The ICE Protest Songs Galvanizing Minneapolis, and the Country

Minneapolis musician Jeremy Messersmith occasionally sets himself a challenge: write one new song every day for an entire month. He started his most recent songwriting marathon in January, the coldest month of the year in Minnesota, a seemingly perfect time to hunker down and create. Seven days into the new year, an ICE agent shot and killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother who had just dropped off her six-year-old at school.

Messersmith, a beloved local songwriter who’s lived in the city for over 20 years, woke up the next day and felt like he couldn’t go on. “I sat down to write and I just had nothing else to say. I had absolutely nothing else to say that day,” he tells InsideHook. “Then I was kind of vocalizing and I just went, ‘Eff this.’”

His completed song, titled “Fuck This,” is part of a growing tidal wave of protest music created in response to the increasingly violent immigration enforcement across the country, which has led to the shocking killings of Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis. The songs include traditional protest music in the style of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, somber odes to Good and Pretti, and anthems that celebrate the resilience of Minnesotans. They’re composed by local artists in the Twin Cities as well as musicians on the national and world stage, from Jesse Welles to Dave Matthews.

Whether these songs are meant for personal reflection or to be sung or played in the streets, they’ve all served a similar purpose: shaking Americans out of fear and galvanizing them into action.

“A Sense of Solidarity and Bravery”

Messersmith posted his “F-bomb Dr. Seuss song,” as he describes it, on Instagram on Jan. 13. Three days later, it was broadcast across the airwaves on the Current, a radio station owned by Minnesota Public Radio. It played during a morning show block with other raw, recently composed songs from local musicians who were speaking out against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Metro Surge,” which has seen over 3,000 federal agents flood into Minnesota.

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The playlist that morning included “Told You So” by Durry, “Compassion” by Cloud Cult and one from Hilary James, who performs under the moniker Bathtub Cig, in which she sings, “They took the doctor, they took the nurse. / They took the lady giving birth. / They took the gardener from his bed. / They shot the poet in her head,” a reference to Good being an award-winning writer; James follows that section with the refrain: “We are not afraid.”

Also in the mix was “Who Is She to You?” by Geoffrey Lamar Wilson, a father of two young boys, who plays music as Laamar.

Wilson’s haunting tribute to Good, written the day she was killed, poses questions to the ICE officer who pulled the trigger: “What’s it mean to you? / What you’re paid to do. / Hide behind a mask / for a pocket full of cash.” Wilson left work early that day as horrific details of the shooting emerged in the news and across social media. When his wife bundled up for a shift volunteering in a neighborhood ICE patrol, he sat down at his piano and tried to process his feelings through music.

“I just kind of wrote the song and had a cry,” Wilson says. A few days later, he had a show at the iconic Minneapolis venue First Avenue and “decided to perform it there just because it was fresh and everything was feeling wrong, and I felt like that’s what I could contribute.” He sat alone at the piano in front of a handwritten sign that read “Abolish ICE.” The crowd stood in stunned silence.

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“There are a couple of different types of protest songs,” says Noriko Manabe, chair of the Department of Music Theory at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Protest Music. There are presentational songs, she explains, like Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” where somebody sings to you about a problem and possibly the ways it might be solved; then there are participatory songs, meant to be sung in marches and at protests, like the freedom songs of the civil rights movement, where the message is secondary and the focus is on a simple, singable, repeatable tune that’s easy for people to join and “builds solidarity for greater action later on.”

On a surface level, most of the songs being put out by Minnesota musicians fit into the first category. But the two differentiating factors between these songs and other protest music throughout history are the speed at which they’ve been shared and professionally recorded (both Messersmith and Wilson made radio-friendly audio files for the Current), which fueled immediate solidarity as the chorus against ICE grew; and the fact that the artists had plans for their songs beyond simply releasing them out into the world.

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When Messersmith posted his initial version of “Fuck This,” which includes string accompaniment by Dan Lawonn, he put out a call for people to sing along to the song and send in their recordings which would be compiled into another version. He ended up adding over 70 additional tracks to a “Community Choir Edition,” including families who sang lines like “Fuck those / Iceholes” together, choir folks who added harmonies, someone who played a baritone ukulele to complement Messersmith’s instrument and an old college friend of his who he hadn’t spoken to in years. He also accepted donations for his songs with the money going to local mutual-aid organizations helping those impacted by ICE; as of Tuesday, he had donated $5,000 and had another $1,000 to give away.

“The main thing really is just to get people singing together,” he says. “Songs that you sing I think are just way stickier and do a lot more for you than songs that you just passively hear and maybe don’t move your body to.”

