Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Nina Simone … none of them could have dreamed of a stage like this.
Rows of field laborers hacking at sugar cane with machetes. Workers in harnesses dangling from power poles as lights strobe, then black out. The man who’s arguably the biggest global pop star today weaving among them, rapping, singing, dancing, and interacting with tableaux of daily life and social issues from his Puerto Rican homeland and its diaspora. Not to mention the whole hemisphere’s troubled relationship with the U.S. of A. “God bless America,” he says near the end, three of his only words in English, adding, “Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Perú,” and so on—God bless all of the Americas.
With tens of millions watching at home.
Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday, though much more celebratory in mood, was formally not so dissimilar from Kendrick Lamar’s last year: Each was dense with politico-cultural symbolism not automatically legible to all the throngs watching the big game. But most would get that these visions dissented from the perspective of the current White House. Especially now, in the aftermath of the January killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and the citizen uprisings against Immigration and Customs Enforcement surges in Minnesota and elsewhere.
At the opening ceremony before the game, veteran punk band Green Day played parts of three songs from the group’s Bush-era protest album American Idiot that could be said to be even more pertinent today. But somehow Variety and other outlets reported that the band had “skipped the politics.” True, Billie Joe Armstrong didn’t reiterate his explicit anti-ICE rhetoric from a concert earlier in the weekend. Likewise, Bad Bunny did not repeat his “ICE out!” speech from the Grammy Awards the week before, though the performance included a couple of nods to that moment.
What does it mean, then, for music to be political in 2026? Who has to recognize it as such, and must it come with an obvious “protest” label? The answer can depend as much on context as on any song lyrics. As in the cases of Lamar and Bad Bunny, it very well might not fit the image that usually springs to mind when people ask, “Where are the protest songs?”—the troubadours with guitars, usually white and mostly male, of 1960s folk and rock mythos. No matter what its style, how do you judge whether a political song has been effective—by its artistry, or by how much it changes the world? And which comes first, the music or the movement? Events of recent weeks have made these questions pressing by prompting a fresh wave of high-profile protest songs.
The one that drew all the headlines was Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis.” He wrote it on the Saturday that Pretti died, recorded it on Tuesday, and released it on Wednesday—a rapidity that calls back to that folk troubadour tradition, to Woody Guthrie in the 1930s and 1940s and others across the decades issuing musical broadsides in response to the news of the day. When I first heard it, I thought it was too stiff and literal compared to Springsteen’s own back catalog of issue songs. In the past he’d illustrated ideas with characters like the mistreated Vietnam vet in his huge—and also perennially misunderstood and misused—1980s hit “Born in the U.S.A.” Others projected real-life events onto large narrative canvases, as in “American Skin (41 Shots),” his 2000 composition about the New York police shooting of Amadou Diallo. But at age 76, with the Boss’ magics slowly fading like Prospero’s, “Streets of Minneapolis” seemed more valuable as gesture than song, boosting the morale of the people in the streets simply by letting them know that a figure of Springsteen’s stature heard and reflected back their voices.
A week later, I realized I’d been wrong. On Jan. 30, Springsteen sang it solo in a surprise appearance at a “Defend Minnesota” benefit at Minneapolis’ fabled First Avenue club. Even on video, one could sense how the song scorched the air as it expanded to meet the demands of the moment. The lines “Here in our home, they killed and roamed / In the winter of ’26” rendered the past couple of weeks’ events as if they were already history, like a song from Nebraska recounting something from yellowed newsprint. It lent today’s protests the nobility of legend, while assuring that this too shall pass. In other lines, the song paid tribute to the meager tools at the protesters’ disposal in the face of a paramilitary force: “It’s our blood and bones / And these whistles and phones / Against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies.” Working in the wrongdoers’ real names via internal rhyme was a chef’s-kiss-off. And the crowd in that room proved that it worked as a sing-along, arguably one of a protest song’s most valuable attributes.
