What Do We Want from a Protest Song?
On January 28th, four days after Customs and Border Protection agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, a new song by Bruce Springsteen called “Streets of Minneapolis” appeared online. In it, Springsteen croaks his solidarity with a city under “an occupier’s boots,” as agents for the D.H.S. and for ICE break into homes, intimidate peaceful observers, detain U.S. citizens, and, with the shootings of Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, kill people in the street. “Streets of Minneapolis” is a rapid-response protest song, and it shows. Springsteen’s voice sounds shredded, and the words often fall awkwardly within the cadence of the Dylanesque melody. He sings the names of the dead haltingly, as though he is reading them off a screen—which, judging from the recording-studio footage in the song’s lyric video, he probably is. The song is about the news, but it is also, perhaps unintentionally, about the moment of lag when we absorb the names and images, when we try to assimilate atrocity into narrative.
Springsteen wasn’t the only artist to rush into this gap. The British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg released “City of Heroes,” a spirited work of turbo-folk agitprop that invokes Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came.” The punk bands NOFX and Dropkick Murphys updated old songs with new anti-ICE lyrics. (A sample line from “Citizen I.C.E.,” by the latter: “Too scared to join the military / Too dumb to be a cop.”) Earlier in January, the roots-rock doyenne Lucinda Williams put out “The World’s Gone Wrong,” a record that tries to capture the texture of everyday life amid smoldering crisis—the toll of long working hours, the distant thrum of war, the small consolations of art. Williams’s brand of dissent is off the cuff and laconic: “The President of the United States can kiss my ass,” she told the crowd at a recent show in New York.
The protest song is threatening a comeback, as it tends to do during episodes of national turmoil. The “return of the protest song” has been hailed—to take a quick sampling from this millennium—in 2004 (with the releases of Green Day’s album “American Idiot,” the compilations “Rock Against Bush” and “War (If It Feels Good, Do It!)”), in 2015 (the year Kendrick Lamar dropped his anthemic, if ambivalent, “Alright”), in 2017 (the projected year of anti-Donald Trump music that never coalesced into a movement), and in 2020 (the year of George Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed it, extensively chronicled in song). Even the topical songs of the sixties folk movement constituted a revival, a reinvention of the Popular Front-style political art of the thirties and forties, for the waning years of McCarthyism. At its best, protest music could channel and focus public feelings, and clarify the stakes of the moment—“Which Side Are You On?” asked a 1931 song by Florence Reece, written for the United Mine Workers on strike in Harlan County, Kentucky.
What do we want from a protest song today? For a form that takes aim at the issues of the present, the protest song in 2026 is curiously backward-looking. Sometimes these songs situate current events in a longer arc—Bragg’s “City of Heroes” speaks of learning “the lessons of history,” and Williams’s well-intentioned but clumsily executed “Black Tears” declares that “four hundred years” of anti-Black violence in the Americas is “long enough.” Often, they are concerned with entering today’s horrors into the record. When Springsteen sings about “the winter of ’26,” he is singing as if it is already over, giving an archival gravitas to events that many of us experience mainly through flashes of short-form video. Slashing electric guitars and gospel-choir harmonies once served to wrench the old folk idiom into the violent present, as they did when Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded the lacerating “Ohio” in response to the killings at Kent State, in 1970. And yet, in today’s topical songs by legacy rock artists, such elements don’t heighten the immediacy of the day’s horrors but, rather, run them through a sepia-toned filter. The protest song longs for history.
Or else it longs for a break from it. One curious thing about the periodic announcement of protest music’s return is that it never really went away. The past decade in particular has seen a flourishing of conservative protest songs, in particular. In 2023, Jason Aldean, a vocal Trump supporter, released “Try That in a Small Town,” a sombre pop-country song that many took to be a general celebration of vigilante violence, or a fantasy of white revenge against the 2020 George Floyd protests. (It also quotes a guitar riff from Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”) The music video interposes clips of a nation on fire—thieves and looters running rampant, protesters spitting in cops’ faces—with footage of Aldean and his band playing in front of a courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, vowing to deliver justice. When it was discovered that this courthouse had been the site of a lynching and a race riot, this promise took on a particularly sinister character. Amid the controversy, Aldean both denied knowing this history and presented himself as a speaker of truth to power. “It’s very uncommon for someone to say something, for fear of losing a job or losing some money,” he told one interviewer. “It just kind of reaches a breaking point to where you’re, like, ‘Somebody needs to say something, and if nobody’s gonna do it then I’ll be the guy.’ ”
The lone guy speaking up from the wilderness is the central figure in today’s conservative protest music. “Am I the only one here tonight shakin’ my head and thinkin’ somethin’ ain’t right?” Aaron Lewis, the pro-MAGA frontman of the hard-rock band Staind, sings in a 2021 solo release. In the song’s video, a now familiar montage of protests and lockdown notices is intercut with shots of Mount Rushmore and soldiers waving flags. Lewis stands alone with his guitar, enveloped in a green-screened thunderstorm. He is “standin’ on the edge of the end of time,” athwart history, begging it to stop.
