I’ve been falling a bit behind on my writing because life happens and I have been focusing a lot of my attention on my new project on Instagram, if you haven’t checked it out, on the IG account @thediversityofclassicrock, I feature five rock stars a week and talk a bit about their story and their music. On this Instagram account, I go back to the roots of the blog and what they were founded on: talking about non-white/mixed, female, LGBT, and disabled musicians. There’s only so many posts I can write about ethnicity and sexuality so I decided to take a fresh, accessible, bite sized approach to talking about the diversity of classic rock musicians. I’d really appreciate it if you give that Instagram page a follow. I also cross post all the posts to Facebook, for those who don’t use Instagram. Running that page is fun, but it does take time away from writing posts for the main blog and these posts take a lot of hours to write, research, and put together in an easy to digest, approachable way that you’ve come to appreciate from me.

As a “filler” – but not a boring filler, I had this blog post idea in my back pocket. As you know, I love memes and have made a bunch in my time in the classic rock fandom. I’m also into politics and why not combine the two to make political compass classic rock memes? First, I’ll go over a little background on what a political compass is so you can understand where I’m coming from. Before I go onto that, I’ll say this: these are memes, please don’t take them seriously. I based these off of song titles, not necessarily the content of songs (believe me, I’d have a hard time filling in the authoritarian right quadrant if I stayed true to the meaning of the lyrics).

And what a timely post this is, after that disaster of a debate, here’s something to take your mind off it.

What’s a political compass?

In politics circles, you’ll see people asking each other and showing off their political compass results. Personally, mine fall somewhere between -6, -6 and -8, -8, easily in the left libertarian quadrant. You find your position on a political compass by taking a quiz like the one on politicalcompass.org, which is the most common one. This style of political compass isn’t perfect, but it can provide some good insight on where people stand politically. I’m not here to discuss the ins and outs because I’m not a politics blogger and I didn’t major in political science. Just enough to give you a basic understanding so we’re on the same page and you don’t look at this blog post confused.

The two axes measure where you stand socially (libertarian or authoritarian) and economically (left or right). There are four quadrants: Left Authoritarian, Left Libertarian, Right Authoritarian, and Right Libertarian. Now, let’s talk about who falls into each of these categories and some generalisations:

Left Authoritarian: These guys are typically your tankies and communists. You might find them supporting the USSR, Cuba, or the People’s Republic of China. Some political adjectives people use to describe themselves in this quadrant might be: Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, and Stalinist. Economically, they are left wing and support communism, but socially they’re not all about freedom and they’re all about big government, from my understanding.

The songs I put in this quadrant often reference the Soviet Union, China, collectivism, labour sorts of things, communism, the like.

Left Libertarian: Gonna be biased here since this is my team, this is the based quadrant. You’ll find a lot of different people ranging from social democrats (or as they like to call themselves succ dems) to democratic socialists to libertarian socialists to a bunch of different anarcho things like ancoms, anarcho-syndicalists, and anarcho-mutualists. Some people in this quadrant are revolutionaries, but you’ll also find a lot of hippies here too.

The songs I put in this quadrant will most likely reference the hippie side of this quadrant: peace, free love, legal weed, LGBT rights, equality. Good stuff.

Right Authoritarian: These guys are the fascists and (a lot of them) racists. We don’t like them. This is where Donald Trump would be. On the “less extreme” end, you’ll find you neoliberals here – some people like to call them fascist enablers or fascist adjacent. Neocons are also here. I don’t like any of these political groups because they’re the opposite of what I support. Yuck!

The songs I put in this quadrant will most likely mention racism, patriotism, war, or white people in the song title.

Right Libertarian: Socially left, economically right. You’ll find liberals, traditional libertarians, and anarcho capitalists here. The traditional libertarians are the ones I often find myself nodding and agreeing with them on social issues, but not on economic issues. So close, yet so far! These guys stand for small government and think taxation is theft. These guys also really like money. They’re like Mr Krabs.

The songs I put in this quadrant will most likely reference money, taxes, and that one stereotype about libertarians being creepy to women and girls (yeah I know there are libertarians who are sound people, but this is a real problem). Sometimes a song about drugs will be in this quadrant.

Radical Centrist: In reality, they’re people with a mix of views. They’re really not fence sitters, even if people stereotype them that way.

When I can find a song title that sounds like a radical centrist song I’ll put one in there – usually something pretentious about being smarter than others.

Let’s look at some classic rock political compass memes then!

AC/DC

The Beach Boys

The Beatles

Cheap Trick

The Clash

David Bowie

Eric Clapton

Fleetwood Mac

Genesis

Guns N Roses

Jimi Hendrix

King Crimson

The Kinks

Led Zeppelin

Lynyrd Skynyrd

Pink Floyd

The Ramones

The Rolling Stones

Rush

Small Faces

Sparks

Talking Heads

Thin Lizzy

The Who

Yes

What was your favourite political compass meme? Let me know in the comments section!

Shoutout to my friend Patrick for supporting the blog!

Loved this blog post and want to support? If you cannot afford to donate to The Diversity of Classic Rock, there are many free ways to support the blog: Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, click the follow button on my website, leave a nice comment, send your music or classic rock related books for review, or donate your art and writing talents to the blog.

You can also download the Brave Browser using my referral link* and earn tokens that you can donate to your favourite creators (including me!), donate to charity, or you can keep them for yourself and redeem them for cash. The choice is yours! Thank you!

I am also an affiliate of MusoSoup*, a platform for musicians to efficiently share their music with thousands of bloggers, radio stations, and curators for coverage for a very affordable price. If you’re a blogger, you can sign up for free by contacting them. If you’re a musician, you can sign up and share your music with all the bloggers and content creators signed up on the website. If you sign up as a musician using my referral link, I get a commission, which helps keep this blog running and helps you get more publicity for your music.

*This is an affiliate link that you can use at no extra cost to you. I get $5 for every person who downloads the browser through my link. Downloading Brave (which is free) using my link is a nice gesture to support the blog at no out of pocket cost to you, but it’s not obligatory. For the MusoSoup affiliate link, I get 50% of the sign up fee for musicians. The cost is no extra if you use my affiliate link.