February 1, 2026

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic isn’t hoping for Grammy winners to speak out about injustice.

Carsie Blanton speaks at the Folk Alliance International conference

R. Diamond/Getty Images

Hello fellow citizens,

Music’s well-branded biggest night — the 68th annual Grammy Awards — is upon us, and I can feel a perennial question surfacing: How will the most entitled people in the popular music realm respond to the suffering of their fellow citizens?

Forgive me if I sound a little glib. I admit I am weary of such forays into symbolic politics. Given all that’s happened in the past few weeks — especially the collective shock of witnessing the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Macklin Good in Minneapolis — it’s difficult to care about the mild interventions a pop star might make onstage at the Crypto.com Arena. Watching major news stories unfold that show the power and determination of regular people to protect their communities and offer mutual aid, I think about the long history of resistance through music in this country and remember that it almost always takes place on the ground, emanating from the very spaces where people are putting their bodies on the line. Does a pop star move through the world in that kind of body? The kind that faces direct threats every day? It’s hard to reconcile the nebulous cost a Grammy winner or performer might suffer for speaking up — dropping streaming numbers, dipping ticket sales, maybe a social media backlash — with what we’ve seen people endure in real time in this still-young year.

Yet I know that many music fans still feel a hunger for bold gestures from the artists they’ve elevated to star status. On Wednesday, Bruce Springsteen released his barn-burning broadside “Streets of Minneapolis,” a raw-throated addition to the songbook of arena-ready polemics that includes “Masters of War,” “Ohio,” “Fortunate Son,” “Clampdown,” “Biko,” “Fight the Power,” “Killing in the Name” and “Alright.” This list, and now Springsteen’s intervention, has defined the protest song in the rock- and hip-hop-era mainstream as a nearly-all-male endeavor drenched in swagger, indignation and righteous entitlement. And people have been deeply inspired by it: The cathartic energy of the massive, angry anthem has brought focus and a sense of permanence, of making a mark, to the often frustrating project of preserving democracy. It’s only one variation on what a protest song might be, but it remains very effective. Springsteen’s latest (not his first, by any means) names names and spits rhymes in a way that has filled many fans with a sense of both solidarity and relief.

I truly appreciate what the Boss has given those fans who feel bewildered by the state of the union, the climate crisis, the blood on the ground. Yet just as I wonder how even the most heartfelt sentiments expressed during the Grammys will feel anything but inadequate, I have to ask: Is the musical mainstream the right place to look for protest music right now? In the days following the killings of Renee Macklin Good and then Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, I noticed a hunger for musical responses; again and again, I saw posts asking, where are the protest songs? Springsteen answered the cry, and many were grateful. The same day, one of my favorite rabble rousers, Billy Bragg, raised his own cry with the proudly anti-fascist “City of Heroes.” Onstage in Mexico on the day Alex Pretti died, Dave Matthews debuted “Making It Great,” a yearning ballad whose bitterness reflected the shock many distant onlookers felt at these events. I can’t help but think that these famous men each experienced a moment of intimate reckoning when they decided to speak so directly; they felt their privilege as a barrier between themselves and those they believe are fighting a crucial fight. Music was their vehicle back into the realm of action. Taking in their words, I think, many of their fans felt the same way.

I appreciate this determination to infuse popular music with a kind of power that meets this moment, when to many, nothing feels adequate. Yet I’m deciding right now to expect nothing less from established artists who’ve based their careers on inhabiting a progressive, humanitarian stance. It would be weird if self-styled spanners in the works like Bragg and men of the people like Springsteen and Matthews didn’t step up; they are the reassuring patresfamilias of protest music. Shaping outrage into something both stirring and enjoyable, such songs restore balance in the hearts of sympathetic listeners as much as they pose challenges to the state. The fist such a song throws in the air softens into a warm hug. I’d say the same about Amy Grant’s recently released, moving account of baby-boomer self-reckoning “The 6th of January,” or Lucinda Wililams’ rawly emotional album World’s Gone Wrong — these are voices many people trust, speaking in ways their fans expect.

