The New Yorker:

For a genre that confronts the horrors of the present, the protest song of 2026 is curiously backward-looking.

By Mitch Therieau

On January 28th, four days after Customs and Border Protection agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, a new song by Bruce Springsteen called “Streets of Minneapolis” appeared online. In it, Springsteen croaks his solidarity with a city under “an occupier’s boots,” as agents for the D.H.S. and for ice break into homes, intimidate peaceful observers, detain U.S. citizens, and, with the shootings of Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, kill people in the street. “Streets of Minneapolis” is a rapid-response protest song, and it shows. Springsteen’s voice sounds shredded, and the words often fall awkwardly within the cadence of the Dylanesque melody. He sings the names of the dead haltingly, as though he is reading them off a screen—which, judging from the recording-studio footage in the song’s lyric video, he probably is. The song is about the news, but it is also, perhaps unintentionally, about the moment of lag when we absorb the names and images, when we try to assimilate atrocity into narrative.

Springsteen wasn’t the only artist to rush into this gap. The British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg released “City of Heroes,” a spirited work of turbo-folk agitprop that invokes Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came.” The punk bands nofx and Dropkick Murphys updated old songs with new anti-ice lyrics. (A sample line from “Citizen I.C.E.,” by the latter: “Too scared to join the military / Too dumb to be a cop.”) Earlier in January, the roots-rock doyenne Lucinda Williams put out “The World’s Gone Wrong,” a record that tries to capture the texture of everyday life amid smoldering crisis—the toll of long working hours, the distant thrum of war, the small consolations of art. Williams’s brand of dissent is off the cuff and laconic: “The President of the United States can kiss my ass,” she told the crowd at a recent show in New York.

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