Winslow Townson, Associated Press Mick Jagger did not sing "Sweet Neo Con" on Sunday night when the Rolling Stones played Boston's Fenway Park. Click photo for larger image.

New songs and videos addressing the Iraq war have lately been edging their way into the American mainstream, led by one of the oldest names in rock, the Rolling Stones, and pop-punk chart-toppers Green Day.

"Sweet Neo Con," a song on the Stones' upcoming album, has been getting notice for some of the most political lyrics Mick Jagger has ever written. A video for Green Day's "Wake Me When September Ends," about a young couple's anguish when one goes off to Iraq, was the most requested video last week on MTV's "Total Request Live."

They are in addition to work by artists who are more predictable in their political views: Barbra Streisand, a Democratic Party fund-raiser and lightning rod for conservative criticism, has released a new video showing footage of soldiers past and present going off to war.

Folk singer Joan Baez, known for her activism against the Vietnam War, performed Sunday in support of Cindy Sheehan's protest outside President Bush's home in Crawford, Texas. Sheehan says she wants Bush to explain why her late son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, was sent to Iraq.

Baez has not been a cultural force in decades, so her appearance has been a laugh riot to Bush supporters, such as talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.

"You've got to love this. Well- known communist sympathizer Joan Baez in Crawford, Texas, regaling this bunch that think they're having a new Woodstock down there with more anti-American folk tunes," Limbaugh said on his show Monday.

Baez is an easy mark, but certainly there are more artists openly questioning the war now than there were a couple years back, when a song like Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red White and Blue (The Angry American)" could send his album to the top of the Billboard charts, in the summer of 2002. (That was the "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way" song.)

War critics have not produced a hit protest song -- like the chart-toppers of another era, such as Edwin Starr's "War" (No. 1 in 1970) or CSNY's "Ohio" (No. 14 the same year) --though if anyone could do it, it could be Green Day.

Green Day's record "American Idiot," which openly criticizes the Bush policies, has gone to No. 1 twice in the past year and was up for an "Album of the Year" Grammy. During concerts this summer, singer Billie Joe Armstrong has stood in front of a backdrop of the album's cover -- a grenade-shaped heart dripping with blood -- and shouted, "We're not anti-American, we're anti-war."

On the home front, Pittsburgh punkers Anti-Flag -- also intense critics of Bush and the war -- are in Los Angeles now recording their major label debut for RCA, only after winning artistic control over their songs and political lyrics.

Rapper Eminem also took on Bush in a video for his song "Mosh," released last year, showing animated scenes mocking his behavior on 9/11.

It would be a major surprise if the Rolling Stones' upcoming album, "A Bigger Bang," has anything approaching Green Day, Eminem or Toby Keith sales, but when Mick talks people still listen. His lyrics for "Sweet Neo Con" go after the Bush administration, without mentioning it by name.

``You call yourself a Christian/I think that you're a hypocrite/You say you are a patriot/I think that you're a crock of [expletive]. ... How come you're so wrong? My sweet neo con," the lyrics say.

"It's liberty for all/Democracy's our style/Unless you are against us/Then it's prison without trial."

The song has been getting loads of attention on the conservative Drudge Report -- the most viewed computer blog in the United States -- over the past week as the band geared up for its North American tour. At the kickoff at Boston's Fenway Park on Sunday, the band did not play the song, nor its cover of Bob Marley's protest classic "Get Up, Stand Up" despite practicing for it before the tour.

The Stones have always been a party band, not a political one. When they famously tried to embrace flower power, by throwing a "Woodstock West" concert at California's Altamont Speedway in 1969, it was an utter disaster. They have addressed politics only obliquely in the past, in such songs as "Street Fighting Man" or "Undercover of the Night."

"There's been other social comment before from the Rolling Stones,'' Jagger told the Boston Herald last week. "This one's a bit more direct. Perhaps it's the times we're living in. I was being more direct than metaphorical.

"I think right-wing commentators get fed up with pop singers getting involved with anything but pop singing. But artists have responsibilities, too. Everyone has responsibilities. As long as you don't bang on about it every day -- because people get pretty bored with that -- I think comments from artists, whether they are painters or any kind of creative people, is part of what you do."