Violence in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) is often understood as the main determinant of how people remember the war and how social and cultural formations are shaped in Lebanon today. Though most accounts of this violence often emphasize its sectarian-political dimension, such views have been contested in recent scholarship (Salloukh, 2015; Traboulsi, 2017). My paper builds upon such studies by examining the conceptualization and representations of violence in songs associated with leftist political discourse. Songs by artists then-affiliated with the leftist Lebanese National Movement such as Ziad Rahbani, Khaled Habre, and Marcel Khalife are often excluded from accounts of Lebanon’s cultural history because of their militancy and association with violent wartime memories (Basha, 2015). My paper highlights songs produced by those artists, examining their violent components and contextualizing the rationale that informed them. Contesting a unidimensional understanding of violence, I argue that its meaning was continually being negotiated. In the songs, violence appears in an often contradictory manner. One is of a transformative nature, as a process of creating a new identity, while the other is a means for resisting colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. For example, Khaled Habre’s song “Oghniyat al-Shayyah” and Ziad’s “al-Sha’b al-Maskin” both propose violence as means for liberation. At times, however, violence is also depicted as meaningless, senseless, and disruptive to the lives of ordinary people, like in Habre’s “Mosh Hayyin” or Ziad’s “Ya Noor ‘Inayya.” Nonetheless, the fractious military and political conditions in Lebanon’s civil war inevitably impacted the ways people perceived themselves and their surroundings. The leftist camp in alliance with the PLO initially spearheaded the armed insurgency in West Beirut. In later years, the left suffered multiple defeats due to the 1977 Syrian intervention, the 1982 Israeli invasion, and the rise of sectarian agents on the local and regional scene. The positions held by leftist intellectuals towards the war and violence were not immune to these changing contexts. This mutability is most apparent in the shift from celebrating violent “revolutionary” action during the 1970s towards disenchantment and retreat - and sometimes repudiation- during the late 1980s and the post-war period. My paper aims to contextualize the multifaceted notions of violence in the songs within contingent military and political conditions that did not always match the expectations of “committed” leftist artists.