Mark Twain once wrote that true patriotism is loving your country all the time and your government when it deserves it. I agree. Patriotism isn’t the refusal to ask hard questions. It isn’t blind allegiance or ignorance of shortcomings. To me, patriotism is the recognition that we have what it takes to be great, and the belief that we must work together to create a better tomorrow.

Because the things that have made America great aren’t its economic policies or elections. I have always believed that it is the people, places, and cultures that have come together to weave a story of what it means to be American. It’s Yosemite and the desire to protect our national lands. It’s crawfish étouffee and mustard greens and the creation of new cuisine from the contributions of immigrants. It’s the unbelievable sacrifice across generations of Americans to protect this land around the world.

America’s music can tell us a lot about her rich history. This Independence Day, I’ll be spinning the records that tell the stories of America, like Springsteen’s tales of hollowed factory towns and Dylan’s anxious odes of social and civil progress. I’ll be spinning songs like James McMurtry’s ‘We Can’t Make it Here,’ in which he identified many of the problems plaguing the American working class 21 years ago— Problems which have still not been remedied nor hardly even addressed.

One song that I was drawn to put on this morning was ‘Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore’ which John Prine wrote almost 60 years ago about the rise of faux patriotism. In it, Prine makes a simple case— it isn’t enough to plaster the flag on your tailgate to be a good citizen. In fact, sometimes blind patriotism can mask the truth about the state of the nation: “Well, I got my window shield so filledwith flags I couldn’t see.” He called out warhawks who pursued unjust killing in the name of American hegemony or some kind of Christian mission, singing “Now Jesus don’t like killin’, no matter what the reason’s for.” And, he made a heavy political argument with the humor and subtle sarcasm that made Prine one of the best poets of the last century. Songs like this are the soundtrack of the good American conscience.

More broadly, I’ll be celebrating the rich musical tradition of this great country. To me, the story of American music is the story of America itself. From Muscle Shoals to Laurel Canyon, America’s myriad sonic traditions have reflected and shaped its life and culture. Blues, gospel, soul, rock n’ roll and country have sprung from the landscapes. Arguably, they couldn’t have appeared anywhere else.

And, music has always occupied a special niche in the collective consciousness. Whether it was integrated recording sessions in the Jim Crow South at STAX or work songs being used to organize picket lines in the coalfields of West Virginia, song has always held a special place in the American story.

So, this Fourth of July, take a moment to appreciate Motown and FAME Studios, Sun Records and Chess, and all the artists that gave us an American Soundtrack. Watch a Second Line in New Orleans or a James Brown show. Listen to Blue Yodel #9 or Alan Jackson. Because the multicultural evolution of American music is the best way to understand — and to celebrate — this great country on her 250th birthday. In a few moments, I’ll be at a friend’s gig watching him play blues songs that came out half a century before he was born.

The current moment in American politics feels like it should have a louder soundtrack. The conditions are obvious: wages that don’t keep up with the cost of living, a stagnant job market, wars that begin without sense or just cause. Elections aren’t trusted and violent crime has become a fixture of city living. It appears at times that democratic and social civility has gone out the window. To many, the very fabric of the American ideal would seem to be fraying. But the music that once tried to make sense of that reality has mostly gone quiet.

Which is how I end up back at Nebraska, not as a throwback, but as something uncomfortably current. What’s striking isn’t just that Bruce Springsteen was writing about a country coming apart; it’s that he assumed it already had.

In place of the movement, work, and redemption that structured Bruce Springsteen’s earlier music, it offers a world shaped by deindustrialization, post-Vietnam drift, and social breakdown, where characters move through empty landscapes, commit violent acts they barely understand, and continue, out of habit more than belief, to search for something that might still make sense. But the album ultimately reframes that meaninglessness through a Catholic-influenced belief that is not redemptive, but necessary.

The album should be understood as a product of its historical moment. As union rates declined and the industrial heartbeat of the country slowed, workers faced direct assaults on their material well-being. Collective labor lost power and factories shuttered. And so this record, which was not explicitly political on its face, “became political,” asserts Steven Hyden in his book, There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland. Although the 70s began with a massive wave of strikes, by the end of the decade, “the energy crisis, inflation, globalization, and deregulation” crushed the momentum of the early part of the decade The Vietnam war -- fought mostly by blue collar boys -- and deindustrialization laid “siege” to the working class both materially and mentally.

As a direct result, faith in the government cratered and crime rose. Notably, the new violence was largely impersonal. Homicide rates doubled, but homicide rates by strangers increased faster, especially in cities. Serial killers like the Son of Sam captured the public imagination. Property crime and robberies increased as well. In the summer of 1977, New York City was hit by a blackout that darkened most of the city. The streets quickly filled with rioters and looters, with the cops nowhere to be found. Authority still existed, but it became detached and struggled to govern behavior.

On Nebraska, Springsteen uses sonic cues to shape a landscape of lonesome confinement. The album, recorded on a four-track TEAC 144 that had fallen in a river and dried out again, sounds like a fever dream. Nebraska’s intentional imperfections create a haunting underworld of sound. “Skeletal hooks propelled by distant, solitary guitars,” mesh with the “low, wounded range of Springsteen’s mantra-like singing inside ocean-fog reverb,” wrote David Fricke for Mojo Magazine. Intentional imperfections litter the record. The creaking of a chair can be heard below yelps that send the VU meters soaring. The over-modulated harmonica seems poised to melt your speaker cones.

