthy is perhaps because many don’t take that responsibility to heart.