Isabella Gomez-Sarmiento

But it just doesn't really have that same aesthetic as, you know, the really folk guitar singer songwriting protest music.

Yeah, I think we start to see a lot of backlash in the 2000s whenever artists are willing to take that kind of a political stance and especially make music that is infused with those politics.

I think what happened to the chicks and the backlash that they received is something that we see generations fear for decades.

Taylor Swift talks about that in her documentary Miss Americana, how she was so scared to take a stance or align herself with any political party because of what had happened to the chicks.

And artists get told to kind of stay in their lane if they want to be

Shut up and sing.

Totally, yeah.

Because, I mean, it's not like we stopped protesting from the 70s to now.

I think it's really important that you bring up someone like Kendrick Lamar and BLM because I think rap, it carries the torch of social protest, I think, for the past two decades.

And now what we're seeing is that, you know, even having a pop artist like Beyonce, right, reclaim her roots on Cowboy Carter or having Bad Bunny reclaim his roots with this last album, De Mi Tirar Más Votos, like, those things are protests in their own way.

But I think, like you're saying, they have to strike a really fine balance of how they're sort of

both commercial and also sending a specific message to an audience that can sort of interpret it, you know, in a way that feels meaningful to them.

Like, I think we've seen both of those albums sort of, you know, they speak to a particular community, but they can also sort of resonate across a lot of different issues and across a lot of different meanings.

They're not as like topical as some of these protest songs.

Coming up… Something that we have yet to see is how much that raising consciousness of this era of protest music really translates into pushing for social change.

Today, it's like most of us get our information from the internet.

I think we're all so plugged in all the time and kind of overwhelmed with information.

And I think in a certain way, this sort of very slow, just a guitar and a voice kind of cuts through that noise and is sometimes able to hold people's attention in a different way.

Like it's very much at odds with how quick things move on the algorithm.

And this is something I also asked Tammy Cronodle about because I was curious as to why, why is it this particular aesthetic that's sort of making a comeback at this particular time?