1. The National, "Fake Empire" (from Boxer, Beggars Banquet)
2. Georgie James, "Cake Parade" (from Places, Saddle Creek)
3. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, "The Sons of Cain" (from Living with the Living, Touch and Go)
4. M.I.A., "Bamboo Banga" (from Kala, Interscope)
5. Nas & Jay-Z, "Black Republicans" (from Hip-Hop Is Dead, Columbia)
6. Les Savy Fav, "Raging in the Plague Age" (from Let's Stay Friends, Frenchkiss)
7. Black Lips, "O Katrina!" (from Good Bad Not Evil, Vice)
8. Against Me!, "White People for Peace" (from New Wave, Sire)
9. Jarvis Cocker, "Running the World" (from Jarvis, Rough Trade)
10. Bruce Springsteen, "Last to Die" (from Magic, Columbia)

When I first got to college I was incredibly excited for the protesting to start. I knew it was only a matter of time before I was occupying a faculty building or chaining myself to the library staircase, or perhaps waving a red flag, yelling something meaningful, and striding purposefully down a wide avenue in a large city. It was all going to be so damned exciting. But no parade came my way that I could jump in step with. Instead, it turned out that my college was, for the most part, a sort of sleepy, bookish, and completely apolitical place. Of course, I could well have gotten off my ass and started something, or joined something, but I kept waiting for the revolution to come to me, and of course it never did.

In the years since, I struggle more and more with how I am or am not a political being. The naïve and clichéd notions I once held of shouting down injustice still rattle around the back of my brain, but in the day to day I realize what's crucial is to stay aware, stay educated, and find some way to make whatever you do into a principled act, no matter how far from the arena of real political change it might seem. And of course there is no place seemingly further from the nuts and bolts of activism, resistance, and progressive action than music criticism. And anyway, there aren't many political artists out there these days, and not even so many politically charged songs. Plus, let's face it: the political song is not always such a good idea.

But I have begun to look hard for the confluence of a great tune and a powerful message, because while a great deal of the job of music, if it has one, is entertainment, life-enrichment, aesthetics, songs always have meaning too. And if a song speaks, makes you consider an idea, maybe moves you to action, that's remarkable. I think this year some kind of switch flipped in my brain and I started obsessively seeking out songs and music with ideological elements. It has something to do with how little music in the past fifteen years has been truly engaged with society. (Certainly there are bands that never stopped speaking out, but the rule has been a kind of paralytic blandness and obsession with personal emotional life).

This year I was pleasantly surprised to find some great music voicing serious ideas. The opening track isn't overtly message-heavy, but the persistent, repetitive piano rolling under Matt Berninger's deep baritone, intoning "we're half awake in a fake empire," as well as the Steve Reich-ian horn round finishing things off, gets us off to an appropriately ominous and suggestive start. Probably my favorite song of the year was Georgie James' "Cake Parade," a power-pop tune with a bouncy keyboard riff at its core and singer Laura Burhenn cooing gorgeous, melancholic lines like, "Another sailor sleeping well today/Another mother misses her lonely son's birthday." Ted Leo is one of few consistently outspoken yet also consistently awesome songwriters we have, and Living With the Living is one of his best.

M.I.A.'s agitprop is frequently discussed, but I think what's best about her music is its tendency to spray fire in so many directions at once, essentially reminding us Westerners that we'd better watch our backs. Nas stands poised to make perhaps the biggest "statement" album of his career (and an absolute rarity in today's hip-hop climate). We'll see if it succeeds, but his collaboration with longtime non-friend Jay-Z (aw!) yielded a smart, pissed-off tirade on whose interests get served by the powers that be. Les Savy Fav are usually thought of as a sort of "party band," but listen carefully and you'll find social critique everywhere on Let's Stay Friends (okay, maybe not in the sexy horse song); the best example is their "Masque of the Red Death" tribute. Black Lips came through a little late with their Katrina jam, but it's a good excuse to recall that all is still not well down in the Gulf Coast.

Against Me! are so about the protest song that they made this anti-protest song on their latest, New Wave, which made the band look great and their fans look like annoying nit-pickers. Jarvis can do no wrong, and he's certainly not wrong when he sings, "Cunts are still running the world." And then there's Bruce, who wrote to my mind the most cutting and political album of his career with this year's Magic. There are a bunch of great tunes on the album, but "Last to Die" is Bruce at his most poignant, poetic, and devastating.

Some of these tunes might feel a bit heavy handed, as these things can. But it's thrilling to hear dissatisfaction, resistance, and outrage make their way into pop, because we could all use a little help getting off our asses and getting involved, even if all that means is picking up a newspaper or registering to vote.

J. Gabriel Boylan is a freelance music journalist who lives in Brooklyn, New York and Idolator's columnist about infomercial music collections. He's also a writer for Heaven and Here, a blog about the best show on earth, ever, HBO's The Wire.