The event also revealed that Springsteen shared some of my initial hesitations about “Streets of Minneapolis.” He said that before releasing it, he’d sent it to Tom Morello, the former Rage Against the Machine guitarist who organized the benefit, and asked, worried, “Don’t you think it’s kinda soapboxy?” Morello gave a very punk-rock answer: “Bruce, nuance is wonderful, but sometimes you have to kick them in the teeth.”
His boots might have been the biggest, but Springsteen was far from the only songwriter who laced up for the occasion. His fellow New Jerseyite, the folk singer and leftist activist Carsie Blanton, had already posted her song “Come Out Ye Cowards ICE,” an adaptation of the classic Irish rebel song “Come Out, Ye Blacks and Tans.” Blanton exhorts an ICE agent to confess his actions to his wife:
Won’t you tell her how you stood
In the way of Renée Good,
How she tried to leave, but you were too afraid of her?
How she did just what you said
So you shot her in the head
For the crime of being too good of a neighbor.
Around the same time, the Arkansas folk-bluegrass musician Willi Carlisle, who usually couches his politics in storytelling songs, posted a first-draft song, “They Were Evil, She Was Good.” The five-decade-standing, often jokey California punk band NOFX adapted an older song into a new release, “Minnesota Nazis”: “Is ignorance and pride what you call great? / America, America / Seems more like Germany in ’38.” And at a concert on the day of Pretti’s death, even Dave Matthews, hardly a name heavily linked with radical politics, debuted a disturbed tune called “Making It Great.”
There’s a short list of artists you’d be surprised not to hear from at times like these, and probably chief among them is the British folk-punk socialist Billy Bragg, who’s been rabble-rousing since the early 1980s. On the same day Springsteen put out his song, Bragg released “City of Heroes.” It calls on the spirit of Martin Niemöller, the German pastor who was sent to Dachau for opposing the Nazis and later wrote the famous confessional piece “First They Came,” in which he laments not acting earlier, when other groups were under attack. In contrast to Niemöller’s “I did not speak out,” Bragg commends Minneapolitans for breaking that silence, often with the same “whistles” and “phones” that Springsteen also singled out: “When they came for the immigrants, / I got in their face,” he sings. “When they came for the refugees, / I got in their face / When they came for the 5-year-olds, / I got in their face.”
I’ve been a listener of Bragg’s most of my adult life, and I’ve absorbed many of his ideas about protest music, which go back to his involvement with the Red Wedge tour opposing Margaret Thatcher and his performances in support of the British miners’ strikes. In a statement last week about writing “City of Heroes,” he repeated a point he often makes: “[Music] has no real agency; it alone cannot change the world. But what it can do is inspire people to get out there and participate. … In this way, music can make a contribution to the cause, generating waves of solidarity from the wider community.”
Music can offer a beat to march to, but it almost never really leads the procession. In this sense, the frequent question “Where are all the protest songs?” is a chicken-and-egg confusion. There’s always plenty of music you might call topical, politically minded, or socially conscious. But it rarely rises to the status of “protest music” unless there is a vital enough protest movement happening in society to activate its full potential. Bob Dylan was responding mainly to the civil rights and “Ban the Bomb” activism of the early 1960s. However much the Beatles’ aesthetics shaped the counterculture’s vibe, John Lennon’s later peace anthems were prompted by the anti-war campaign, not the other way around. Same goes for the anti-apartheid songs of the 1980s. In the past year, and the past month particularly, we’ve felt the difference that sustained energy makes, with studies suggesting that there have been even more protests in the past year than during the beginning of Donald Trump’s first term. A mass movement summons its own music into being.
In fact, if that music doesn’t immediately present itself, a movement will turn existing sounds into what it needs. To use a classic 1960s example, the Buffalo Springfield song “For What It’s Worth” (you know, the “Stop—children, what’s that sound?” one) was originally written about clashes between youth and police over curfews on the club scene on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip. It became seen as “about” the Vietnam War only because that was more useful to the anti-war counterculture in the long term.
Similarly, the 2015 song “Alright,” from Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, wasn’t exactly written as a protest anthem. Like most of that album, it traced Lamar’s own complex internal spiritual and moral conflicts, as an individual and as part of a community. It refers to police brutality only in a couple of lines, as one of the many troubles facing Black Americans from his location and generation. But when Black Lives Matter rose up to protest police in the late Obama era, it found in “Alright” the anthem it needed, its chorus asserting the resilience of the community against everything the world could throw at it.
