The way Dorian Lynskey tells it, you might wonder why the writers and performers of protest songs bother. Especially if they're in a hip-hop crew who just want to party but the record label boss is adamant they need to get topical ("The Message"), or a soul singer excoriated for straying from sweet love songs (Motown's boss Berry Gordy described Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" as "the worst thing I've heard in my life"). You'll be criticised and ridiculed (Bono). You're liable to be pigeonholed (Bob Dylan), censored or even tortured and killed (Victor Jara).

Lynskey dedicates a chapter each to 33 protest songs, lucidly and authoritatively describing how they came to be written, the state of the artist's mind and career, and the political and musical context. The chapter that takes "War Ina Babylon" by Max Romeo & the Upsetters as its starting point discusses the development of Rastafarianism, Michael Manley's populist platform in Jamaican politics, and musicians such as Lee Perry, John Holt and Bob Marley. In addition to the 33, Lynskey mentions at least a thousand other songs, but inevitably there are some genres missing or under-represented, particularly the fertile connections between black nationalism and jazz.

So given, at best, the risk of ridicule, why do protest songs continue to be written and released? For most writers it's because the circumstances demand engagement and things can no longer be left unsaid. Lynskey vividly describes how Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam" emerged all in a rage, a direct response to the killing of four children by a klansman who bombed a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama.

To take another example, REM's early work was introspective, and Michael Stipe's lyrics intriguingly cryptic, but as the band grew more troubled by life in America under Ronald Reagan and George Bush (Snr), their songs took on topical issues with greater clarity. By the end of the 1980s the band had evolved, in Lynskey's words, into "the most celebrated activists in US rock music". A few years later, though, REM took a step back from political issues, partly because the Clinton years didn't draw their ire but also because it gave their songwriting greater freedom.

For any artist, being stuck in a pigeonhole is unhealthy (Bob Dylan determinedly rejected the "protest singer" label within months of writing "Masters of War", describing politics as "trivial"), but the real enemy of creativity is dogmatism. Lynskey also argues that protest songs don't have to be incendiary to be effective. Thus certain soul and disco acts avoided disruptive lyrics but could still carry social meaning in their songs ("Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now", for example).

In the battle for hearts and minds, the liberals haven't always won; the biggest-selling Vietnam-themed hit of the 1960s in America was Staff Sgt Barry Sadler's flag-waving "The Ballad of the Green Berets". But in a deeply divided country, those musicians who took a radical stance found a receptive audience, an audience equally politically engaged and eager, or naive enough, to believe in the revolutionary power of protest songs.

The dreams of the 1960s made way for the dispiriting 70s, and although Neil Young wrote "Ohio" in 1970 ("the most powerful topical song ever recorded," according to Lynskey), rock's radical voices were already moving on, withdrawing into a druggy haze and apolitical introspection.

Since then, the forces of reaction in politics and the power of the entertainment industry to kill the impact of dissident music have been in the ascendant; "The Message", one of hip-hop's first protest songs, recently turned up in a car commercial. Perhaps, too, there is no longer a receptive audience for protest songs. We live, Lynskey says, in a time of "waning faith in hands-on protest".

But his chapter dealing with the feminist riot grrrl movement is instructive. After attaining prominence in the years 1991-93, it came under fire from some unexpected places (notably Courtney Love) but also from the heart of an inveterately laddish music industry. Blur's Alex James, for example, once quipped: "How many riot grrrls does it take to change a lightbulb? None, because they're never gonna change anything." Although it fell from view, riot grrrl survived, clearly audible in the music of Le Tigre and Gossip. Its commitment to DIY activism lives on in zines, an international network of Ladyfest events and a subculture of lo-fi and brat-punk feminist bands.

Some protest songs jolt their listeners, make an immediate impact and stay conspicuous for decades; others create a more subtle and subterranean route through which ideas continue to flow to new artists and listeners. As Billy Bragg tells Lynskey: "Only the audience can change the world  not performers."

Dave Haslam's Not Abba: The Real Story of the 1970s is published by Fourth Estate.

