So Where’s Our Protest Music?

Graphics by Maria Masek

“At least we’ll get a lot of great music out of this.”

With the popularity of movies like A Complete Unknown centering on the story of Bob Dylan, or Joni Mitchell’s beautiful Grammy’s performance last year, a question kept circling around in my brain like a fly around a cold glass of lemonade on a hot summer day.

Where the hell is the protest music? 

The guys and gals with the guitar singing about “The Man?”  

There is a lack of protest music in mainstream popular culture. Folk and country music used to be the bastion of anti-establishmentism, and well… take a look around. It’s not anymore. 

Actually, it seems that the protest music of the 1960s and 1970s was more of an anomaly rather than a rule. In the early 2000s during the Iraq War, pro-war music was actually more emblematic of the general culture than anti-war music was. For every American Idiot, there were ten songs like Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue dominating the charts and your dad’s Chevy Silverado. Anyone still blasting Dear Mr. President by Pink or Bu$hleaguer by Pearl Jam? Right. I didn’t think so. 

Furthermore, any artist that was a little too outspoken got Dixie-Chicked right out of the radio (the first instance of modern cancel culture…look it up. Or ask your parents). There was little to no room for anything other than full support of the Bush Administration in majority culture, a far cry from the Woodstock hippie-dippie-love-is-all-you-need sensibility just a few decades prior.

But that is only one factor of the phenomenon. In part, to blame, is the Internet. The music business is heavily decentralized and democratized due to the accessibility of the internet. Gone are the days of needing a record label; artists can upload their music from the comfort of their bedrooms. 

In a lot of ways, this is a good thing. It removes barriers artists used to experience from record labels. The artist can pretty much have complete control of what they make and where they put it. However, it also means there is no real central musical culture. There are artists most people know, but you could go your whole life without hearing any of their music. 

You pick what you like from an endless library on Spotify or Apple Music, and you can just live there forever. No need for the radio anymore, no need to be exposed to anything beyond what you prefer. That did not used to be the case. It’s the same with politics; people get entrenched in their own thing and never come out of that hole. Is there a counterculture when there is no more monolithic culture? 

Apathy seems to rule the day. Gen Z is known particularly for its absurdist humor, as we’re growing up in a world that seems to be on the edge of falling apart. When it feels like there is nothing you can do, you often end up doing nothing. When every step forward is met with 8 steps back, what’s the point? This also explains the lack of protest music: all that peace and love stuff didn’t work. 

Radio broadcasts are controlled by companies who get to decide what gets airplay. In a capitalistic society, what sells is what matters. Protest music doesn’t sell as well as “that’s that me espresso” (apologies to Sabrina Carpenter, it’s a great song but this is just an example. Love you girl!). Especially now, things seem pretty bleak. The resistance seems to keep losing. The work done over the past decades seems to be unraveling each passing day. 

And not to be that person, but a lot of the protest music against Trump’s first administration was…well..bad. You cannot really compare For What It’s Worth with Chained to the Rhythm. I actually shudder at that thought. 

The rules are different. The stakes have changed. 

Does protest music even change anyone’s minds? Will there even be art in a few years? Where am I and how can I get out? 

However, there is hope. There are artists that push against power, namely Kendrick Lamar and his stellar Super Bowl Halftime show. He seems to be the exception to the rule; the only beacon of hope we have. Some artists release political songs here and there occasionally, such as Taylor Swift’s ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ but I doubt anyone can look me in the face and tell me Swift is a protest musician.

If you look around, there are plenty of folk and punk artists in the underground that make music critiquing current society and pushing back against the grain. Artists like Jesse Welles, for instance, have gained some traction on TikTok for their protest music. While these artists’ popularity are not strong enough to break into the mainstream, it is comforting to know that people still care to make this kind of music.

So maybe protest music is dead because it just isn’t effective. Maybe it’s because people are so tired of everything being terrible that it seems too hopeless to even try. Maybe it’s because people are so used to customization and everything being tailored to themselves that there’s no more collective art movements. Whatever you think is to blame, it’s clear that there is a big space where anti establishment music used to be. 

If you miss it, remember this quote by the fabulous Penny Lane from Almost Famous: “I always tell the girls, never take it seriously, if ya never take it seriously, ya never get hurt, ya never get hurt, ya always have fun, and if you ever get lonely, just go to the record store and visit your friends.”