10 Rock Songs You Didn't Realize Were Protest Tracks

You’re not really going to find a ton of protest songs in the world of hair metal. Who are we kidding? If you’re lucky, you’ll probably be able to find a handful of songs that actually make any sort of sense outside of sex and drug abuse. Def Leppard were a bit of a different breed though, and Gods of War was an epic tale told by the man on the street.

Starting life as a guitar jam that Steve Clark would work out when they would play live, the crux of the song came to life when they were riffing on the main line from the Police’s Message in a Bottle. Around the same time they were in the studio, the world was also dealing with Cold War propaganda, with Russia and America being in a fairly tense relationship at the time. Though this is supposed to call out the Gods of War, Joe Elliott doesn’t pretend like he has the answers to all of these questions.

All he knows is that these nuclear missiles are only going to bring destruction wherever they go, so there would be no reason to set them off in the first place. While the song might start off dark and ominous, the chorus of “what the hell we fighting for?” practically feels angelic, with each voice panning against each other to create a wall of sound in your headphones, as Joe’s scream overpowers everything underneath. Then again, the digitized voice shouting orders at the end might tell a different story, saying that there’s no way to hide from the destruction. You can cry all you want, but we all have to wait and see if that pleading will actually pay off.