Compared to What" was copyrighted in 1966. The lyrics contain a "topical rant" against the
Vietnam War and the President of the United States, and include the lines: "The president, he's got his war / Folks don't know just what it's for / Nobody gives us rhyme or reason / Have one doubt, they call it treason". In 1976 the popular American
music critic B. Lee Cooper suggested that the song "of social criticism attacked a variety of social practices as being based on hypocritically 'unreal values'" and contrasted "the social myth of equality and the economic reality of poverty in the stratified American society."