In Springsteen’s own words, the record was meant to sound “restrained,” and “minimal,” to let the narrative come through clearer, but the sound of Nebraska is not intimate, it is claustrophobic. Springsteen considered it a set of “black bedtime stories,” which might all take place over one night. The sonic profile produces an intangible sense that something is lingering just outside the frame. The throbbing guitar on “State Trooper” starts to sound like footsteps. The wails on “Johnny 99” sound like warning cries coming across the plains from someone -- or something -- you don’t want to meet. The record starts to feel like a late-night drive down a seemingly endless road, miles away from the last town that made sense. Neon signs and roadside relics flash by without meaning.

The songs on Nebraska represent social concerns that Springsteen began expressing on The River. Nebraska doesn’t make political statements, per se, but it tells stories from a world where systems are failing without easy explanation. On “Johnny 99,” Springsteen tells the story of a man who loses his job at the Ford plant and shoots a hotel clerk in drunken frustration. “Atlantic City” talks about the mob wars of the early 1980s and the murder of mob boss Philip Testa. And the title track, which opens the record and generally sets the tone, is a first-person retelling of serial killer Charlie Starkweather’s slaughters in the 1950s. These sorts of stories all reflect a societal collapse without naming it. Institutions have failed to wrangle the greed and violence of regular people. Constraints of decency and legality have fallen away. What remains is desolation and a hopeless search for meaning.

Through songs of ambient violence and lonely nights spent chasing fleeting hopes, Nebraska “dissects the vulnerability of the American dream,” writes Ryan Sheeler in “A Meanness in This World: The American Outlaw as Storyteller in Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.” Through the eyes of criminals and poor men, Nebraska surveys what happens when the cornerstones of American life -- work, love, family -- crumble and there’s nowhere left to run. Springsteen organizes this world through three recurring motifs: senseless violence, the collapse of ordinary life, and isolation.

On the title track, as the narrator couples with death on the execution line, he expresses little remorse, instead blaming his actions on a “meanness in the world.” This concept permeates every other song on the album in some way. On “Highway Patrolman,” a police officer faces the choice between turning in his own brother or letting him go, ultimately electing to do the latter. He blames his brother’s bad actions on a simple reality: “he just ain’t no good.” On “Johnny 99,” the murderous narrator does show remorse, but seems to dissociate from the reality of his actions, saying “it was more ‘n all this that put that gun in my hand.” Sentenced to 99 years in prison, he begs to be executed instead. These songs of senseless violence create a Hobbesian landscape of selfish desperation, man against man, making what little is possible of a life that is nasty, brutish and short.

On the songs where everyone makes it out alive, Springsteen details other elements of the collapse of ordinary life. “Used Cars,” condemns the myth of upward mobility; the narrator vows he’s never “gonna ride in no used car again,” but he places his bets on winning the lottery, not landing a steady job. “Mansion on the Hill” tells a story from Springsteen’s past of a grand house his father would drive him to see as a child. It’s a ballad of longing and aspiration.

But its title is taken from a 1948 Hank Williams track, which reflects a certain emptiness; Williams sings, “I know you’re alone with your pride dear, In your loveless mansion on the hill.” Within this context, the Springsteen song takes on a different hue. The song positions the mansion as closed-off and unreachable, perched high behind “gates of hardened steel.” Beyond the aspiration the narrator feels, perhaps they sense that the money has built not just distance, but a kind of emotional vacancy—something sealed off as much from meaning as from the road below. The mansion becomes less a symbol of success than of insulation, a place where desire ends but nothing begins. What first reads as envy starts to fracture; the object of longing reveals itself as fundamentally hollow, its grandeur sustained by isolation rather than fulfillment. In that sense, Springsteen is not simply recalling the ache of looking up, but quietly indicting a material world in which the dream, once attained, carries within it the conditions of its own emptiness.

On other tracks, Springsteen tells stories of isolation and paranoia. On “State Trooper,” the narrator becomes increasingly paranoid as he begs a state trooper, either real or imagined, to let him make it home. It’s interesting to consider the motif of the car here. On earlier projects (Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town) the car “represented escape,” or “defined boundaries,” where stories could roll out, asserts Mark Richardson for Pitchfork. On Nebraska, the car occupies a different role. It’s “a kind of isolation chamber, a steel husk that keeps its passengers apart from the world.” or something they travel in seeking some kind of elusive redemption. The sound of the album, with its sparse instrumentation behind wails and yelps, cements this feeling of isolation. Hanging on each next word, the listener starts to hear a throbbing in their own head.

Springsteen also repeatedly puts forth the notion on Nebraska that crime will naturally arise from hopelessness. Just as a cat backed into a corner will scratch his way out, a man with no options will turn to desperate measures. Throughout the record, Springsteen tells stories of labor collapse rolling into crime. “Atlantic City,” tells the story of a man “tired of coming up on the losing end” who turns to criminal activity to be able to give something to his partner. The song is a perfect encapsulation of the decay of Americana imagery and the rise of meaningless violence. The town isn’t just a setting for the events of the song, it’s a metaphor in and of itself. From the beginning of the track, when they’re fighting on the boardwalk, Springsteen paints a picture of a waning American town. It becomes a backdrop for a dying romance and the narrator’s last-ditch search for prosperity. Just as the golden age of Atlantic City is long gone, so too are the glory days of our narrator’s romance and material comfort. On “Johnny 99,” the deadly narrator did it for “debts no honest man could pay.” And on “State Trooper,” the narrator suggests he’s got nothing left but his own paranoia.

