16 Songs About Standing Up For Yourself
Standing up for yourself involves assertively expressing your thoughts, feelings, needs, and boundaries while respecting the rights and boundaries of others. It’s an essential skill for maintaining healthy relationships, building self-confidence, and ensuring that your needs are acknowledged and met. Below is a list of songs about standing up for yourself:
1. Imagine Dragons – Natural
This is the lead single from their fourth studio album Origins and ended up being the anthem for 2018’s ESPN College Football. It is generally about becoming a little ruthless as you realize you have to fight and stand up for yourself. Here is what Dan Reynolds said about the song:
Living in a dog-eat-dog world can bring out the worst in you, and sometimes, the best. It would be a lie to tell you I haven’t become somewhat skeptical about some things in the last decade of my life. However, I believe that when you truly learn to love yourself, the judging eyes and hateful words become meaningless. Natural is about finding yourself and being willing and able to stand up to whatever adversity comes your way.
2. Bob Marley & The Wailers – Get Up Stand Up
The track was written as a response to the social and political unrest in Jamaica. It is a call for them to stand up for the voiceless and all those who are denied basic human rights. It ended up being the official anthem of Amnesty International, a human rights nonprofit.
The song also advises people to start fighting for justice now and not just dream. We often use religion as a hiding place instead of facing our enemies. The Rastafari movement believes that God isn’t to be found in heaven but rather among mankind. Peter Tosh tries to send the message that God can basically be incarnated into anyone and is probably living among us.
3. Meek Mill – 1942 Flows
The song is from Meek’s third studio album Wins & Losses. It talks about his journey from the streets to the top of the rap industry and overcoming the various challenges along the way. He touches on issues such as cops killing members of his community and racism from the government that is meant to govern them.
4. Common, John Legend – Glory
The main message in the song is an encouragement to the black community to continue fighting for equality. They went from being treated like not even human to semi-human, to owning land, to voting, to education and now almost equal
5. Michael Jackson – They Don’t Care About Us
This is the fourth single on the album History and has been termed as one of Michael Jackson’s most controversial songs. It is a plea against racism and demanding powerful people to stop ignoring human rights. As a black man, he connected with other people who were being oppressed for the same reason and wished to expose how painful it was to cope with the cruelty.
6. Taylor Swift – Only The Young
The track was released in 2020 alongside her Taylor Swift: Miss Americana documentary. It is a political anthem that encourages young adults and teenagers to use their voices for what they believe in. She wrote it after the 2018 midterm elections in which Republicans won the most votes. Speaking to Variety, she had this to say about the track:
I wrote it after the [2018] midterm elections, when there were so many young people who rallied for their candidate, whether it was a senator or congressman or congresswoman. It was hard to see so many people feel like they had canvassed and done everything and tried so hard. I saw a lot of young people’s hopes dashed. And I found that to be particularly tragic, because young people are the people who feel the worst effects of gun violence, and student loans and trying to figure out how to start their lives and how to pay their bills, and climate change, and are we going to war — all these horrific situations that we find ourselves facing right now.
7. Dua Lipa – Swan Song
This is part of the Alita: Battle Angel original soundtrack. It mainly talks about the fight for justice. Dua tweeted:
Alita fights for the lives of marginalised people. […] we mustn’t ever quit our battle against the injustices of the world. Even in the hardest moments we must speak up. Lyrically the song references the brilliant minds at ACT UP, a HIV and AIDS activist group from the 80s who’s motto was “Silence equals death” with the hopes that in our everyday life we put into action this deeper meaning so that silence never become us.
