By CARY DARLING, McClatchy Newspapers

DALLAS --- Jamie Laurie, one of two frontmen for the suddenly successful alt-rock/rap outfit Flobots, is onstage at a crammed Pontiac Garage explaining his choice of neckwear: an American flag.

"It's not about blind patriotism or desecrating the flag," says Laurie, who also goes by Jonny 5. He then quotes the late poet Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again" and says it's all about the America of the future.

"We are building a movement!" he shouts.

The Denver-based Flobots are doing something that hasn't been seen in a while: bringing overtly political, message-oriented music back onto the Top 40. Their outwardly upbeat "Handlebars" single --- with its lyrics warning of guided missiles, political assassinations and nuclear holocaust --- has just broken through that threshold. Flobots' full-length album, "Fight With Tools," has already hit the Top 15 on the albums chart.

"Handlebars" stands out at a time when pop radio reverberates to the teen-scream shenanigans of Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers, the post-crunk club grooves of Flo Rida and Lil Wayne, and all things "American Idol."

From listening to pop radio, few would know that the United States is involved in two wars and a hotly contested presidential election, or that economic worries abound. The most pressing issue on Katy Perry's mind seems to be telling everyone "I Kissed a Girl," the song that has dominated contemporary-hit airwaves this summer.

It's a far cry from the late 1960s and early '70s, when Top 40 made room for explicit social-issue songs from both ends of the political spectrum.

Aside from such post 9/11 tunes as Alan Jackson's "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)," Paul McCartney's "Freedom" in 2001, and Toby Keith's 2002 fist-pumper, "Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue (The Angry American)," not much else dealing with our jittery life and times has crossed over to mainstream pop success.

It's an omission that many people have noticed: "Radio serves you meatloaf, and you know there's steak back in the kitchen," observes socially conscious rapper Scott Johnson, who has a haunting unreleased track, "The Messenger," about a soldier whose duty is to tell families their loved ones have died in Iraq. "But no one wants to bring the steak out."

Of course, the question becomes whether there's anyone out there making steak and, if so, whether there's consumer demand for it in a world of sugarcoated pop.

"The scale of the casualties of the war, as devastating as they are today, was greater back then (in Vietnam)," says Jeffrey Hyson, history professor and pop-culture commentator at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. "Plus, there was a draft. Young people, then and now, are consumers of popular music, and there would have been more urgency (back then) about current events. And that would be felt in the kind of music they'd be demanding."

He points to the failure of any of the Iraq-themed Hollywood movies to find an audience. "(People) want to be able to escape when they go into a movie theater, put on their ear buds, or pick up a trash novel. Were the stakes higher, it wouldn't be as easy to simply escape, and you might see more willingness to engage things that address the state of the world."

Others suggest that shifts in radio-station ownership in the '90s have narrowed musical choice and shaped listener demand for material that's not going to rock the boat.

"It causes radio to become more of a mirror rather than a leader," said longtime North Texas DJ Redbeard, host of the nationally syndicated "In the Studio" show. "So when something comes down the pike musically that smacks of controversy - that's considered a risk. And, with shareholders, risk is a bad word."

Many musicians shy away from political themes because they want to be successful. And Redbeard says there's even an unofficial phrase to describe a station's passing on a song that raises too many red flags.

"In my business, there's a term called 'being Dixie Chick-ed,'" he says. It's become a verb for being blacklisted, as many radio stations dropped the Dixie Chicks from their playlists after the uproar over group member Natalie Maines' 2003 statement that she was "ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."

Stephen Brackett, the co-frontman of Flobots who also goes by the name Brer Rabbit, says that radio initially didn't want to touch "Handlebars." "Every single radio station that we gave 'Handlebars' to, their initial reaction was, 'Oh, hell no.'"

Yet for all of that, political music continues to be made, even if it doesn't cross over to pop radio. Neil Young's 2006 album, "Living With War," was a scathing verbal assault on the Bush administration, while in the same year, Springsteen recorded a tribute to pioneering protest singer Pete Seeger with "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions." Yoko Ono's dance remix of John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance" is now No. 1 on Billboard's Dance Club Play chart.

Flobots' Brackett says that word-of-mouth and a growing fan base in the band's native Colorado persuaded nervous stations to try "Handlebars." (No doubt, it helped that the band had signed to Universal.)

"They played the song once and they'd get a flood of phone calls," he says. "(The stations) are still after ratings, but there are songs that will come through and will alter what's acceptable and push the boundaries. ... I'd be very surprised if we didn't start seeing more of this."

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