It remained core to the BLM repertoire through the George Floyd protests in 2020, but then it was joined by a plethora of other songs that year, like Lil Baby’s Top 3 hit “The Bigger Picture” and H.E.R.’s “I Can’t Breathe,” which won the 2021 Grammy for Song of the Year. YG’s “FTP” aka “Fuck the Police” mixed DNA from both YG’s own 2016 “FDT” aka “Fuck Donald Trump” (featuring the late Nipsey Hussle) and of course N.W.A’s monumental 1988 “Fuck tha Police,” the original springboard of gangsta rap. Speaking of OGs of political or “conscious” hip-hop, 2020 also saw a new remix of Public Enemy’s 1989 all-timer “Fight the Power” that incorporated guest rappers across generations like Nas, Black Thought, YG again, and Rapsody. The period even brought some self-interrogating songs about racial reckonings by white artists, best among them country singer Tyler Childers’ “Long Violent History.”
Lately there’s been an amnesia about that whole period. It’s bound up with the pandemic; it’s inconvenient to Democratic political strategy; it shames those who naively let ourselves imagine that something was maybe changing. And musically, again, it doesn’t suit some people’s idea of protest music, even though hip-hop has been a resistance music all along—“the Black CNN,” as it used to be called, still political at its core despite all the ways it’s changed and evolved.
The mainstream resists matching hip-hop with, say, Pete Seeger, even though it has been from the beginning basically a folk art. Its people expressed their creativity with the materials at hand—at Bronx street parties in the 1970s, instead of a guitar, they had two turntables and a microphone. (Indeed, the rise of hip-hop is one of the few times you could argue that music really did change the world, less because of the words—or “The Message”—than because of the social questions the sound itself forced into view.) Today you can make beats in your bedroom and record and release yourself on your phone. It’s no less “authentic” than caterwauling over four chords on a Martin acoustic. It’s just different tools, ones that are now more familiar to much of the world’s population.
Until an artist’s reach approaches Bad Bunny proportions, language can be another barrier. The coverage that’s happening now for Minneapolis-related protest art wasn’t often expended on the music that soundtracked actions led mostly by Latino people facing ICE last year in places like Los Angeles, partly because they weren’t necessarily in English. I heard about the anthem “Chinga La Migra,” by Oklahoma City–based Mexican American artist Lincka, only thanks to my fellow critic Julianne Escobedo Shepherd at the independent music site Hearing Things. Likewise, I haven’t seen L.A. queer singer-violinist Cain Culto’s amazing “¡Basta Ya!” (with artist-activist Xiuhtezcatl) in a lot of anti-ICE-song roundups this year. Even most Super Bowl viewers failed to grasp the politics of such Bad Bunny selections as “El Apagón” (“The Power Outage”) and “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii” (“What Happened to Hawaii”), each of which finds the rapper protesting the island’s colonization.
Even when an artist does fit the expected template, they still can be misread in the hype machine of social media. Consider the case of Jesse Welles, the shaggy-haired six-string-toting Arkansan in his early 30s who in the spring of 2024 started posting videos of himself outdoors, “singing the news” in a homely drawl. He’s kept up a pace of near-weekly new material, topical and otherwise, ever since. In fan comments on his videos, praise as a modern-day Woody Guthrie, young Bob Dylan, or John Prine are routine. Like Dylan before him, he has dueted with Joan Baez and played the Newport Folk Festival. He appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in November to sing his satirical recruitment song “Join ICE,” which he followed up in January with “Good vs. ICE”: “Now they’ll circle the wagons / Drape the man in a flag and / Say don’t trust what your eyes can see / They’ll say it’s her fault instead / For gettin’ shot in the head / When we all watched the same damn thing.” Nominated for four Grammys this year, his songs are loaded with goofy wordplay, sardonic edge, earnest humanist messages, sometimes a fuzzy variety of stoner spirituality, and occasional conspiracy thinking.