8. Halsey – Nightmare
The song is part of Love and Power EP (2021) and is dedicated to young women. It has been termed as a follow-up to Devil In Me, where Halsey discusses her passive past. Here is what she had to say on what inspired her to do the track:
I was thinking about the way my experiences relate to my fans. One of the things that a lot of myself, and a lot of my young female fans of mine have, is the experience of when someone is telling you to smile. At some point, some man will look at you say, ‘Ay, why don’t you smile? You’re so frigid. She would be so much nicer if she smiled. What a pretty face, you should just smile.’ And you’re like, ‘I don’t want to!’ If you don’t, then the narrative about you becomes, ‘Oh that girl’s such a nightmare. She’s so difficult, she’s such a nightmare.’ I used to not like that, and I was like, ‘Oh gosh, I don’t want anyone to think I’m a nightmare. I don’t want people to think I’m mean or rude.’ So I found myself in situations smiling when I didn’t want to smile or being nice to people who probably didn’t deserve it. Not anymore, I’d rather be a nightmare than a bunch of jerks get away with forcing me into some kind of complacency, or some kind of convenience or positivity because they want to see it. It’s for their own entertainment, and it makes them more comfortable. It doesn’t matter if you’re a famous person, or any person we can all relate to that experience.
9. NWA – F*** The Police
The song came about after the members of NWA were forced by the police to lie face down in the streets while pointing guns at their heads. This was because Easy E was doing drive-by shootings on innocent people on bus stops and freeways with a paintball gun.
10. Muse – Uprising
The track is from their 2009 album The Resistance. Matt Bellamy had this to say about the song:
This song is influenced by glam rock, 80s synths, riots and the more eccentric protesters at the G2O protests. It expresses a general mistrust of bankers, global corporations, and politicians.
Chris Wolstenholme added this:
The title of the album relates strongly to the first two tracks [the other being Resistance]. Uprising has the protest thing going on. I think that the whole song is about having a massive mistrust for people in power, whether it be government or bankers. We’re living in a society where we’re being told to keep quiet, to just accept things as they are
11. Taylor Swift – Look What You Made Me Do
This is the lead single of the album 1989. We see Taylor taking shots at some of her rivals in the music industry and many suspect they are Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry. During the release party, she explained how the song came about:
It actually started with just a poem that I wrote about my feelings, and it’s basically about realizing that you couldn’t trust certain people, but realizing you appreciate the people you can trust. Realizing that you can’t just let everyone in, but the ones you can let in, you need to cherish. And it had all the verses in it, just basically as is.
12. Taylor Swift – You Need To Calm Down
The song is part of the album Lover (2019). In it, Taylor Swift tries to address various critics who post hurtful comments online. She stated:
It’s about how I’ve observed a lot of different people in our society who just put so much energy and effort into negativity, and it just made me feel like, “You need to just calm down, like you’re stressing yourself out. This seems like it’s more about you than what you’re going off about. Like, just calm down.
13. Cardi B – Press
Cardi takes shots at the media for their negative coverage of her and how she isn’t bothered by the judgment from different people. She also goes ahead to brag about her success in the music industry despite people trying to bring her down.
14. Drake – Energy
Drake decided to address his haters in this track after getting a lot of hate throughout his career. He has had feuds with musicians such as Pusha T, Common, Chris Brown, Meek Mill, Diddy, Birdman and Tyga.
15. Taylor Swift – Mean
The track is a reponse to music critic Bob Lefsetz who gave her a cruel review after a February 2010 performance with Stevie Nicks. He claimed that she can’t sing and her career had been shortened by that performance. Mean ended up winning two Grammy Awards for Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance. Taylor Swift shared this about the meaning of the song:
When you do what I do, which is you put yourself out there for a lot of people to say whatever they want about it, there are a million different opinions from a million different people.I get it that not everyone is going to like everything that you do, and I get that no matter what, you’re going to be criticized for something. But I also get that there are different kinds of ways to criticize someone. There is constructive criticism. There’s professional criticism. And then, there’s just being mean. There’s a line that you cross when you just start to attack everything about a person, and there’s one guy who just crossed the line over and over again. Just being mean, and saying things that would ruin my day. […] There’s always going to be someone who’s just mean to you. Dealing with that is all you can control about that situation, how you handle it. ‘Mean’ is about how I handle it, and sort of my mindset about this whole situation.
16. Tayor Swift – Mad Woman
The song was a way for Taylor Swift to stand up for herself against entertainment mogul Scooter Braun who purchased Big Machine Records along with the masters to her first six albums. He ended up selling them to Shamrock Holdings after frustrating Taylor when she tried to buy them by asking her to sign a document that would prevent her from saying anything negative about Scooter.