In his autobiography, Springsteen wrote of the album that “everyone knows what it is like to be condemned,” expanding the relevance of Nebraska beyond car thieves and murderers. This helps to explain why the record refuses to end where it would seem to lead. If the first nine songs sketch a world stripped of meaning, the final two complicate that diagnosis without quite resolving it. On “My Father’s House,” the narrator dreams of being rescued, an image that feels almost biblical in its simplicity, only to wake and find that reconciliation, like grace, cannot be willed into existence. The house is gone, the past sealed off. It is a cruel specter: redemption appears, then recedes.

But on the final track, “Reason to Believe,” Springsteen ties the sorrow and fatalism of the album into a decidedly Catholic bow. Four vignettes of suffering -- a dead dog, a grieving lover, a man waiting on a miracle -- are bound together by the insistence that people still find “some reason to believe.” This is where the album’s Catholic undercurrent becomes legible, though not in any doctrinal sense. It is not faith as certainty, but faith as compulsion, as the refusal to relinquish meaning even when the world provides none. As Rob Kirkpatrick puts it in The Words and Music of Bruce Springsteen, “people endure… they struggle against all evidence to the contrary, because it’s the only thing that they can do—or else they end up dead, spiritually or literally.”

It’s a fascinating way to close an album about murder, theft, and despair. What emerges is not a clean redemption arc but something more unsettling. The violence of Nebraska does not become meaningful in hindsight; it remains senseless. But “Reason to Believe” reframes that senselessness as the condition under which belief itself becomes necessary. Suffering is not justified, but it is, in a quiet and almost defiant way, repurposed. The characters do not transcend the brutality around them; they insist, stubbornly and irrationally, on living within it. In that sense, the album closes not with an answer, but with a posture: belief as resistance, and faith as the last available form of meaning in a world that offers none.

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No one writes like Blaze Foley anymore. In the 1970s, there was a seemingly endless supply of alt-country writers. Singers who wrote their own songs and did so with the craft of a poet. From the folksingers like Gordon Lightfoot and Jim Croce to the working class heroes — John Prine, Guy Clark, Townes of course — the 70s were the singer songwriter decade.

And then, for no clear reason, that changed. Sure, Springsteen gave us Nebraska in the 80s, and Dylan kept churning out noise, but by and large, the songwriter’s moment had come and gone. Country, for its part, turned mostly to radio-ready hits, overproduced and overladen with pedal steel. In time, the genre would touch on poignant themes like ‘big green tractors,’ cowboy boots, and grape soda.

But lately something’s changed. A new crop of singer songwriters, riding broadly in the country / Americana lane, seem compelled to write better. Ian Noe is one of these artists.

His new song, Jukebox Blues (For Blaze Foley) sounds like what you’d get if Mr. Foley took psilocybin while locked in a room with an old reverb tank. Allusions to classic alt-country lace the verses, while an eerily distant pedal steel whines. The track sounds something like being stuck in the anteroom of some honky tonk, hearing an old troubadour through a smoke-stained curtain.

Mr. Noe, somehow only 35 years old, is another from the long tradition of Kentucky songwriters. His music, like that of Prine or Childers, handles themes of poverty, death and addiction. Sonically it is as reminiscent of Dylan as it is of Gram Parsons or other cosmic country heroes. Noe’s excellent debut, “Between the Country,” was produced by Dave Cobb, whose resume could roughly stand-in for a list of who’s-worth-listening-to in alt country.

The new track was recorded and produced by Andrija Tokic— a man not from the hollers of Kentucky but from the suburbs of Washington, born to Croatian immigrants. Influenced by punk and the Beatles, Tokic has since become a key player in the roots-rock movement. It really does take a village.

I suspect that the timing of this folk revival is no coincidence. Between skyrocketing inequality, war, and political unrest, the 2020s resembles the early 1970s in many respects. The news reports that gave us Election Day or Sam Stone didn’t sound too different from the nightly news today. I, for one, am glad that at least a few people are still trying to write like those old folk heroes.

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Since its inception, blues music has essentially asked one question: what is the appeal of a mortal existence in a cruel world? In 1931, facing a great depression that hit the Delta even harder than the banks in New York City, Skip James sang, “if I can ever get off of this old hard killing floor, Lord I’ll never get down this low no more.” Blues music is the transcendent struggle for equal footing given unequal foundation.

Sinners, set in 1932 in Clarksdale, uses blues music not only as a soundtrack, but as a central metaphor for a story of attempted salvation. Though on its surface a movie about the undead, the real threat in the film may be the looming specter of the Jim Crow economy. The sawmill the twins by seeking upward mobility becomes a death trap. The symbolism isn’t difficult to grasp.

The interwar economy the twins inhabited was a near-inescapable poverty sentence for black Americans in the South. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote at the time, “The black peon is held down by perpetual debt or petty criminal judgments… If by accident or miracle he escapes and becomes a landholder, his property, civil and political status are still at the mercy of the worst of the white voters, and his very life at the whim of the mob.”

In Sinners we see various forms of this struggle. Stack and his cousin Sammie pass by a chain gang on their way to the juke joint. After the abolition of slavery, many Southern states passed laws enabling convict-leasing, wherein authorities could arrest black people for small crimes and force them to work without pay under heinous conditions. Likewise, sharecropping kept poor black and white southerners in an unending cycle of debt. Du Bois described it as “serfdom.”

