Songs in the key of real life

Woody Guthrie had a maxim for aspiring songwriters: "You should be able to look at a newspaper and write a song." Neil Young, the son of a journalist and a product of the early Sixties folk scene, where Guthrie's influence loomed large, is old enough to remember the old folkie's advice. Indeed, vérité accounts of drug deaths and the Manson killings produced some of Young's most memorable songs from his classic Seventies albums, "Tonight's the Night" and "On the Beach". It's not surprising, then, that he was one of the first people to record a song inspired by the events of 11 September.

"Let's Roll" has been given heavy rotation on US radio for the past few months, and it's now available on Young's new album, Are You Passionate?. The song takes its title from the last words heard on the mobile phone used by one of the passengers who stormed the cockpit of the hijacked United Airlines flight 93 and forced it to crash in a field in Philadelphia. It begins with the sound of a mobile phone and ends with a rallying cry for Americans to conquer the threat of the enemy in their midst, but "Let's Roll' is hardly one of Young's most memorable songs. Written three months after the event, it's bereft of an impassioned, heat-of-the-moment reaction. One reviewer compared it to the script for a made-for-TV movie.

Such is the dilemma for topical songwriters in a heavily mediated age. When Guthrie was alive, made-for-TV movies, 24-hour satellite news channels, mobile phones and the internet didn't exist. Information wasn't such an overused, or devalued, currency, and real-life occurrences still had a potent effect when used in popular song. Bob Dylan took Guthrie at his word and wrote "Oxford Town" and "The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll", both about miscarriages of justice and rank evil in the Deep South.

Neil Young's Buffalo Springfield band-mate Stephen Stills used first-person reportage to pen "For What it's Worth". The song captured perfectly the dread Stills felt while watching a minor protest on LA's Sunset Strip turn into an ugly confrontation with the LAPD. And in May 1970, just after the US National Guard had shot four students dead at an anti-war protest on Ohio's Kent State University campus, Dave Crosby gave Neil Young a magazine containing a report on the killings. "He read the article, picked up the guitar, and started writing 'Ohio'," recalled Crosby. "I watched him write it." Before the month was over, the song was recorded, released and in the American Top 20, a ringing condemnation of Richard Nixon's domestic and foreign policy long before Watergate became an issue.

In Britain, musicians had started to take similar inspiration from events in the news. The Rolling Stones inserted new lyrics into "Sympathy for the Devil" when Robert Kennedy was shot in 1968. Later the same year, they released "Street Fighting Man" and the Beatles cut "Revolution". Both of these songs charted after anti-war protesters took to the streets of London and Civil Rights demonstrators were attacked by the RUC in Derry.

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the Clash's "White Riot", their first chart entry and a song inspired by the experiences of Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival. In the aftermath of punk, topical songwriting came to the fore. Outraged at the air time given to the British Fascist party chief Oswald Mosley, Elvis Costello wrote "Less Than Zero". In 1977, Linton Kwesi Johnson championed the cause of the imprisoned anti-racist George Lindo in the song "It Dread Inna Inglan". Initially reluctant to tackle Irish politics, Derry's Undertones responded to British government intransigence to H Block hunger strikes with "It's Going to Happen". Around the time that they played the song on Top of the Pops, the hunger striker Bobby Sands died, prompting co-writer and guitarist Damian O'Neill to wear a black arm band.

The Specials' "Ghost Town", written by Jerry Dammers after he witnessed the effect of Thatcher's policies on the inner cities, had a similarly eerie providence, reaching number one in the week that riots broke out across the UK in June 1981. But perhaps the pomposity evident in songs such as the Boomtown Rats' 1979 hit, "I Don't Like Mondays" (former journalist Bob Geldof's overwrought account of a pre-Columbine US school slaying), and U2's chest-beating "Sunday Bloody Sunday" contributed to steering bands away from topical song. The Rolling Stones did try to reclaim credibility and relevance with the Gulf War-inspired "Highwire", but it made little impact.

Bob Dylan's last notable topical songs "Hurricane" (which detailed the story of the wrongly convicted boxer, Rubin Carter) and "Joey" (about a gangster shot dead in a New York clam bar) were featured on his 1976 album, Desire. On the sleeve notes to his 1993 album, World Gone Wrong, he rewrote Guthrie's maxim for the modern age, deciding that "the only thing nearly real is virtual reality".

But following Guthrie's maxim these days can be problematic, as Bruce Springsteen discovered when he performed "American Skin (41 Shots)" in New York. The song bluntly retold how Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man, was shot dead on his doorstep by police. The NYPD blues picketed Madison Square Gardens when Springsteen played there in June 2000, but the boss held firm and played the song each night.

Real life in song can prove too messy, too troublesome, to deal with. And so Guthrie's maxim holds little water with today's generation. They're more likely to adhere to the poet Seamus Heaney's rule: "Whatever you say/ say nothing." He was referring to Ulster at the height of the Troubles, but he could have been summarising the past decade of Britpop.