Pop Culture's Failure To Rage

Why songs and TV shows are full of postelection angst about feeling impotent, complicit, despondent— and what a more constructive future of protest art might look like

- Spencer Kornhaber

IN THE DAYS after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Brooklyn punk rocker Jeff Rosenstock retreated to the Catskill Mountains to do what liberals everywhere were doing—mourn—and what many artists were doing, create work about what had just happened. The resulting songs, released on New Year’s Day 2018, bore titles such as “Powerlessness,” “All This Useless Energy,” “Beating My Head Against a Wall,” and “Yr Throat” (as in, “What’s the point of having a voice / when it gets stuck inside your throat?”). In jittery, epic-scale shout alongs, he described his neighbors taking shots and moaning, “There’s nothing left we can do right now.” He told of joining a demonstration that shut down an interstate, and then realizing that “after a couple of days / the fire that I thought would burn it down was gone.” He reported withdrawing from regular life to channel his discontent into action, but finding it impossible to do so.

He sang, in other words, about impotence. About complicity. About his inability to effectively rage against the machine.

Rosenstock’s Post-, one of the best reviewed albums of this year, embodies a prominent strain in recent pop culture. No one could argue that American musicians and other artists have been indifferent to Trump. On the contrary, the entertainment world is under going, as a recent piece in New York magazine put it, “the Great Awokening.” Even public figures known for their detachment have become walking Daily Kos comments sections, and when hundreds of thousands of women and other voters marched in protest after Trump’s inauguration, celebrities added oomph with speeches and songs. “Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House,” Madonna confessed to the crowd in Washington, D.C.