Just about the only thing that America’s indie rock revivalists of the early aughts would not bring back was the protest song. While the 9/11 attacks may have personally affected New York bands such as the Strokes, the Rapture, and LCD Soundsystem, they were politically quietist to the point of amnesia throughout the Iraq invasion. Where, many asked, were the protest songs?

Songs about the Vietnam War could fill a jukebox, be it finger-pointing folk missives or sharp Motown protest cuts — but that conflict, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, had involved the mass conscription of young men. The biggest vessel for antiwar sentiment in 2003 was undoubtedly the Black Eyed Peas single “Where Is the Love?” It was a cloying hip-hop rewrite of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” though it offered little beyond liberal truisms and trite sentimentalism. (Black Eyed Peas member will.i.am would later provide the soundtrack for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign with his official tie-in single “Yes We Can.”)

Artists old enough to have participated in antiwar protests against Vietnam were now waving the flag. Bruce Springsteen had his biggest hit in over a decade with The Rising, an album with soaring, patriotic themes. Paul McCartney was joined onstage at the 2002 Super Bowl by five hundred schoolchildren to perform his crudely jingoistic single “Freedom.”