Isabella Gomez-Sarmiento

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.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I think there's been a lot of criticism of these platformers from many artists.

This is the thing.

When I asked the artists that I talked to for this story, this particular question and, you know, what their relationship with these platforms is like, since it's something that, you know, it's helped them gain this huge reach and really distill their message to a wide audience.

But it seems like it's kind of complicated for them because like in a way, you know, an app like TikTok or Instagram or Spotify can be a huge tool for music discovery and

And for helping people who have maybe been traditionally shut out of the music industry sort of reach new audiences and sort of launch their own careers.

But it can also shut a lot of voices out.

And there does tend to be a feeling that, like, there is some kind of censorship on these apps.

There's so much that we don't know about how these apps work and how the algorithm works and how it prioritizes the content.

So there are imperfect tools.

And I think the artists are perfectly aware of that.