What’s crucial to note, though, is that these beloved voices aren’t at the vanguard of today’s protest music — they’re adding height to a wave that’s been building for some time. From pleas for peace to calls for revolution, from satire to righteous diatribes to earnest personal testimonies, the sound of musical dissent echoes throughout the 2020s. Finding it just takes a little bit of engagement.

The obvious place to look for all kinds of topical songs is on social media, where the ability to create and distribute performances with a key stroke has fostered an ever-expanding agora. Devotees of folkish broadsides have already made a star of Jesse Welles, the Arkansas indie rocker (I really liked his sweaty 2018 album Red Trees and White Trashes) who turned his talents toward “singing the news” in 2023, writing brief, highly topical songs almost daily and posting them across his socials. Since he began gaining attention, some have doubted Welles’ motives — had he transformed himself from scruffy Southern bohemian to bandana-wearing dispatch rider only for his own benefit? I have to say, though, that I find this question irrelevant. Welles tends to occupy a typically liberal stance in his songs, though in satires like “Join ICE,” he wields a sharp blade. He’s not the most radical artist, nor is he the most conciliatory. His widely appealing and sometimes frustratingly soft-landing commentaries are just one piece of the larger puzzle of current protest music. The problem is never that one voice doesn’t ring strongly enough; it’s that other voices are overlooked or obscured.

Welles’ success — he’s nominated for four Grammys — represents what the mainstream music industry wants from protest music: an appealing and relatable conduit for ideas that many people long to hear expressed. I think Welles would be happy to admit that when it comes to getting his messages across, he’s a fortunate son — of John Fogerty, whose working-class anthems Welles greatly admires, and of Joe Strummer, whose sleeveless t-shirt look he sometimes adopts, and of Springsteen, an inevitable touchstone. Many in this line are white men willing to question, if not abandon, their own primary position within the historical narrative. Others are black and brown men like Chuck D or Zach de la Rocha, who tap into a similar flinty bravado. In 2026, though, as always, the actual field of protest music is much wider. It includes many women and queer people, many more soft-spoken or weirder or more communally focused creative minds.

The question, where are the protest songs? obscures the contributions of these different voices because it contains the presupposition that a real protest song sounds like “Masters of War” or “Fortunate Son.” If a woman mounts a protest, for example — especially if she’s a Black or brown woman — it may be viewed as an expression of identity first and dissent second. If it’s danceable, it could be mistaken for mere fun, a valve being released. If it’s melodramatic or more beautiful than it is angry, it could be dismissed as art for art’s sake. If it’s embedded in a hip-hop song that also has fun with battle rhymes, it might be considered incomplete. If it echoes through a chorus of voices instead of from just one, it may count as dissent but not art — just a street chant, not worth preserving..

I was thinking about this narrowing of the definition of protest music as I pondered the ubiquity of that question — where are all the protest songs? — while attending the annual awards ceremony at the Folk Alliance International conference in New Orleans a week ago. (Full disclosure: I’m on the board of FAI, in a volunteer position.) In front of me, an array of highly engaged and committed protest singers took the podium, one after another, to accept their awards. Song of the year award recipient Crys Matthews is a traditional folk singer expressing a queer point of view. Rising Tide winner Yasmin Williams, an amazing fingerpicking guitarist, gained national recognition when she turned a recent appearance at the Kennedy Center into a form of protest. Kyshona, who accepted the People’s Voice prize, singer-songwriter and country-soul diva who also is a music therapist working in prisons and in Nashville’s urban core. Carsie Blanton (who shared the artist of the year award with the trio I’m With Her, who weren’t in attendance) is, according to many of her fans, “doing what people want Jesse Welles to do” — she’s a topical songwriter with a sound that blends jazz, folk and old-timey music and a life of activism that put her on a flotilla to Gaza last year and led to her imprisonment in Israel. These women received their awards from other artists including Leyla McCalla, whose music casts a wide net encompassing global rhythms and diasporic histories, and Ani DiFranco, who revitalized political folk for a new generation in the 1990s and has continually found new ways to expand its definition.

