We’re starting with Everybody Knows by Leonard Cohen, who called his own message “pretty hard to take” without the “music and nonsense rhymes” — because the vision has a “funeral quality.” He said he wrote it to “close that gap” between private life and public life — and the only way he could do it was to say the unbearable parts “humorously… as a joke.”

So listen for the voice under the jingle. And listen for what happens when the joke stops being funny.

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Cohen gives us the atmosphere first: “Everybody knows it’s coming apart,” and the old “political vocabulary” feels obsolete — like we’ve inherited words that no longer fit the world they’re meant to describe.

Then Bullet the Blue Sky by U2 takes that same feeling and drops it into a place where the collapse isn’t theoretical — it’s audible.

Bono said the song came from Central America in the 1980s — “the bullying of the left by the right.” He describes the sickening double-exposure of everyday life: you see McDonald’s, you see children with schoolbooks… and then you go 25 miles and see peasant farmers, and the machinery of power.

And then the moment that turns a mood into a memory: on the road to a village, “troops opened fire above our heads… just flexing their muscles.” He said, “It scared the shit out of me… I literally felt quite sick.”

From “everybody knows” to your body knows.

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If Bullet the Blue Sky is fear in the face of force, Tramp the Dirt Down is anger sharpened into language — the kind of language that doesn’t ask permission.

Tramp the Dirt Down by Elvis Costello is often mistaken for a personal vendetta, but Costello insisted it’s not about burying a person — it’s about burying “an idea in the ground”: Thatcherism.

That move matters. Because once politics stops feeling like “public life” and starts feeling like something that enters your home, your job, your relationships — it doesn’t stay abstract. It becomes an idea with fingerprints.

Costello points to his own bridge as a kind of slogan-with-teeth — a grim little snapshot of a country’s self-image as it shifts under pressure. It’s brutal, yes — but it’s also a direct answer to Cohen’s complaint that nobody is speaking in a way that addresses him.

Here, someone is speaking. Loudly. And without mitigation.

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Now we’ve had: the joke that masks the dread, the dread that turns physical, and the fury that wants to bury an idea.

So what’s left?

A voice that refuses certainty.

Rise by Public Image Ltd comes, John Lydon said, from “South African torture victims.” But what’s striking is the stance he takes while speaking on something that severe: “I always consider both sides of the argument.”

And then the line that becomes the hinge of the whole episode: “I could be wrong, I could be right.”

After Costello’s certainty — after the need to condemn, to bury, to end — this is a different kind of courage: to name horror without pretending you’ve solved the world.

It’s a reminder that “voices in society” aren’t just angry or afraid — sometimes they’re morally alert. Sometimes they’re the sound of someone trying not to lie to themselves.

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That uncertainty — “I could be wrong, I could be right” — doesn’t stay in politics. It seeps inward.

And that’s where Those Whole Girls by Suzanne Vega arrives: not with a manifesto, but with self-scrutiny.

Vega said it began as “an envious song,” but she didn’t want to live there. She wanted to move from envy toward “the way I wish I could be.” The “whole girls,” in her description, are people who “don’t seem to be troubled by the things that trouble me.” They seem “so together,” and — this is the line that sticks — “they don’t seem to have any parts missing… they’re whole.”

After the violence outside, and the certainty and doubt about systems… we meet the quieter question: what does all of this do to a person? Not to their opinions — to their sense of being intact.

This is a societal voice too: the private voice, admitting it’s not coping as neatly as it looks.

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Vega’s “whole” people feel almost mythical — like characters from a story where things don’t fall apart and nobody is missing parts.

And that leads perfectly into Late for the Sky by Jackson Browne, because Browne talks about how mythology actually forms: not from cleverness, but from lived experience catching up with you.

He called this song “very personal” — the moment you realise “something has changed, it’s over,” and you’re “late for wherever you’re going to be next.” But then he says something bigger than heartbreak: he once wrote a song and only later understood it was about the relationship he’d just left. “It was only when I stood back that I realised…”

And here’s the real connection: Browne says mythology emerges “from human experience,” not from the “conscious mind” trying to be clever. “Humans make metaphors,” he says — “one way of telling the truth in an artful way.”

So maybe being “whole” isn’t a type of person. Maybe it’s a story we tell — until life edits it.

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Browne gives us the personal pivot: you don’t always know what your own story means until you’re already living the next chapter.

Now zoom back out — from private mythology to national one.

Something About England by The Clash is, as Mick Jones put it, “another little story/film.” A conversation between a young, hip guy and the same tramp from “Kill Time.”

That framing matters: it’s not a lecture — it’s a scene. Two people, two angles, one country in the background. Because “voices in society” often don’t arrive as speeches. They arrive as overheard exchanges. As characters bumping into each other. As someone who’s been discarded speaking to someone who still thinks they’re safe.

And that tramp is a brilliant bridge back to Cohen’s starting point: the sense that public life has gone missing — replaced by fragments, by symbols, by people talking past each other.

Now we listen to England as a conversation — not an anthem.

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