He is also sitting in front of a screen. “Am I the only one willin’ to bleed / Or take a bullet for bein’ free / Screamin’ ‘What the fuck?’ at my TV?” Lewis bellows. This oscillation between rage at one’s own powerlessness and fantasies of violence is the song’s motive force. It could be said that conservative protest music is more likely than its progressive counterpart to call for something like armed revolt—perhaps most overtly in Forgiato Blow and JJ Lawhorn’s minorly viral 2025 song “Good vs Evil,” which takes “Try That in a Small Town” to its logical end point. “We need a big tall tree and a short piece of rope / Hang ’em up high at sundown,” Lawhorn sings over a beat suspiciously reminiscent of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” But these songs are also honest, sometimes despite themselves, about the feelings of impotence associated with watching history play out on a screen.
Then again, the protest song is right there in the fray with history, flashing across our screens, vying for our attention. Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” from 2023, a song about “livin’ in the new world / with an old soul” that gets sidetracked on a rant about welfare and snack cakes, became a surprise viral hit partially on the strength of its video, which finds Anthony playing the song live in the woods. It also owed some of its popularity to the efforts of right-wing commentators, including Matt Walsh and the former F.B.I. deputy director Dan Bongino, to brand the song as a MAGA anthem. It hardly mattered that Anthony described his own politics as “dead center,” or that the song’s inventory of complaints—the cost of living, human trafficking—could align with any number of political programs. The song was subsumed into online discourse, and it became something at once more banal and more pervasive than spectacle: it became content, another piece of digital flotsam eddying across the feed.
For progressives, the undisputed master of the viral protest song is the thirty-three-year-old folksinger Jesse Welles, who makes videos of himself standing in a field, singing clever miniature tunes about the hypocrisies of the health-care industry, tech billionaires, ICE. Welles, who was nominated for four Grammys in 2025, is a gifted lyricist, and his finest verses use cascades of slant rhymes to move subtly from specific finger-pointing to broader implication. One recent song takes aim at “outright white supremacists, or America First / I think they both sell merch / The whole place seems a little bit cursed / It’s like somebody might have been living here first.”
If Welles’s hyper-specific lyrics are his gift, they can also make his songs feel ephemeral. In “The Ballad of Big Balls,” from August, 2025, he sings, “Some days I forget that Cracker Barrels exist / But there ain’t no one forgetting about that list.” The assault of a former DOGE staffer, the fracas over the Cracker Barrel logo, the demands to release Jeffrey Epstein’s “client list”—this is hardly the stuff of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” let alone “Rich Men North of Richmond.” It is more like the “Today’s News” sidebar on X set to music, re-creating the vertiginous churn of posts—and then neutralizing the feeling in a mist of icy smugness. In this sense, Welles’s songs are far better suited to social media than to the stage, to say nothing of the ramparts. At one of his concerts last year, a member of the audience yelled during a song, “Why didn’t you film this one in the woods?”
Caught between nostalgia and numbing immersion in the feed, the protest song today seems to have lost some of its power to confront and mobilize. Even when it takes a bold stand—see “Hind’s Hall,” Macklemore’s admirably adversarial song in support of the Palestinian-solidarity movement on college campuses—it has a tendency to feel simply like more news, more commentary, more posts. “We see the lies in them / Claiming it’s antisemitic to be anti-Zionist,” Macklemore raps, the lyrics less an incitement than a summary.
Perhaps the protest song has changed because our listening has changed, too. More than a decade into the streaming era, music has been radically devalued, with artists taking home less revenue than ever from their recordings and listeners ceasing to think of music as a product of skilled labor, something worth paying for directly. Along with this economic devaluation, as the journalist Liz Pelly has written, there’s been a diminishment of music’s social function, “the relegation of music to something passable, just filling the air to drown out the office worker’s inner thoughts.” When the dominant mode of listening to recorded music is more or less unconscious, the protest song can hardly go to work shaping one’s political consciousness.
Still, some songs can disrupt our dazed habit of barely listening and give us something to participate in. Protesters in San Juan blasted “Afilando los Cuchillos,” a furious indictment of the Puerto Rican government, by Bad Bunny, Residente, and iLe, during demonstrations in 2019 that eventually led to the resignation of then governor Ricardo Roselló. Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” a song that became synonymous with Black Lives Matter, is less granular in its critiques, but it is exactly this quality of expansiveness—with its nimble pivots from the personal to the topical to the metaphysical—that has allowed it to endure as an all-purpose protest anthem. (Most recently, it has been heard at demonstrations against ICE.) Even “Not Like Us,” his Drake diss track from 2024, with its sheer exuberance, its surfeit of hooks, and its invocation of a shared “us,” delivered a frisson of the collective will.
Today, the most stirring music coming out of the protests against ICE is not being made by marquee artists but by groups of everyday people, such as a large crowd that gathered outside the Minneapolis Marriott City Center to sing a song called “It’s Okay to Change Your Mind” to the ICE agents staying in the hotel. Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis” is at its most galvanizing when a chant of “ICE out now!” erupts during the final verse, a crowd of voices intruding and exceeding the song. A skeptic might say that the recording merely pantomimes this collective participation—though, when Springsteen played it in Minneapolis, the crowd joined in and all but drowned him out. It is maybe fairer to say that the song knows on some level that it is not on the leading edge of oppositional politics but, rather, just a step behind it. There are far worse places to be. ♦