Isabella Gomez-Sarmiento

This is a question I asked musicologist Tammy Kernodle.

She also teaches at Miami University.

And this is what she told me.

So, you know, like the 70s, the 80s, you start to see the rise of like MTV and capital P pop music.

And like this folk protest music doesn't really go away, but it becomes way less central to like mainstream culture.

And I will say, you know, there's definitely a lot of politics in other kinds of music, like pop music is political in its own way.

And you have the rise of all of these genres like pop.

you know, hip hop and into the 90s and 2000s, you have reggaeton and all of this music that, you know, pushes for a lot of political and social change.

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.