Is protest music coming back? From Bad Bunny to Bruce Springsteen, Grammys to the Super Bowl, the answer seems to be yes

Bad Bunny vows to protest with love. Bruce Springsteen has opted for a more confrontational approach.

Both are part of a growing wave of pop-music dissent aimed at what critics see as overreach by the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security — actions in Minneapolis that have been linked to the deaths of two American citizens during encounters with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar known as the King of Latin Trap, was the world’s most-streamed pop music maker in 2025. The rapper-singer-producer, whose full name is Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, has a massive platform to air his grievances if he chooses, serving as the half-time show headliner at Super Bowl LX on Sunday.

This year’s half-time show is likely to surpass Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 performance, which drew 113.5 million viewers as the most-watched in history.

The decision to book Bad Bunny, whom, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell this week called “one of the world’s great artists,” has been steadily attacked by conservative critics since September.

Those critics include President Donald Trump. “I’m anti-them. I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible,” he said last month, referring to Bad Bunny and Green Day, who will play a pregame concert during NBC’s broadcast. The clash between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots will also stream on Peacock.

Bad Bunny haters have an alternative: Kid Rock, whose 5 million monthly Spotify listeners is dwarfed by Bad Bunny’s 87 million, will top the bill on Turning Point USA’s All-American Halftime Show, shown on TPUSA’s YouTube page and conservative media outlets. Country singers Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett will also perform.

Will Bad Bunny’s performance be a virulent attack on the Trump administration’s immigration policy?

That remains to be seen. But the speech he gave at the Grammys last weekend, after winning best música urbana album for Debí Tirar Más Foto — which also became the first Spanish-language album of the year winner — suggests a more subtle expression of Puerto Rican pride that emphasizes the humanity of demonized brown-skinned immigrants.

Speaking in English, Bad Bunny thanked God, said “ICE Out,” then continued: “We’re not savages, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.” (As a Puerto Rican native, Bad Bunny is an American citizen unlike recent MAGA convert Nicki Minaj, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago.)

“Hate gets more powerful with more hate. The only thing that is more powerful than hate is love. We need to be different. If we want to fight, we have to do it with love.”

Bad Bunny’s speech was one of many gestures opposing ICE at the Grammys, from Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon wearing a whistle on his lapel to Billie Eilish criticizing anti-immigrant voices with a terse line: “Nobody is illegal on stolen land.”

Olivia Dean, the British singer who won best new artist, said: “I’m up here as a granddaughter of an immigrant. I’m a product of bravery, and I think those people deserve to be celebrated.”

Vernon and Eilish immediately were embroiled in left-right political back and forth. Eilish’s brother, Finneas O’Connell, sparred with multiple critics on social media and Vernon with Sirius/XM host Megyn Kelly.

But the Grammys didn’t include any overtly political new music. A rumor that Springsteen would open the show with “Streets of Minneapolis" proved unfounded. Springsteen wrote the new anti-ICE broadside the day protester Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents.

But Springsteen’s protest song leads the way in a trend toward musicians opposing the Trump administration in song, in many cases consciously connecting with a tradition that reaches back to Woody Guthrie, Peter Seeger, Bob Dylan, and the Civil Rights protest of the 1960s.

In “Street of Minneapolis,” Springsteen meets the moment by expressing outrage at the deaths of Renee Good and Pretti, specifically the administration’s initial pronouncements that placed blame on the dead rather than the federal agents.

“Their claim was self-defense sir, just don’t believe your eyes,” the Boss sings. “It’s these whistles and phones against Miller and Noem’s dirty lies.”

The song builds to a rousing “ICE out” chorus that’s so unsubtle it even gave the Boss pause.

Performing in Minneapolis last month with rabble-rousing former E Street Band member Tom Morello, Springsteen said he asked the guitarist whether “Streets” was too “soap boxy.” Morello, of Rage Against the Machine, replied: “Nuance is wonderful, but sometimes you have to kick them in the teeth.”

Springsteen, of course, can afford to be aggressively provocative. Not only is he a revered superrich artist at the tail end of his career whose loyal audience is not going anywhere. He’s also a white man whose fans who look like him are not in danger of being detained and deported.

And he has a history of sparring with Trump, whose administration he repeatedly labeled “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous” on stage in Europe last spring. At the time, Trump responded by calling the Jersey rocker “not a talented guy — Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK.” The president hasn’t responded to “Streets of Minneapolis” as of yet, but loyalist Steve Bannon called Springsteen “fake and gay, as the kids say.”

Springsteen’s singing out will also surely lead to others joining the chorus. And plenty of broadsides have been in the works already.

Philadelphia’s Adam Weiner of Low Cut Connie has been an outspoken Trump critic, among the first to pull out of a Kennedy Center performance last year.

He’s announced an entire protest album called Livin’ in the U.S.A. Weiner said he made the album “because I am disgusted to see our country descend into an authoritarian hell, a place where art does not lead the cultural conversation.” It arrives timed to the Semiquincentennial on July 3.

The same day that Springsteen released “Streets of Minneapolis,” British folk-punk singer Billy Bragg dropped “City of Heroes,” also written to commemorate Pretti’s death.

Veteran punk rockers are joining in, too, sometimes by rewriting lyrics to old protest songs like Boston band Dropkick Murphys’ “Citizen I.C.E.” — a new version of “Citizen C.I.A.”

The protest isn’t manifest only in topical song writing. In Philly, local events in the indie music scene are aiming to assist immigrants. Juntos, the organization that aids Philadelphia communities affected by ICE, will be the beneficiary of “A Jam Without Borders” at Ortlieb’s on Wednesday, with local musicians Arnetta Johnson, Nazir Ebo, and others.

New generation protest singers include Liberian-born Afro Appalachian singer Mon Rovia, whose buoyant 2025 song “Heavy Foot” remains upbeat as he sings “the government staying on heavy foot / No, they never gonna keep us all down.”

Most prominent in branding himself as a modern folk troubadour is Jesse Welles, whose “No Kings” duet with Joan Baez came out in December.

Welles’ “Join ICE” uses humor as a weapon, with an early Dylan persona. “There’s a hole in my soul that just rages,” he sings. “All the ladies turned me down and I felt like a clown / But will you look at me now, I’m putting people in cages!”

He plays the Fillmore on March 4.

Serious songwriters are likely to continue to pen protest songs as long as scenes of turmoil continue to show up on TV and social media screens.

But high-profile artists worried about alienating their audience aren’t likely to start flooding the zone with anti-ICE screeds if they’re concerned about backlash.

A case in point would be formerly Philadelphian country superstar Zach Bryan. Last October, he released a song snippet of “Bad News” that included the lyrics “ICE is gonna come, bust down your door” and cited “the fading of the red, white and blue.”

The song was met with disdain by the White House. Spokesperson Abigail Jackson said, “Zach Bryan wants to open the gates to criminal illegal aliens and has condemned heroic ICE officers.” DHS secretary Kristi Noem was “extremely disheartened and disappointed.”

Bryan did include the song on his album With Heaven on Top in January, but not before taking great care to explain he wasn’t on one political side or the other.

“Left wing or right wing, we’re all one bird and American,” the Eagles fan said. “To be clear I’m not on either of these radical sides.”