Blues music, given this context, is easy to see as a form of escapism. “What is lived through blues” is the “livable embodiment on what are acknowledged to be decisively disadvantaged terms,” writes Steven G Smith in Blues and our Mind Body Problem. It is a protest against the unwinnable, an expression of humanity and vitality in the face of inhumane oppression. It is also, writes Smith, better considered an aesthetic than purely an art form. Like “the romantic,” or “the grotesque,” blues can be understood as a one of those aesthetic qualities that pertains to a general human attitude. It is this definition that best explains delta blues as a metaphor in Sinners.

The film uses blues music as a symbol of the brothers’ revolt against threats both human and supernatural. The dizzying climax to the movie takes place in the converted sawmill, as blues musicians alive and dead come together in a musical melánge of pure joy. The performance “makes his point far more profoundly than any expository dialogue ever could,” writes David Sims in the Atlantic. It is so powerful that even the vampires want to listen, tying together the two halves of the film: the human struggle against oppression with the inhuman fight against the undead.

In this, Sinners makes use of a soundtrack in a way that feels considerably more impactful than simple scoring. Blues music isn’t just a backdrop for the film or a pretext, it’s a character in its own right, a useful participant in the unfolding story.

Personally, I’m glad to see the blues get its due. At the Grammys, an ensemble performed the movie’s I Lied to You. Christone Ingram, who has been at the forefront of a blues revival in recent years, joined forces with legends like Buddy Guy and Eric Gales. Between the popularity of Sinners and the emergence of young blood like Ingram, maybe blues will once again provide the relief America needs for ongoing economic hardship.

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Mumford and Sons occupy a strange spot. Enough banjo to intrigue the suburbanites, enough reverb and beard oil to get on pop radio. For years they have remained firmly stuck in the ‘stomp, clap, hey’ lane co-inhabited by bands like the Lumineers. Their attempt to appeal to both pop and roots audiences has led to some of the most milquetoast Americana on the radio today.

Which made it surprising when I tuned into SNL and saw them performing their newest single, Here, with Sierra Ferrell. The song was recorded with Chris Stapleton— talk about calling in backup. Were Marcus and his so-called sons looking to establish their Americana credential?

The song is … fine. The “introspective lyrics” their PR sheet promises include gems such as “can you hold all my secrets / can we swear that we can’t forget?” Wow, never heard that one before. Ultimately, Here falls into the same trap as most other Mumford and Sons tracks. Borderline poignant lyrics are laid over basic roots instrumentation. Slap a folky album cover on there (An old Zippo showing its patina… get it?) and call it “Americana.”

Ultimately though, Here sounds like just about every other Mumford and Sons song, which is to say it sounds like half the Lumineers’ discography, and like last-gasp Gen X adult alternative songwriters everywhere.

Too bad. Earlier efforts, like “Sigh No More,” and “Babel,” were interesting because they carved a new lane in the alt-pop world. Maybe Mumford and Sons should go back to banjo.

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“Mutiny After Midnight,” is, in one sense, the most Sturgill record he’s made in a while. It is simultaneously a disco-funk project by a man who no longer answers to the name J.S. Simpson.

Certain tracks (Excited Delirium, for one) might have been left on the cutting room floor of “Sound & Fury.” Others, like Don’t Let Go, would be more at home on “A Sailor’s Guide to the Earth.”

However most of the album is, in Simpson’s own words, “pure, unfiltered, unapologetic, relentless disco-hedonism.” But the sensual self-indulgence of “Mutiny” is not simply an epicurean pursuit. The liner notes indicate that the project was to be an “open rebellion” against oppression and suppression, contrasting global darkness with the “bright state of love.”

Politically undefined, lines about ICE raids flow into jokes about Hunter Biden’s coke habit. On Excited Delirium, Simpson asks, “You got a warrant to show me?
Never mind, my hands are up and I'm down on the floor.”

Love songs range from the profane — Make America Fuk Again is the album’s opener — to the sweet. On Viridescent, Simpson proclaims, “I wanna breathe you in like air until the day I die.” Certain tracks, like Situation, would make even Sabrina Carpenter blush. Singing “stay on that D until you hit the G” while shuffling between those same two chords was a nice touch.

So JBS made a funk-inspired record full of politics and sex songs. That’s not that shocking coming from the one-time country singer who protested the CMAs and released two bluegrass records when he was set to retire from music altogether (all before changing his name and moving to France).

And so instead of wasting any more white space discussing the particulars of the album, I want to turn to what it means.

Because “Mutiny After Midnight” is cool. It takes grand narratives about Americana music and throws them into the wood chipper. Is Sturgill a country artist? Yes. Is he a psychedelic rock n’ roller? Equally yes. Unconfined by commercial category, he has consistently created music that scratches his own creative itch. What more do you want from an artist?

“Mutiny,” is therefore narcissistic in the best way. Nashville, and perhaps the broader world, asked Sturgill what he was rebelling against and just like Brando he asked “whatddaya got?” The record looks to threaten injustice everywhere with nothing but a damn good time.

“Mutiny After Midnight” is not as good an album as “Passage Du Desir,” in many boring, musicological ways. It is however fantastic in all the non-boring musical, artistic ways. Simpson wrote all the lyrics on the spot while recording, and band members came up with all their parts in the studio. As a result, many tracks feel rushed, and the jams are mostly uninteresting. Disappointing coming from one of the songwriters and one of the best live bands currently touring.

