The Rise of the Anti-ICE Protest Music

He’s additionally sitting in entrance of a display. “Am I the one 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 personal powerlessness and fantasies of violence is the track’s driver. It may very well be stated that conservative protest music is extra doubtless than its progressive counterpart to name for one thing like armed revolt—maybe most overtly in Forgiato Blow and JJ Lawhorn’s minorly viral 2025 track “Good vs Evil,” which takes “Strive That in a Small City” to its logical finish level. “We want an enormous tall tree and a brief piece of rope / Cling ’em up excessive at sunset,” Lawhorn sings over a beat suspiciously harking back to Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” However these songs are additionally sincere, generally regardless of themselves, in regards to the emotions of impotence related to watching historical past play out on a display.

Then once more, the protest track is true there within the fray with historical past, flashing throughout our screens, vying for our consideration. Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” from 2023, a track about “livin’ within the new world / with an outdated soul” that will get sidetracked on a rant about welfare and snack truffles, turned a shock viral hit partially on the power of its video, which finds Anthony enjoying the track reside within the woods. It additionally owed a few of its recognition to the efforts of right-wing commentators, together with Matt Walsh and the previous F.B.I. deputy director Dan Bongino, to model the track as a MAGA anthem. It hardly mattered that Anthony described his personal politics as “useless heart,” or that the track’s stock of complaints—the price of dwelling, human trafficking—might align with any variety of political applications. The track was subsumed into on-line discourse, and it turned one thing directly extra banal and extra pervasive than spectacle: it turned content material, one other piece of digital flotsam eddying throughout the feed.

For progressives, the undisputed grasp of the viral protest track is the thirty-three-year-old folksinger Jesse Welles, who makes movies of himself standing in a subject, singing intelligent miniature tunes in regards to the hypocrisies of the health-care business, tech billionaires, ICE. Welles, who was nominated for 4 Grammys in 2025, is a gifted lyricist, and his best verses use cascades of slant rhymes to maneuver subtly from particular finger-pointing to broader implication. One latest track takes purpose at “outright white supremacists, or America First / I feel they each promote merch / The entire place appears a bit of bit cursed / It’s like any person might need been dwelling right here first.”

If Welles’s hyper-specific lyrics are his reward, they will additionally make his songs really feel ephemeral. In “The Ballad of Big Balls,” from August, 2025, he sings, “Some days I overlook that Cracker Barrels exist / However there ain’t nobody forgetting about that checklist.” The assault of a former DOGE staffer, the fracas over the Cracker Barrel emblem, the calls for to launch Jeffrey Epstein’s “client list”—that is hardly the stuff of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” not to mention “Wealthy Males North of Richmond.” It’s extra just like the “Right this moment’s Information” sidebar on X set to music, re-creating the vertiginous churn of posts—after which neutralizing the sensation in a mist of icy smugness. On this sense, Welles’s songs are much better suited to social media than to the stage, to say nothing of the ramparts. At one in all his concert events final yr, a member of the viewers yelled throughout a track, “Why didn’t you movie this one within the woods?”

Caught between nostalgia and numbing immersion within the feed, the protest track at the moment appears to have misplaced a few of its energy to confront and mobilize. Even when it takes a daring stand—see “Hind’s Hall,” Macklemore’s admirably adversarial track in assist of the Palestinian-solidarity motion on faculty campuses—it tends to really feel merely like extra information, extra commentary, extra posts. “We see the lies in them / Claiming it’s antisemitic to be anti-Zionist,” Macklemore raps, the lyrics much less an incitement than a abstract.