“I have gotten messages from so many people, probably hundreds of people, and then a bunch in person here in town, people who are out on their shifts, out at their kids’ school,” he adds. “They’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we sing it literally all day long.’”

Through her study of protest music around the world, including blogs where she’s cataloged recent ICE protests, Manabe acutely understands the power of singing in moments like these.

“If you’re singing, A) that gives you a sense of solidarity and bravery,” she says. Moreover, if you’re singing in front of a masked squadron of heavily armed federal agents who have sprayed chemical irritants directly into protestors faces, kneed people who were already restrained in the face and fatally shot two people in broad daylight, “it also makes the other side look completely ridiculous because you’re attacking a chorus.”

Reverberations in Arkansas, Mexico and Sweden

For the most part, national artists have followed in the wake of Minnesota musicians speaking out against ICE.

On Saturday at a concert in Mexico, after introducing it by talking about the killing of Pretti earlier in the day, Dave Matthews debuted a song called “Making It Great.” (“So get out your car, get on the ground, please / give me a reason to reign all hell down on you / Making it great again / Making it great again.”) On Wednesday, Bruce Springsteen released “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he said was written “in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis.” That same day, Tom Morello, Rise Against and others announced a surprise concert at First Avenue on Friday, where 100% of the proceeds will go to “the families of ICE victims Renee Good and Alex Pretti.”

There are a few exceptions that came earlier, most notably “Join Ice,” by Arkansan folk troubadour Jesse Welles whose raft of political songs in the style of Woody Guthrie have gone viral over and over. This particular example, in which he sings “If you’re lackin’ control and authority / Come with me and hunt down minorities,” has over 10 million views on Instagram and led to appearances on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and Joe Rogan’s podcast.

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This type of song, where the singer is impersonating a contemptible federal officer, has a predecessor not just in the American protest tradition, but in the Japanese as well. Manabe notes this song’s similarity to “Let’s Join the Self-Defense Forces” (or “Jieitai ni Hairou”), written by Wataru Takada during the anti-Vietnam War movement in Japan and set to the tune of Pete Seeger’s “Andorra.” “It’s the same kind of idea,” Manabe says, “this sort of parodic idea of let’s join ICE so that you can be a he-man.”

Welles has contributed more recent songs, including “Good vs. Ice,” released the day after Good was killed. (“They’ll say it’s her fault instead / For getting shot in the head / While we all watched the same damn thing.”) But one of the more curious additions to this rapidly expanding sonic support system comes from even further afield than Arkansas.

North Dakota-born Marc Skjervem, who has lived in the Minneapolis area since 2008, has been sharing what’s going on with ICE in his city with a few of his friends that live in Stockholm, Sweden. They’ve been more attuned to what’s going on in the U.S., he says, “especially with the Greenland stuff.”

“One of my friends, Jimmy, was really sad and heartbroken about it,” he adds. “Neither of us are professional musicians or anything, but he was just playing around with some AI stuff, a music-generation thing, and he created this song called ‘Minnesota Anthem.’”

Out of nowhere, Jimmy sent Marc a link to the song. “He’s like, ‘Hey, I’ve been thinking about you. I just shared this song. If you want to play it in a room and cry or get mad, go ahead.” Skjervem was so touched by the gesture, and legitimately moved by the song, which was created using the AI music creator Suno and has an arena-folk feel to it, that he decided to add some images of vigils, protests and donation drives in Minnesota, and upload it to YouTube.

“I thought it was going to have an impact on a few people, maybe my closest friends,” he says. After uploading it on Monday, the video already has over 180,000 views. Just to illustrate how quickly it traveled: I live in Minnesota, and I became aware of it on Tuesday morning because my neighbor posted it on Facebook with the caption, “This is so powerful! I am so proud to live here!”

If you’re turned off by the use of AI, especially in conversation with contributions from working musicians, take Manabe’s insight to heart: there are many types of protest songs. “Minnesota Anthem” doesn’t serve the same purpose as “Who Is She to You?” or “Fuck This.” Plus, Skjervem added a disclaimer to his video that’s hard to argue with. It reads, in part, “My hope is that this project serves as a bridge that inspires creativity, connection, and positive change.”

If the people of Minnesota standing up for their neighbors and the constitutional rights of all Americans doesn’t simply inspire the rest of the country, but folks 4,000 miles away in Sweden, then you know something big is happening. Thanks to these songs, and the more that will inevitably follow, this movement isn’t going to fizzle out anytime soon.

Meet your guide

Alex Lauer

Alex Lauer is the features editor at InsideHook. Since joining the company in 2016, he’s covered a wide range of topics, including cars, the environment, books and business.