Yet from his press, you’d assume he was either a musical savior or a devil in disguise. One set of headlines reads, “Can Jesse Welles Revive the Protest Song?” (Rolling Stone), “Will the Revolution Start at a Jesse Welles Concert?” (Vulture), and even “Jesse Welles is the Antidote to Everything That Sucks About Our Time” (Current Affairs). The backlash, mostly on Substacks and Bluesky accounts from my lefty music-critic friends and peers, flies banners like “I Protest His Protest Song, or Why Jesse Welles Is Bad—and Bad for Us,” “The (Bland) Ballad of Jesse Welles,” and “You can’t trust smug.”
Among the charges against Welles are that he borrowed his shtick from Oliver Anthony, the right-leaning populist who had a viral singing-outdoors hit in 2023 with “Rich Men North of Richmond” and hasn’t been heard much from since. Welles freely admits to ripping off the model, but that doesn’t make their politics the same. The rule about movements attracting the songs they need doesn’t seem to apply to right-wing ones. The Minutemen summed it up in one of my favorite 1980s political songs: “If, if Reagan played disco / He’d shoot it to shit / You can’t disco / In jackboots.”
The critics also point out that Welles’ political analysis doesn’t run that deep, something you could probably say of 90 percent of socially conscious pop songwriters, and he articulates them even less well when he’s talking. Welles went on Joe Rogan’s podcast in what was probably a well-meaning attempt at reaching outside his bubble, but he spent the two hours too mumbly and agreeable to challenge Rogan or his audience and mostly met on their common ground of dorm-room-style conspiracy theorizing about subjects like the “health care scam.” In his interview with Rolling Stone, he appeared caught off guard when asked which way he voted in 2024, a reaction some took to imply that he went for Trump. I find that impossible to believe; listening to a song like “The Debate II,” which makes clear his alienation from both parties, it seems far more likely he went for some flaky third-party candidate or didn’t vote at all and didn’t want to admit it given the results.
I originally came to this piece wanting to mount a full-throated defense of Welles. But after an immersion in his extensive body of work, I have to agree that his topical songs mostly lack melodic hooks, are often more clever than deep, and sometimes miss the mark completely. His mostly nontopical studio albums—he has made five of those as well in the past two years—have more musical sophistication and structure but still aren’t particularly to my taste. But out of his hundreds of songs, if even 15 to 20 percent land, that’s still substantial. They seem to be helping raise a lot of people’s spirits, even if—as I also agree—those people should go exploring for other and often better current political songwriters too, especially ones who aren’t straight white dudes, such as Carsie Blanton, Margo Price, Adeem the Artist, Amythyst Kiah, and Dua Saleh.
However, none of those artists really matches what I think is most compelling about Welles. It’s the way he uses the internet. After years of having YouTubers, influencers, and podcasters like Rogan churn out endless hours of blather, finally here’s a socially aware songwriter trying to use it in a similar way.
Some people who’ve asked where the protest songs are don’t realize that the music and media industries have never really wanted to sponsor that kind of music, which can offend advertisers and ownership consortiums alike. The airwaves were not full of protest songs even in the 1960s, with rare exceptions. You had to seek them out, be part of the subculture that knew—music history would mostly catch up later. Welles’ approach is a concerted effort to subvert those gatekeepers by someone who’d already failed at approaching a music career the conventional way, with rock bands in his teens and 20s. If that makes him a poser with a gimmick, I don’t think that really matters. I myself was initially put off by the impression that he was doing young-Dylan cosplay, but I got over it.
Indeed, if Welles is some dodgy mixture of sincere and opportunistic, that’s probably the way he’s most like Bob Dylan circa 1963, when for a couple of years he turned out “finger-pointing songs,” as he later called them, as a springboard to notoriety, while himself cosplaying as a reincarnation of the young Woody Guthrie. The way that Welles has customized his output for TikTok and Instagram you might say Dylan churned out material for the folk-song-publishing magazines Sing Out! and Broadside, where “Blowin’ in the Wind” first appeared.
