Unlike with other instruments, this volume range is static, making the noisiness of the Scottish bagpipes both very public and impossible to ignore. The bagpipes don’t simply request your attention—they hold it hostage, which is why they work for ceremonial events like weddings and funerals. It’s also why they’ve historically worked so well with rock music. AC/DC’s first big hit, “Long Way to the Top,” notably used bagpipes during the era of its frontman Bon Scott, whose birthday is still celebrated in Scotland every year (he would have turned 70 today). In addition to being spectacularly anarchic-sounding, bagpipes have long been part of a tradition of protest—one that’s perfectly in line with the disruptive ethos rock was founded on.

For decades, rock musicians have been using bagpipe noise to amplify political messages in their work. Sometimes, this artistic choice works on two levels: First, there’s the visceral impact of the instrument’s unique sound, and second, there’s the bagpipes’ more subversive history of being associated with protest. Take, for example, Eric Burdon and The Animals’ 1968 hit “Sky Pilot,” which includes a full 60 seconds of Scottish bagpipes. The single was released in January of 1968, during a time that also marked the launch of the Tet Offensive and the escalation of the Vietnam War. In order to include pipes on “Sky Pilot,” Burdon covertly recorded a practice session of The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards pipe band—one of many groups that retains its links to British military units today. But the song the pipe band was playing was “All the Blue Bonnets Are Over the Border,” a tune linked with the Scottish Jacobite rebellion. The Jacobites were members of a Scottish rebel militia that rose against British forces in 1745, and historians commonly cite their resulting defeat as the end of the Scottish clan system and of traditional Gaelic culture in general.

The Animals’ inclusion of the pipes on “Sky Pilot” speaks to the way the instrument has been historically used to critique colonialist enterprises, in spite of its contemporary ties to those very enterprises. But so far as the use of bagpipes in rock music is concerned, “Sky Pilot” constitutes more of an exception than a rule. The song stands alone in permitting the bagpipes to function as an instrument, rather than simply as noise or backdrop. In “All Is One,” the final track on The Animals’ album The Twain Shall Meet, the bagpipes appear again, but this time as part of a discordant soundscape that also contains sitar (another instrument summoning histories of colonial oppression), electric bass, and drums.

Most rock records, if they use bagpipes at all, tend to downplay the instrument. The result is that people hear chaos in these recordings without really recognizing the bagpipes. The Patti Smith Group’s 1978 album Easter is one such record. I listened to it for years before I even noticed the bagpipes, which appear amongst the din of the title track. The bagpipes in “Easter” sound a lot like the pipes in The Animals’ “All is One” and, for that matter, like the uilleann pipes in Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Holland, 1945.” In these songs, bagpipes form but one part of a many-layered cacophony, and so are downplayed to the point of inconspicuousness. Which prompts a question: Why include them at all?