Among the more surprising inclusions on this month’s playlist are a brace of authentic sounding, traditional in form, new protest songs by a pair of prominent artists. Both Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Streets Of Minneapolis’ and Billy Bragg’s ‘City Of Heroes’ arrive at a moment when the daily news bulletins are awash with shocking reports of civilians being shot dead on the cold, snowy streets of Minneapolis with the Springsteen song directly addressing these events and naming the casualties too. Bruce is reported as having written the song the previous weekend, recorded it the next day and got it released by the end of the week. Obviously, in a recording industry where getting a song distributed is a simple upload and for a man with the Boss’s wealth and presumably easy access to top notch recording equipment, this feat is not quite as remarkable as John Lennon trying his hand at a similarly quick turnover for ‘Instant Karma’ back in 1970, but it is a noble and good intentioned effort all the same. Furthermore, Springsteen is sufficiently high profile for the song to make the news and get itself widely heard and reacted to. A withering, personal put-down in Bruce’s direction from the President himself is surely only a matter of hours away.

The unexpected side of the release is simply down to the fact that any artist believes a protest song to be a valid idea in 2026. It is a seasoned song form, mainly associated with the folk movement, that hit a real peak in the early 1960’s when protest songs became a big deal. The idea that news stories and activist agendas could be spread in song form, often printed out as sheet music in Broadside magazines, to be circulated by the artists and players themselves, was a potent idea in a pre-internet age when radio and TV stations were slow to keep up with the evolutions in popular song. Bob Dylan became the figurehead of the whole scene, mainly because he wrote the best numbers, the ones that acts like Peter Paul and Mary could cover and take high in the charts and into the homes. Bob had a poetic eloquence to his work that was absent in some of his more earnest contemporaries, although a peer like Phil Ochs could pack just as much punch with his hard-hitting musical polemics. Ochs would arguably be a bigger influence on an artist like Billy Bragg, because he really believed and pushed for the social and political changes the work dreamed of, he was a hands-on activist compared to Dylan. Unlike Phil, Bob was content to write and then move on, forever serving the art rather than the cause, his sudden progression away from the protest scene perhaps reinforcing the wider belief that to expect songs to change the world is naive.

Of course, songwriting that criticizes current affairs and attempts to raise awareness about any issue close to the writers’ heart did continue beyond its era of ubiquity. Not just in the hands of an unashamedly conventional protester like Bragg, but also in diverse acts like Public Enemy, Rage Against The Machine and Asian Dub Foundation whose anger was expressed as they called hypocrisy out. Somehow though, the idea of the guitar wielding troubadour putting the world to rights became a bit passee, bringing memories of past disappointments to the fore by a generation determined not to be fooled again. When Paul McCartney responded to 9/11 with a simple rousing song called ‘Freedom,’ a straightforward declaration that we should fight for the right to live in freedom, not too dissimilar from Lennon’s ‘Give Peace A Chance,’ I thought it was a welcome chartbound commentary, but it mostly inspired mocking derision. I sincerely hope that Bruce Springsteen does not meet with similar indifference, regardless of what you might make of the artistic merits in the song, I have absolutely no doubt that the man really cares about his fellow citizens. Most minted singers in their mid-seventies would be content to hide away in the secure surroundings of their ranches or whatever, not Bruce; he is standing up and firmly answering the age-old ‘which side are you on?’ question and for that he should be applauded.