Like Welles, the young Dylan was also wildly prolific, and I think the aesthetic of the quick-and-dirty is interesting in itself. (The same goes for art made very slowly.) Inevitably, there’s a formulaic side to that level of production, but that’s not always so bad. I’m reminded of John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, a prolix and often sneakily political songwriter himself, who began one of his most beloved unrecorded tunes with the lines “This is a song with the same four chords / I use most of the time / When I’ve got something on my mind / And I don’t want to squander the moment / Trying to come up with a better way to say what I want to say.”
There is also a risk factor to that immediacy. On the day that Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Welles put out a song called “Charlie,” which began: “For all the bile, the bold talk, the venom, the hate, and the lies / No one should get killed, no blood should be spilled / Charlie shouldn’t have died.” It objected to the “laughter” and the “glee” about the violence that Welles had seen on social media. What he couldn’t have known at that moment (though arguably should have) was that the right was about to use similar excuses to censor and blackball anyone seen being critical of Kirk, a trend that led, for example, to Jimmy Kimmel Live! going temporarily off the air under threat from the Federal Communications Commission. Such are the hazards of from-the-hip topical songwriting. Welles’ critics kept referring to the song as an “apologia” for Kirk, which is an unfair description, but he wisely just moved on.
As it turned out, ultimately the most musically and politically effective treatment of Kirk’s death might have been from the teens who memed an overearnest Christian “We Are Charlie Kirk” song into a kaleidoscope of absurdity over the ensuing months. This kind of skibidi dada collage is a form of protest that’s really beyond category. Although I was reminded by a documentary last year that besides the famous example of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio” in 1971, the Kent State University massacre of student protesters also led to a group of art students there forming the band Devo. The surrealist new wavers always thought of themselves as a completely political band—making song, video, and performance art about humanity regressing to a state of idiocy and compliance—but lacking a corresponding movement to make their anti-authoritarian art intelligible, they were received mostly as a novelty act.
There are also the sounds that protesters generate themselves on the ground—those whistles and phones, and the chants that have a music of their own. Sound can serve as a weapon in the struggle, as in the “rough music” tradition of charivari, and as in Minneapolis right now with the Mediocre Bedtime Band, which makes deliberately discordant music outside ICE agents’ hotels to keep them from sleeping. More mellifluously, groups have often formed to lead songs at protests, and in Minneapolis there’s currently a group called Singing Resistance, which Anderson Cooper covered recently on CNN. As one of its leaders told him, “Song is a vehicle for us to grieve, it’s a vehicle for us to feel rage, it’s a vehicle for us to strengthen ourselves. That song ‘I Am Not Afraid’ that I sang—we’re not singing it because we’re actually not afraid. We are afraid. It is terrifying what is happening. It’s a way to gather our courage.”
I think that’s more where the heart of protest music tends to lie than in a sunny idea of educating people or convincing the unconverted. Social science research tells us it’s nearly impossible to change people’s opinions even with fact and careful debate. Usually it takes direct experience (a friend or family member coming out as queer, for instance) or influence from one’s own social group. Particularly for the young, however, the ideas and reference points of an artist you already think is cool can spread a similar sort of (para)social contagion.
In pop culture, that often operates particularly through artists who in their very being embody an inherently politicized relationship to society, as Bad Bunny and Kendrick Lamar reinforced in their halftime shows, or as a queer artist like Chappell Roan does just by being who she is, especially if you identify with her. “Pink Pony Club” is a protest song too.
Part of the reason it was so moving when Lucy Dacus sang the traditional labor song “Bread and Roses” at Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration in New York was that fans already understood who Dacus is, and her way of approaching music as both political and artistic practice. The song itself is about that duality. It’s the rare political song that addresses not only the practical needs of the community to survive, but the beauty that makes that survival worthwhile in the first place. For me, that’s the more profound undercurrent of all political art, that it’s not only about the fight but is itself evidence of the human spirit you’re fighting for. Maybe that’s what makes the best protest songs last. To turn back to a couple of old white male masters, W.H. Auden once wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen.” But as William Carlos Williams added, people still “die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”
Listen to Carl Wilson’s playlist of recent protest songs on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, or Tidal.