Certainly the efforts of such women have received attention; they were in New Orleans to pick up their flowers, after all. (Blanton refused to accept her award until the conference is made free for all attending musicians, citing the dire financial situation of most musicians and noting that “it’s very hard to embody revolutionary spirit when you’re 80,000 dollars in debt.” That's her speaking at Folk Alliance in the photo at the top of this email.) My question is, would any of them have been included in a top five of activist musicians published in a major news outlet or celebrated at a televised awards show like the Grammys? Despite the fact that women have served as the faces of resistance in America from suffragism to civil rights and beyond, men’s voices, like their words, have historically been recognized as more representative. This is obviously partly because, in sexist society, men have been elevated to leadership positions when women often have done the groundwork within various movements. It’s also connected to lingering ideas about what a creative voice should sound like: rebellious, singular, a little rough and a whole lot Romantic. The women who helped define protest music in this country, from Bernice Johnson Reagon, Mavis Staples and Joan Baez in the 1960s to the ones I’ve mentioned today, have sometimes been granted the spotlight — Baez was a bona-fide pop star — but were and are as likely to think and act in communion with others and make art that reflects the values they’ve developed as caregivers and organizers. Instead of standing alone, they’ve linked arms and shared the spotlight. And so, paradoxically, women’s songs have been judged as both too personal and too communal to be the definitive statements of protest.

Artists like Crys Matthews and Carsie Blanton also sometimes get overlooked within mainstream conversations because of the way they make and share their music. Both release conventional albums, but they’re also all over Instagram and other platforms where a particular song’s impact can be ephemeral or very niche, the online equivalent of a Greenwich Village hootenanny. In the fluid, interactive spaces where both grassroots music and activism have gravitated, an artist can nurture a fan base that’s also a political front; fans become comrades, and the line between star and admirer blurs. Institutions like the Grammys reinforce the separation between artist and audience by covering official success stories in glitter. Musicians who choose to operate outside the system may not enjoy that shine. That doesn’t mean their impact is less powerful. When asked what makes a political leader, the esteemed labor organizer Dolores Huerta famously said, “A leader is the person that does the work.” That kind of engagement happens in basements and on streetcorners more than at Hollywood galas.

While the throngs of marchers in Minneapolis and beyond make a great impression on distant phone screens, among those opposed to federal intervention it’s the day-to-day observers and neighbors who run communications on the ground, sustaining resistance and dissent. Some are musical allies whose protest music is not necessarily intended to resonate beyond the blocks where it is made. Groups like Brass Solidarity and Singing Resistance, who stand among activists on the streets and make music that both documents and feeds their actions, shape soundtracks to history that may never be fully recorded. Yet what they do may be the most vital liberatory gesture of all.

One person who seems to understand this is Bruce Springsteen. While any official statement from the Boss remains too overdetermined to purely serve social change, I’m impressed with his spontaneous broadside about the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Macklin Good. While “Streets of Minneapolis” is, at its core, nothing new from the man who gave us The Ghost of Tom Joad and The Seeger Sessions, Springsteen shows he understands the moment when he gives over its arrangement to a mass of voices that’s redolent of the neighborhoods he honors in his song title. He lets his forward-pushing background singers lead him toward a vocal that’s increasingly loose, loud and tilting toward the communal. Kudos to America’s rock star for taking a back seat to the voice of a community. Doing so allows him to find where the real spirit of protest, and of survival, resides in 2026.

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I’ll raise my voice in support of these things making my week more bearable

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My pal Daoud and I have a new NPR Music+ episode for you, this time asking a perennial question posed in the flyest way by Whodini: “Friends: How many of us have them?” Before we go any further: Please subscribe to our pod! We need some new friends.

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February 1, 2026

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I’ll raise my voice in support of these things making my week more bearable

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