But none of that bothers me all that much. The craziest guy in Americana music put out a fusion funk record the same week America went to war in the Middle East. He leaked it two weeks early on his own YouTube channel after promising it would be a physical exclusive. With “Mutiny After Midnight,” collective sensibility goes out the window. We’re all left to dance on its ashes.

I’ve never believed in the cliche of a creaking board under the foot of an out of towner until I arrived at a “country bar” in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, wearing one too many pieces of turquoise jewelry. From the moment I walked in, I could feel eyes on the back of my neck. I left just about as soon as I finished my $10 High Life.

I’d made the pilgrimage to the original Skinny Dennis because its second location, in Nashville, has gotten itself to the point where my car’s navigation occasionally asks if I’m driving there instead of my house. The second location has only been open for a year. However, in that time, it has established itself as a pillar of the community.

Overdecorated with old beer signs and ironic taxidermy, the bar emulates the aesthetics of late-1970s dives across America. It would be easy to write it off as simulacra, with overpriced drinks for those who hope to cosplay the working class. And yet…

And yet it isn’t. Maybe because of $6 beer-shot combos or maybe owing to consistently great live music, the bar has become a neighborhood hangout. I can’t step in without seeing a familiar face or three. People are willing to make a new friend over a game of doubles pool. Strangers two-step without any expectation of going home together after. Skinny Dennis Nashville is what a venue or music bar should be.

Bars like that, what some would call ‘third spaces,’ are vital to strengthening community ties. The term, coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg, refers to physical locations other than work or home where there’s little financial barrier to entry and where conversation is the main activity. A study from 2019 found that living near community-oriented commercial spaces brings a laundry list of social benefits, such as increased trust, decreased loneliness, and a stronger sense of attachment to where we live. Residents of neighborhoods with a high number of amenities — bars, cafes, restaurants, entertainment venues, etc. — are twice as likely to say people in the community are “very willing” to help their neighbors compared with residents in low-amenity areas.

But the divide between the two Skinny Dennises proves that having the social infrastructure only goes so far. Modern social life can pose challenges to relationship building, even in spaces designed for exactly that. Part of the problem is a preoccupation with efficiency, argues Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology at NYU, in his book Palaces of the People. “You tend to enrich your social life when you stop and linger and waste time,” he explained in an interview. But increasingly, many see the outside world as a place to do something and the home as the domain of rest and relaxation. The idea of sticking around somewhere just to waste time feels off. Too often, people are going to a space to do something specific with specific people.

This was the problem of Skinny Dennis Brooklyn. Little social molecules watched the room but refused to integrate. Breaking those social bonds to strike up conversation was met with reactions that ranged from bewilderment to hostility. One man seemed to assume I was hitting on him.

Taken aback by how different the room felt from its analog in Nashville, I asked a man near me, wearing athletic chinos tucked into Amazon boots, if this was a typical crowd. Exasperated, he replied, “I mean yeah, it’s a country bar.”

Many consider it preferable to keep to yourself in public. Social media, of course, and the ability to look away from the room and towards your phone, has fueled this. But there’s something gained from serendipitous socialization, from a purposeless desire to go where the conversation wanders. A world full of atomized, isolated people is a world without shared reality.

It seems that the protest song is dead. Last month, when Zach Bryan released, “Bad News,” a song about national divisions, it elicited a certain shock and awe from both sides of the aisle. The right took issue with Bryan’s criticism of ICE; in the song, Bryan warns, "ICE is gonna come, bust down your door." The left, however, seemed unsure as well. Why was the guy who sings about whiskey talking about the Department of Homeland Security?

It’s been a long time since the third most popular musician in the US was writing against the government. Half a century ago, it was all the rage. In 1963 Bob Dylan recorded “Masters of War,” a song critical of US intervention in Vietnam. That was two years before the Johnson administration’s massive escalation of ground troops. It didn’t take much for the folkies to condemn Washington.

Many popular artists, from Billie Holliday to Bruce Springsteen, made political statements in song. And then, sometime around the digital music revolution, the protest song became relegated to the annals of alternative music. Sure, writers like James McMurtry and some rock bands like Rage Against the Machine made political music, but the mainstream had shifted. After 9/11, pop and country music stressed unity, not division. Artists preached patriotism, not dissent. Songs like “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American,” and “Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning),” topped the charts.

Streaming exacerbated the trend. Digital siloing has decreased the relevance of making the Top 40, says James Sullivan in his book Which Side Are You On? “In the 1960s, if Curtis Mayfield or Bob Dylan wrote a track that addressed a social issue, and it was a hit, they got on the Top 40 radio, and Top 40 radio was what every single human being listened to. Now we’re all siloed.” This fragmentation makes it hard for any track to achieve cultural saturation.

Now, with political division reaching levels theorists couldn’t even theorize in the 1960s, mainstream protest music shows signs of life. Jesse Welles, the darling of the Americana world was nominated for four Grammys on the back of songs like “Join ICE,” and “United Health.” With “Bad News,” Zach Bryan is bringing radio country onto the same shaky ground.

It didn’t come without backlash. The White House responded with a statement condemning Bryan: "While Zach Bryan wants to Open The Gates to criminal illegal aliens and has Condemned heroic ICE officers, Something in the Orange tells me a majority of Americans disagree with him." Setting aside a seemingly AI-generated press release, it’s refreshing to see a popular artist clashing with the government.

