There are riffs that need a master's degree in odd meters, a seven-string, and a support group. And then there is Beds Are Burning, which needs two fingers, zero music theory, and roughly the aggression of a slightly annoyed dad. Somehow the second one got a whole planet to think about climate change, so let us not pretend complexity is the point.
This clip is a punchy little tour of the chorus riff of Beds Are Burning by Midnight Oil on guitar — the part where the whole thing goes big and chunky. It is built almost entirely from power chords and octaves, which is my favourite kind of homework: the kind that sounds enormous and takes about four minutes to learn.
How this power-chord-and-octave riff works
A power chord is deliberately incomplete: just the root and the fifth, with the third left out entirely. Because there is no third, there is no major and no minor — the chord refuses to commit to a mood, which is exactly why it survives being cranked through distortion without turning to mud. Octaves work on the same principle: the same note, doubled twelve frets apart, giving you a thick single line that punches through a mix without any of the harmonic clutter a full chord drags along.
The useful takeaway is that the Beds Are Burning chorus doesn't drive because it's clever — it drives because it's stripped bare. Play the shapes cleanly, keep your palm ready to mute the strings you're not using, and let the rhythm do the heavy lifting. Move one two-finger shape around the neck and you've got the whole part; the anthem lives in the timing and the attack, not in the note count.
So yes, you can play a globally beloved protest anthem with fewer notes than it takes to spell "arpeggio". Come feel superior about it with me — Guitar Pro files and PDFs of everything are over on my Patreon.