<\/p>\n
He is also sitting in front of a screen. \u201cAm I the only one willin\u2019 to bleed \/ Or take a bullet for bein\u2019 free \/ Screamin\u2019 \u2018What the fuck?\u2019 at my TV?\u201d Lewis bellows. This oscillation between rage at one\u2019s own powerlessness and fantasies of violence is the song\u2019s motive force. It could be said that conservative protest music is more likely than its progressive counterpart to call for something like armed revolt\u2014perhaps most overtly in Forgiato Blow and JJ Lawhorn\u2019s minorly viral 2025 song \u201cGood vs Evil,\u201d which takes \u201cTry That in a Small Town\u201d to its logical end point. \u201cWe need a big tall tree and a short piece of rope \/ Hang \u2019em up high at sundown,\u201d Lawhorn sings over a beat suspiciously reminiscent of Lil Nas X\u2019s \u201cOld Town Road<\/a>.\u201d But these songs are also honest, sometimes despite themselves, about the feelings of impotence associated with watching history play out on a screen.<\/p>\n Then again, the protest song is right there in the fray with history, flashing across our screens, vying for our attention. Oliver Anthony\u2019s \u201cRich Men North of Richmond<\/a>,\u201d from 2023, a song about \u201clivin\u2019 in the new world \/ with an old soul\u201d that gets sidetracked on a rant about welfare and snack cakes, became a surprise viral hit partially on the strength of its video, which finds Anthony playing the song live in the woods. It also owed some of its popularity to the efforts of right-wing commentators, including Matt Walsh<\/a> and the former F.B.I. deputy director Dan Bongino<\/a>, to brand the song as a MAGA<\/em> anthem. It hardly mattered that Anthony described his own politics as \u201cdead center,\u201d or that the song\u2019s inventory of complaints\u2014the cost of living, human trafficking\u2014could align with any number of political programs. The song was subsumed into online discourse, and it became something at once more banal and more pervasive than spectacle: it became content, another piece of digital flotsam eddying across the feed.<\/p>\n For progressives, the undisputed master of the viral protest song is the thirty-three-year-old folksinger Jesse Welles, who makes videos of himself standing in a field, singing clever miniature tunes about the hypocrisies of the health-care industry, tech billionaires, ICE<\/em>. Welles, who was nominated for four Grammys in 2025, is a gifted lyricist, and his finest verses use cascades of slant rhymes to move subtly from specific finger-pointing to broader implication. One recent song takes aim at \u201coutright white supremacists, or America First \/ I think they both sell merch \/ The whole place seems a little bit cursed \/ It\u2019s like somebody might have been living here first.\u201d<\/p>\n If Welles\u2019s hyper-specific lyrics are his gift, they can also make his songs feel ephemeral. In \u201cThe Ballad of Big Balls<\/a>,\u201d from August, 2025, he sings, \u201cSome days I forget that Cracker Barrels exist \/ But there ain\u2019t no one forgetting about that list.\u201d The assault of a former DOGE<\/em> staffer, the fracas over the Cracker Barrel logo, the demands to release Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s \u201cclient list\u201d<\/a>\u2014this is hardly the stuff of \u201cThe Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll<\/a>,\u201d let alone \u201cRich Men North of Richmond.\u201d It is more like the \u201cToday\u2019s News\u201d sidebar on X set to music, re-creating the vertiginous churn of posts\u2014and then neutralizing the feeling in a mist of icy smugness. In this sense, Welles\u2019s songs are far better suited to social media than to the stage, to say nothing of the ramparts. At one of his concerts last year, a member of the audience yelled during a song, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you film this one in the woods?\u201d<\/p>\n