The Changing Tune Of Protest Music

In the age of Twitter and Trump, can a politically charged song still make a difference?

- Eric Spitznagel

Chuck D is shouting at me, and it’s making me want to set a cop car on fire.

I’m driving through the north side of Chicago, blasting “Hail to the Chief.” The song is from the new self-titled record by Prophets of Rage, a supergroup consisting of the former Public Enemy frontman, Cypress Hill’s B-Real and three-fourths of Rage Against the Machine. It isn’t just a great excuse to drive too fast while pounding the steering wheel; it feels like a gasp of oxygen during a politically suffocating time.

But a funny thing happens when you sing along to songs that demand you fight back: You start to wonder if we’ve entered a new golden age of protest music or if we’re just stuck in our little bubbles, each with its own scathing soundtrack. “What the f*ck are you waiting for?” the Prophets ask in “Unf*ck the World”. Good question.

Whatever your political leanings, there are pop songs out there to prop you up. Most of them are anti-Trump, from Jack Johnson’s “My Mind Is for Sale”, which rails against “paranoid ‘us against them’ walls” to Fiona Apple’s relatively self-explanatory “Tiny Hands”. The pickings are slimmer on the support-our-president side, but you can sing along to Joy Villa’s summer hit “Make America Great Again!” while wearing any of the pro-Trump T-shirts being peddled on Kid Rock’s website. (And given the fact that the Devil Without a Cause announced, just before press time, that he’s running for the Senate, we might be in for a patriotic rap-rock album any day now.)