There’s a long history of country artists coming up against entrenched power structures. In 1975, Loretta Lynn’s song “The Pill” was banned from country radio. In 2013, Kacey Musgraves faced similar pushback to “Follow Your Arrow,” over lyrics declaring her support for LGBT rights and recreational marijuana use. Johnny Cash, Kitty Wells and Conway Twitty all had songs banned from radio play. Not a bad list of names to wind up on.

For his part, Bryan expressed disappointment at the Trump administration’s response. He wrote on Instagram stressing unity, "Left wing or right wing we're all one bird and American. To be clear I'm on neither of these radical sides."

I, for one, wish he’d held his ground.

Art isn’t meant to please all. When songs are pissing someone off, there’s a good chance they’re speaking truth to someone else. For that reason, I hope to see more protest music from Bryan and other American songwriters. The last time America was this divided, it brought us some of the best music of the 21st century. I’m holding out my hope that even streaming can’t take that artistic current away.

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Is ‘brat’ still a thing? A couple of years back, riding on the coattails of Charli XCX’s eponymous album, Brat, the term of art for anything deemed “Cool, audacious or unafraid to mess with convention,” took over mainstream pop music.

Brat may sound like an insult, but in the last few years, “Seeming a little immature, a little selfish, a little nasty, has taken on an air of glamour,” writes Spencer Kornhaber for the Atlantic. Although the ‘bad girl’ is a tired cliche of pop music, new stars like Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter have crystallized a different sort of insouciance. It’s mischievous and scheming, to be sure; Carpenter’s videos frequently feature her boyfriends meeting untimely ends. But it goes well beyond ‘Oops I Did it Again.’

Reflecting a growing gender alienation within Gen. Z, the Brat era of pop seems to say, ‘men suck, who needs ‘em anyway?” It presumes that dating isn’t going to get better soon, and we might as well laugh about it. “He didn’t ask a single question / And he was wearing these fugly jeans,” sneers Chappell Roan on “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl.” On “Love is Embarrassing,” Olivia Rodrigo decries, “For some weird second string / Loser who's not worth mentioning / My God, love's embarrassing as hell.”

The shift has proven wildly successful. Gen. Z audiences, fed up with ghosts on Hinge and casual-exclusive talking stages that go nowhere, resonate with this brand of love story. Following Short n’ Sweet, Sabrina Carpenter enjoyed a meteoric rise to success. She’s been nominated for six Grammys in the last couple years. After her performance of “Manchild,” on the Grammys, when Carpenter sang, “Half your brain just ain't there / Manchild / Why you always come a running?” sales of the song went up 600%. Streaming allows artists like Carpenter to succeed with a brand of pop that doesn’t try to please everyone.

But Brat is more than just man-hating. It’s introspective; it’s raw and vulnerable about mental health in a way that resonates with the first generation to grew up proud to go to therapy. “And I try to be the chill girl / That holds her tongue and gives you space / I try to be the chill girl / But honestly, I'm not,” confesses Chappell Roan on Casual, a song about the silent strain of hookup culture. In short, Brat-era pop reflects the multifaceted experience of Gen. Z.

Enter Maggie Antone. Antone, who came to prominence on TikTok, is 23 years old. Like many other 23-year-olds, she has a wealth of experiences in fraternity basements and smoking weed in backyard sheds. Unlike most 23-year-olds, she has quickly built a country career singing about them. Antone is taking the Brat playbook from pop music and using it to create a new brand of Gen Z country.

On “Suburban Outlaw,” Antone calls out cowboy cosplayers everywhere: “You think you're such a man, but you're a fucking sociopath,” but she also reflects candidly on the toll the relationship took, “You've got me on the verge of an existential nervous breakdown.” This is the essential core that sets Antone apart from earlier girl power country. When Carrie Underwood sang “Before He Cheats,” she left out the part about the rough nights before she got out the baseball bat.

On “The Devil’s Not in Hell,” Antone turns her attention to the men of East Nashville: “Let me tell you 'bout a man, 5'8, swears that he's 5'10,” she begins. Someone ought to pitch it as a jingle for Lakeside Lounge. The chorus, a rousing call that the “Devil’s not in hell, he’s in a bar with the boys on the East side of the town,” is sure to be a singalong for all the women who have been personally wronged by my East Nashville brethren.

Antone’s new song, “White Horses,” a collab with Anna Bates, opens with a lonely fiddle that sounds like we might just launch into Camptown Races. Fortunately we do not. “White Horses” is more mild than some of Antone’s other recent efforts, but it’s cut from the same cloth. “Stupid boy, don’t fuck with forces / That you don’t know … Men they used to go to war,” the two duet on the chorus. “Heard you had a breakdown / Got a new woman,” feels like a line informed by modern dating. It’s hard to imagine even Loretta Lynn accepting the premise that her old flame was seeing a therapist. In all, “White Horses” feels like if Chappell Roan put on a suede fringe coat and set out to write a two stepping song.

I saw Antone debut “The Devil’s Not in Hell,” live in East Nashville. Never have I felt so called-out at a concert (in my defense, the boots do add a few inches). But Antone’s show was also the first time I’ve heard country music that felt catered to my generation. Most audiences won’t relate to songs about dating apps and regretful frat party hookups. That’s the appeal of the songs for those that do.

