Isabella Gomez-Sarmiento

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?

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