Among the challengers hoping to keep the X Factor winner Matt Cardle from topping the charts last Christmas were a new recording of John Cage's "4'33" and "Liar Liar" by Captain Ska. The first was the work of a group calling themselves Cage Against the Machine, who were trying to replicate the success of 2009's campaign to make Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" Christmas No 1, ahead of that year's X Factor winner. "Liar Liar" was an infectious synth-reggae attack on the coalition government's comprehensive spending review. In the event, neither even made it into the Top 40; and neither makes it into Dorian Lynskey's new history of protest songs. Cage's composition isn't a song, of course, though its four and a half minutes of silence can be an eloquent form of protest; and "Liar Liar" is either too slight to be included, or was released too late.

33 Revolutions Per Minute is organised like a giant compilation album or homemade mixtape or iPod playlist: each of its 33 chapters is named for a song, from Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" to Green Day's "American Idiot", via the work of, among others, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, James Brown, Gil Scott-Heron, Stevie Wonder, the Clash, Carl Bean, the Dead Kennedys, Crass, the Special AKA, Billy Bragg, REM, Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine. Lynskey places their music in the context of America's union movement, civil rights, opposition to the Vietnam war, black power, gay rights, opposition to Reagan and Thatcher, the Falklands war, CND, the miners' strike, the anti-apartheid movement, rave culture and opposition to the war in Iraq. It's quite an undertaking.

"For reasons of space," Lynskey says, "I have limited my focus to western pop music." That "western" implies British and American seems to go without saying: there's no room for Deutschpunk or Fabrizio de André. There is a brief and slightly awkward diversion in the mid-1970s, however, with three chapters on the music of Chilean activist-songwriter Victor Jara (who disparaged "the commercialisation of so-called 'protest music'" in the United States), Fela Kuti and Lee "Scratch" Perry, and a quick run through the postwar political histories of Chile, Nigeria and Jamaica. Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering that Lynskey's a music journalist, 33 Revolutions Per Minute is better as a history of pop music than as political history.

A pattern emerges over the course of the book, as musician after musician appears with the hope that he  occasionally she, but most of Lynskey's protest singers are men  can change the world, tries, fails and retreats into disillusionment, having made a few great songs along the way. The book itself follows a similar trajectory. "I began this book intending to write a history of a still-vital form of music," Lynskey says in the epilogue. "I finished it wondering if I had instead composed a eulogy." The reason for the decline of the genre "lies as much with listeners as with artists", and is related to a "waning faith in hands-on protest although the wave of British tuition fee protests in late 2010 marked a welcome and surprising resurgence".

A book about topical songs was always going to run the risk of being out of date by the time it came to be published. The uprisings in north Africa would be beyond its remit but Lynskey should be cheered by the occupation of the state Capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, where they've been singing the O'Jays' "Love Train" and Sister Sledge's "We Are Family", a song that Lynskey says was "politicised after the fact", since its celebration of "the tight bond between the group's four sisters... resonated with black, gay and feminist listeners"  and now with public-sector workers fighting to retain their collective bargaining rights.

Old protest songs have been making a comeback elsewhere, too. Anti-Berlusconi demonstrators in Italy last month took to the streets to the sound of Patti Smith's "People Have the Power"; the British students protesting in London last year sang "Tories, Tories will tear us apart again" to the tune of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart". Putting new words to old tunes has long been standard practice for protest songs; that way they're easier to sing along to. And it makes sense that opposition to the Tory attack on the welfare state should look to the Thatcher era; "Liar Liar" is a form of early-80s revival, too. As for truly new protest songs, it may well be the case that there aren't any being made; but then again it may just be that broadsheet journalists haven't heard them yet.

In the meantime, we still have the old ones to listen to. And the best thing about Lynskey's book is that it will send you back  or for the first time  to an array of extraordinary songs, from Nina Simone's nerve-tingling "Mississippi Goddam" to the full-on assault of Crass's Falklands-inspired and Thatcher-directed "How Does It Feel to Be the Mother of a Thousand Dead".