Antone recognizes the modernity of her music. “With situationships and such nowadays, it feels like no one is looking for the real thing anymore. This album is for the people who didn’t get the I’m sorry text.” she says in the release notes for Rhinestoned. She’s not the only one who’s taking female country music away the traditional love narratives. But much of the mainstream seems stuck singing about putting on the quarterback’s jersey and going for strawberry milkshakes after the big game. What Antone is doing - pulling divisive themes from current pop music and setting them against country aesthetics - represents a certain perversion of the Pop Country era and will be the next big thing.

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On Sunday, half of our country (and our president) tuned in to watch Bad Bunny perform at the Super Bowl. To some, this was existentially concerning.

“This is America, why isn’t he singing in American,” asked an international student I was watching with, apparently earnestly. Setting aside the difficulties involved in inventing a new language, it’s an interesting question. He certainly wasn’t alone in this line of thinking. The forward-thinking people at TPUSA even pre-planned an alternative halftime show, for those who felt alienated (or hot and bothered?) by Benito.

The president called Bad Bunny’s show “an affront to the Greatness of America” (capitalization original). Much of his fanbase was inclined to agree. This is despite several glaring fallacies in the logic. For one, Bad Bunny is from Puerto Rico, which as of the time of writing is still part of America - both in the continental sense and the more narrow ‘Murican sense of the word. Since immigrating to the mainland, he has been the most streamed artist globally for four years. How’s that for American greatness?

But my issue with the attacks goes deeper. Why shouldn’t the 42 million Spanish-speaking Americans get to hear a halftime show in their own language? There have been 60, I think the rest of us can spare one. And Benito’s show was hardly divisive — he ended the show by spiking a football emblazoned with the words, “Together we are America.” But sure, it was a “slap in the face to America.”

Credit where it’s due, not all in MAGA World shared the sense of doom. Harrison Fields, a former press aide for Trump called out conservatives who labelled Bad Bunny anti-American, saying, “Last time I checked, my Puerto Rico–born grandmother was a full American citizen—and she voted for Trump.” Even Alexis Wilkins, a blossoming singer in her own right and girlfriend to the ever-surprised Kash Patel, praised Bad Bunny’s performance.

But still, I couldn’t help but thinking that the attacks meant something more too. No one had an issue when Chris Martin or Bono played the show, neither of whom are American. I wonder why. The Right’s response to Super Bowl LX vocalized a quiet truth about their new ideology: to be American is to be speak English. And this bothers me.

America has always been a land of immigrants. When we sit down to watch football, eat pizza and drink a beer we’re enjoying three things that didn’t come from white America. Football was popularized by Native Americans. Beer was primarily brought over by German immigrants. Pizza, of course, came from my own dirty foreign ancestors, the Italians. None of whom were considered American at the time.

Quite simply, the goalposts have moved on assimilation (terrible pun not intended). What was once foreign now forms the core of what it means to be American.

Of course the National Football League’s decision to book Benito largely reflects commercial realities. Hiring one of the western hemisphere’s most popular singers is good business. The show drew 128.2 million viewers, making it one of the most-watched performances in Super Bowl history. So, who’s to say we won’t all be singing Reggaeton in a few decades?

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Mr. Working Class himself has released a song about ICE, which is good in the sense that it feels appropriate, and bad in the more concrete sense that the song is unpleasant to listen to. Springsteen has long been the musical tribune of the American outsider, so it feels appropriate for him to chime in on the troubling trend of masked federal officials gunning down American protestors.

However, his effort feels contrived. Listeners were likely able to guess which two were left to die on the snow-filled Streets of Minneapolis without Springsteen naming them explicitly. Twice. Likewise, lines like “King Trump’s private army” have the rough eloquence of what other 76-year olds save for Facebook. By the time the gospel choir joins for the chorus, I was checking the track’s runtime.

But none of that really matters. The man who gave us Born in the USA has given us an anthem of the new discontent. Because something new has emerged since Minneapolis. Since the killing of Alex Pretti, more people are recognizing the abnormality of our government killing American citizens. And people are responding with dissidence.

“Dissidence is not revolution; it is not even political opposition. It’s something much more elemental. It emerges in environments where power—usually government power—tramples on the basic conditions of life as people know and value them,” writes Gal Beckerman for the Atlantic. What’s going on in Minneapolis, unlike the Pussy Hat riots of the first term, is not overtly political. They’re about a right to normalcy, a life without threats of violence and coercion.

The Czech playwright (perhaps better known as that country’s first president) Václav Havel understood this sort of dissidence as pre-political. “It could emerge from wanting to play strange music, wear one’s hair long, speak one’s mind, defend one’s economic interests, or protect vulnerable neighbors.”

And the roots of dissidence have long been braided with the bones of art. Creativity is the product of outsiders expressing rebellion, however explicit, with the power structures of society. Pablo Picasso put it nicely: “What do you think an artist is?” he asked. “He is a political being … Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

In this sense, art is inherently rebellious. It responds to the existing power structures and seeks to change them. It’s why strongmen leaders have always sought to control creative expression, as Trump has in Washington.

Last month, Phillip Glass called off the premiere of his new Symphony, Lincoln, at the Kennedy Center, saying that, “the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony.” The Center was dedicated to Kennedy because the former president believed that democracy and the arts were fundamentally intertwined. He was right. Trump’s control of the board, and subsequent closure, of the Center is just another move by a wannabe dictator out of the tired playbook of autocracy. It’s all the more reason we need new music for the new dissidence.

