Raw around the edges and also at its core, “People worth protesting” is a long journey back into the belly of country music that truly rebels. Unmistakably an American point of view, the song tackles many concepts point-blank, questioning the progress made technologically while widening the gap of progress made socially. Certain passages are timeless, like the olden critique of politicians. It rings as true as the first time it was brought up, adding texture to the track and conveying the feeling of a known campfire tale.
The title is repeated between verses, nearly a mantra between telling you exactly who it’s about: those who control, those who squash, and those who constrict. The piece is not filled squarely with a singular (or simple) point of view, for it does fundamental criticism of both the roles of science and religion in the capitalist landscape: how they don’t function only as concepts, but as missions, with agents who benefit from it and become lost in their original function.
While it can be concluded that it mostly criticizes power and those who wield too much of it, the song does take random jabs at “teenagers and identities” and has the singer compare experiences, likening him to Kanye West and “young Nick”, presumably Fuentes. The sudden and jarring tidbits can feel out of left field for most of the points made so far, but they seem to stem more from an experience with a youth flooded by these opinions and the people we ultimately let go. A young person encountering the alt-right pipeline comes to mind, but, as the artist digresses, another familiar frustration with the liberal spaces they then arrive at. While I can personally interject and say the former is much more injurious than the latter, I admit it’s not a perfect synthesis, but these latter “better” spaces are also worth protesting.
Speaking with the artist, I delved a bit more into the meaning of teenagers, identity, and battle in the song. On a first read, it might jump out as a critique of identity politics, pronouns, the works, y’know? But when inquired, Isaac explains: the difference between trans people we know and trans people in the spotlight is something observable. He then goes on to point out that the next generation of queer youth deserves a better example than a pro-drug, pro-party space observed by artists like Kim Petras. Isaac’s conclusion? A search for healthier role models, like Laura Jane Grace, is possible. As a trans person myself, the point it makes is something I arrive at with equal amounts of uneasiness and urgency. I feel compelled to compare it to lived experience, and could mention that even if puritan in nature, the apprehension of the excess-ridden life shouldn’t be discarded altogether.
While it’s an age-old question (and bringing it up during Pride month may be tiring on my part), the search for non-alcoholic/non-party queer spaces has been an interesting road for a while. The same question arises in lots of countercultural spaces, down to the individual lives of the people who make up these scenes and communities. Isaac also points to those who, in an attempt to rebel, destroyed themselves in the hands of drugs and substance abuse. Striving for a healthier ecosystem despite a historic connection to alternative spaces that pushed the envelope is certainly a topic worthy of more nuance than two lines on the song. Then again, the song isn’t really aiming to be about just this in particular. It’d be like blaming “We Didn’t Start the Fire” for not going into analysis about all the things it mentions.
All art is political, but even for a song on which political troubles are very much a centerpiece, it seems to implore us to look past the divisions that exist within us today, and to concentrate on things beyond culture wars, even if that impulse is in of itself political. It transcends genre and themes, but I won’t bore you with a mundane comparison about it being “the new punk” (it’s 10 minutes long, and that comparison is treaded a thousand times over), but it does offer a countercultural analysis without really playing devil’s advocate.
The song is AI-free, as is this article. It’s very dependent on lived experience, and can have almost all of its verses chopped up for analysis, so it’d be a disservice on my part to just list off genres and other bands it sounds like. It’s very worthy of sitting down with, way past its 10-minute runtime, even if you never touch it again afterward.
Written by Charlotte Lacambra
