Isabella Gomez-Sarmiento

And this is what she said to me.

And I think there she's also talking about how, you know, like in the 1930s and 40s, folk protest music was a really big way.

Like people would gather in a town hall or at like labor union meetings and sing about their frustrations and sing about their struggles.

And in a different way, that's kind of what someone is doing when, you know, you're upset by seeing news of ice raids or you're upset, you know, by how people are talking about the Charlie Kirk assassination online.

So you like turn on your front facing camera and play a guitar and sing about how you're feeling.

Like there's this very strange parallel to, I think, how people used to express their frustrations through folk music 100 years ago and how they're doing that right now.

Totally.

I mean, I think that that must be the appeal for some of the people who are listening to this music.

And I agree, like, we are in sort of this like secondhand information economy where a lot of times we're hearing about things through this filtered voice that has already interpreted and analyzed it for us.

There's all these different echo chambers online, right?

And I think maybe sometimes what these songs are trying to do is get to the root of why are people frustrated and how at the end of the day, there might be a lot more

common ground than people realize when they're just ingesting things through a partisan viewpoint um and this is something i was asking monrovia about because he's someone who makes very personal protest music like i was saying a lot of it has to do with his identity and his background he's from liberia and he's making appalachian music but i asked him about this and he told me like he's not trying to make capital p protest music that's just sort of the label that it takes on

So, yeah, I mean, I think a lot of times these songs maybe help things feel more personal.

So it feels less like they're coming from talking heads with a political agenda, you know, but I think there's a humanity and a relatability to a person with a banjo or a guitar expressing how they're feeling and expressing why they're upset or expressing, you know, how they view social and economic injustices in our country right now.

What surprised me across the board was, like, Jesse Wells, Monterovi, and Jensen McRae, all of them were like, I want people to sort of find unity and find community through this anger and to feel optimism that things are going to get better.

Ultimately, sometimes this kind of folk protest music helps underline that people's frustrations are coming from similar places, like...

people feel disempowered, people feel hopeless, people are struggling to afford necessities and healthcare.

And yet partisan lines sort of pit them up against one another.

And it seems like that's sort of the message that they're trying to carry and help people just see more the humanity in each other in a certain way.

Yeah, it's a good question because they are definitely, I think, platforms that artists seem to have some moral misalignment with from time to time.