So when Springsteen comes out with a song about the killings, I think we should overlook the fact that it isn’t very good. After all, it wasn’t like Dylan was a great singer. I’m frankly not sure if Pete Seeger knew more than three chords on the banjo. Protest songs have never been about technical mastery. The music almost isn’t the point. Upheaval demands a soundtrack, and when art starts getting political, history tends to follow.

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What do small town mechanics across America and Trump’s former campaign manager have in common? Both seem to think that Bad Bunny’s win at Sunday’s Grammy Awards is proof of a liberal plot to destroy our nation. Corey Landowski, now a Senior Advisor of the Department of Homeland Security had previously announced that ICE agents would be present at Bad Bunny’s upcoming Super Bowl halftime show because the singer “hates America.” MAGA has in general been… skeptical… of his recent success. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called him a “perverse,” and “unwanted” pick for the show. Social media sleuths have worked tirelessly to prove the link between his management company, Rimas Entertainment, and the Chavez-era Venezuelan government. I’m sure they’re getting pretty close to cracking the case at this rate. When we invade Caracas, maybe we can all take a look for ourselves.

Bad Bunny’s wins likely reflect commercial realities more than conspiracy. For the fourth year in a row, he has been the most streamed artist on Spotify globally. Still, in a time when everything down to the coffee shops we frequent is politicized, it’s no great shock that music has suffered the same fate.

Most headlines Monday morning picked up on the overt political trends of the show. Celebrities strolled the red carpet adorned with ‘Ice Out’ pins and winners spent their speeches criticizing the policies of Trump’s DHS. “Before I say thanks to God, I’m gonna say, ‘ICE out,’” Bad Bunny said during his speech for the Best Musica Urbana award. “We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.” While it may have come as a shock to some Trump supporters that Puerto Rico is a part of this country, and its residents American citizens by birth, the speech was otherwise predictable. For most of the night, America’s richest delivered compelling condemnations of injustice and inequality.

Bad Bunny (can I call him Mr. Bunny?) also won the night’s coveted Album of the Year contest, the first time it’s gone to one predominantly sung in Spanish. The nominees were a reflective sample of this country’s broad taste in music -- pop, alternative pop, indie pop, even a bit of mainstream R&B! The genre hyperfocus might explain why on Sunday night, only about fifteen million people tuned into music’s most important awards show. That’s around a 75% drop from the show’s peak in the 1980s. Meanwhile, our cities and heartlands have grown by more than 100 million hearing persons, many of whom listen to music. But a hip hop album has not won the award since 2004. Rock hasn’t had its day since 2006, when How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, U2’s worst effort except for everything that’s come since, bested Kanye West’s Late Registration. Of the three country records that won in this century, two were about as pop-tinged as you can get while still claiming red dirt. Thank God for the Dixie Chicks.

There were silver linings to the night. The 26-year old British singer Olivia Dean, about whom it is hard to find something disagreeable, won Best New Artist, beating Addison Rae, despite the latter’s admittedly admirable performance hanging off the back of a box truck.

But as I set out to write a Grammys recap, I couldn’t help but think: does anyone still care about the Grammys? Before writing this, I’d never heard half of the albums the Academy thought were the absolute best of last year. After hearing them, I’d like to know what they’re smoking. It would be pointless to list specific snubs, but to suggest that not a single rock, country, EDM, jazz or blues record was better than Justin Bieber’s Swag last year feels … off. For years the Recording Academy has claimed that their votes reflect artistic merit and not market success. Baloney. All of the winners, and damn near every nominee in the last thirty years, has been cut from the same inoffensive, derivative cloth of commercial viability. But, who really cares?

Like much else in America, the communal experience of music is dying. It may have died when Elvis took his last breath; it may have croaked when the iPod hit stores. But there is no American popular music anymore.

In the past, when teenagers gathered at record stores and around jukeboxes, it was clear to see what ‘pop’ music was. It was clear to see trends and who set them. Now, like mice to the baseboards, listeners find their own antisocial corners of the music world to withdraw. The whole of recorded music history lives under our fingertips and new music is birthed for free daily. And if you like to listen to ska punk, who is the Academy to tell you that Sarbina Carpenter could broaden your horizons?

So maybe this atomization of society — this decline in communalistic listening — is the real culprit. To their credit, the people who run this dilapidated old show seem to recognize this. Next year, the Grammys are relocating from CBS, their home of the last half century, to a streaming service. As of 2024, two-thirds of the Academy’s voting members joined in the last five years, and half of last year’s new members were under the age of 40. Voting trends reflect this shift. Twenty years ago, it would have been unthinkable for a Spanish-language record to win Album of the Year. Many of Sunday night’s other awards seemed equally tapped into the cultural zeitgeist. So maybe, by this time in five years, I’ll be eating my words. I sincerely hope that the Grammys regain relevance. I hope that the Academy learns to recognize America’s less commercially viable music. But for now, I just don’t care.

These will not be Rolling Stone-style reviews about the “nostalgic stylings” of derivative records or the “innovative sound” of flops. My goal is to say, in as few words as needed, what actually matters about the record or single. The world is too busy for bad reviews.

New reviews drop every Monday.

Every Wednesday, this section will take current events — music, politics, cultural racket — and treat them the way liner notes used to treat records. These are short essays meant to discard the hype and ask what’s actually being said beneath the press release, the news cycle, or the outrage of the week.

We’ll dive into the context, not just the content. We’ll look at the who’s who of new music and the what’s what of major breaking news. Liner Notes is your home for original criticism that treats music as something more than easy listening.

New essays drop every Wednesday.