What Jesse Welles can teach us about the state of modern protest music

Singer-songwriter Jesse Welles is playing a sold-out show Tuesday at the Van Buren in Phoenix.

Welles is something of a phenomenon. A self-styled troubadour from Arkansas, Welles rose to fame by making videos of himself playing politically charged songs on the acoustic guitar while wearing raggedy clothes, standing outside under a row of power lines.

The videos caught fire on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, and he’s ridden the wave all the way to sets on late night TV and several Grammy nominations.

But some observers of his music wonder what his true intentions are: Is he really making true protest music? And what would it actually mean to do that?

Carl Wilson is a music critic at Slate, and he pondered this question recently in a piece about Welles. Wilson contends that it’s a fallacy to suggest that artists can spur social change solely through politically charged songs.

Protest music, in Wilson’s framing, only emerges when certain songs are embraced by grassroots movements in search of a galvanizing soundtrack.

Wilson spoke with The Show about this, and they began with a case study: Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis,” which Springsteen wrote and released in a matter of days after the death of Alex Pretti.

Full conversation

CARL WILSON: When I first heard "Streets of Minneapolis," first of all, I was kind of comparing it to some of the standout issue-oriented songs in Springsteen's own back catalog. And you know, some of those songs are real storytelling songs that really get things across through characters or through like really high flying lyricism.

This song is much more meat and potatoes. It's really just about what's happening and a sense of outrage about it.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: "Trump's federal thugs beat up on his face and his chest. Then we heard the gunshots, and Alex Pretti lay in the snow dead."

WILSON: And when I first heard it, I thought it was fine, but more kind of valuable as a symbolic gesture. But then a week or so later, I saw a video of Springsteen performing it in Minneapolis at a benefit there, and on stage, and especially on stage in the place where the events were still unfolding, it really took on electricity.

SPRINGSTEEN: "It's our blood and bones and these whistles and phones against Miller and Noem's dirty lies."

WILSON: That's that connection between an actual movement and a song that's there to inspire and motivate that movement. And suddenly the song really felt historic, like, oh, this is in the spirit of Woody Guthrie singing labor songs in the midst of a strike in the '30s and the '40s.

SAM DINGMAN: There's often this hunger to anoint certain songs or artists as political, to hope that in times of political upheaval, these artists will kind of step up and say the thing we hope they will say, become political in some sense. But there's plenty of music, hip-hop in particular, that is by its very nature inescapably political.

WILSON: Well, partly it has to do with communities that artists come out of and who they're speaking for and who they're speaking as. So I think back, Kendrick Lamar has written a lot of songs that have political content to them, but they're usually not sort of just straightforward protest songs.

They're narratives about his community in LA. They're narratives about his sort of spiritual and moral questions about fame and his struggles in that way. But they always read back to being about a community's life and about struggles that other people in that community and outside of it can identify with. And everything he does is kind of inherently political for that reason.

You know, the song "Alright," it has a few lines about police brutality, but that's not most of what it's about. But that was adopted by the Black Lives Matter movement very quickly as a sort of rally and cry at protests.

KENDRICK LAMAR: And we hate popo when they kill us dead in the street for sure. I'm at the preacher's door. My knees getting weak and my gun might blow but we gonna be all right. We gonna be all right.

DINGMAN: Let me ask you, Carl, about the singer Jesse Welles. For people who don't know Jesse Welles' music, explain who he is.

WILSON: So Jesse Welles is a singer songwriter in his early 30s, and through a couple of influences hit upon the idea of just recording songs and putting them up on social media. And to do that, he's a good looking, young, long haired guy, took his acoustic guitar and went out and stood in a picturesque kind of field under some power lines and just sang these songs.

And a lot of those songs started to be about current events and how he felt about things in the news.

JESSE WELLES: I can't tell you what's worse. The message was terse. Outright white supremacists or America First? I think they both sell merch. The whole place seems a little bit cursed. It's like somebody might have been living here first.

WILSON: Gradually that built up a following and now to the point where he's kind of a phenomenon, was nominated for multiple Grammy Awards and really been received by a lot of people as kind of a throwback to that kind of Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village in the '60s kind of way of writing topical songs.

DINGMAN: And you, for this piece, took a kind of a deep dive into Welles and his work. And I got the sense that you came away feeling like there are some things that he does effectively and then some situations where he misses the mark.

WILSON: You know, he puts these songs out that are clever and quick and say things that you might have been thinking to some degree about events that have been happening and make links between events as well. He has a new song just in the past couple of weeks called "Whirlwind" that connects Trump's Board of Peace and the Jeffrey Epstein files and a general sense of outrage about sort of elites.

WELLES: It's a democratic hoax, folks. Have you even seen the Dow? People want to talk about this Jeffrey. Ain't he dead now? Anyhow, they're saying the 401ks are slaying. OK, then none of us even have them. Enjoy the last dregs of a nation. While the future lays abandoned. It's the S&P 500 ...

WILSON: You know, it doesn't have a particularly clear and original message, but it touches on a lot of things in a potent way. But the main thing that I think Welles is gifted at is using TikTok and YouTube and Instagram as if they were kind of coffee houses of the early '60s, as if they were the folk movement magazines that Dylan published his songs in at the time.

And Welles is using these new tools in a clever way. And it's surprising it's taken somebody who's making political music this long to really use those tools to their full potential. So this kind of backwoods, hick kind of costume that he wears in some ways belies the fact that what he really is is an extremely clever sort of digital artist.

DINGMAN: That's very interesting.

WILSON: Yeah. And I'm not saying that that makes him insincere in what he's doing or anything. People sort of talk about him sometimes as if he were just some kind of poser. And I don't know if that's true, and I also don't think it matters very much.

When Bob Dylan was writing those topical songs in the early '60s, he also had his eye on getting rich and famous. And he had those ambitions all the way along. And as soon as folk music and protest music started to seem not so hip and cornier to him, he moved on.

DINGMAN: Well, let me have you close here, Carl, by shouting out some of the music that has been written in response to recent violence on the part of ICE agents. You call out a couple of these in the article, and these are pieces by artists who maybe aren't as high profile as Bruce Springsteen or even Jesse Welles at this moment, but do really capture something about the moment that we're all living through.

WILSON: Yeah, I mean, there's been Carsie Blanton from New Jersey, like Springsteen, put out a song based on an old Irish rebel song called "Come Out, Ye Black and Tans," which she wrote as "Come Out, Ye Cowards ICE."

CARSIE BLANTON: Come out, ye cowards ICE. Come and finally pay the price. Tell your wife how you've been simping for the fascists. Tell her ...

WILSON: And then there's, you know, Latin artists have been making music in response to these border and immigration issues for a long time. And so, you know, there's people like the queer LA artist Cain Culto has a song called "Basta Ya."

Some of those songs coming out of communities that are most directly affected also don't get the same shine that, you know, a rock star does.