On TikTok, a new group of folk musicians are taking the genre back to its political roots

When the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran late last month, songwriter and musician Joseph Terrell says he couldn't get the conflict off his mind. Soon, his thoughts were taking the shape of song lyrics.

"I started thinking about that myth we have about ourselves in the United States, that we are some sort of violent explorer riding our horses in glory into the sunset," said Terrell, who is based in North Carolina.

"And so the song I wrote is called Cowboy Movie and it's where I sing about how these myths started, and how what's obvious to us now is that we're not the good guys."

The song isn't about any specific politician, Terrell says, because "so many of them fit the bill, it'd be a shame to narrow it down."

But it does reference specific events, like the bombing of a girls school in Iran on the first day of the conflict, which killed at least 165 people, mostly children. No country has claimed responsibility for the bombing, but the New York Times reported that a preliminary investigation indicated the U.S. was responsible.

As he does with many of his songs — some political, some not — Terrell shared the first verse and chorus on TikTok. His most popular political tune, about the killing of Renee Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minneapolis earlier this year, has racked up more than 735,000 views.

Terrell has many contemporaries online, where a new generation of artists are reviving the folk protest song for a digital audience, energizing a genre that's long had political roots.

While the folk genre was home to protest music throughout a few decades in the 1900s, as the genre became commercialized and started to go out of style in the late 1960s, songs with a political message shifted to rock and roll, according to Noriko Manabe, professor and chair of music theory at Indiana University who studies protest music.

Only now has this singer-songwriter style of folk made a comeback as a political genre, she says, noting that country music's popularity could be giving it a boost — as could the genre's simplicity in a tech-dominated age.

"In this age of AI, there is something very authentic and personal and artisanal about having a person with a guitar singing with his out-of-tune voice," Manabe said. "There's something kind of real and authentic about it."

This new age of protest songs also call out politicians and administrations by name with hyper-specific lyrics, and they're often shared online within days of a big news event. Manabe says that responsiveness and "clever" lyricism likely also helps the songs resonate on social media.

Terrell did it with Cowboy Movie, but Jesse Welles is one of the best-known singers making these kinds of pointed tracks.

The Arkansas musician has amassed 1.5 million followers on TikTok writing music about the war in Gaza, the renamed Department of War and immigration enforcement. He's also played on Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert's late night shows in recent months.

And his tracks are released quickly. Songs like Tylenol, which references U.S. President Donald Trump's unproven claims linking Tylenol use to autism, and Charlie, appealing for empathy after the assassination of right-wing figure Charlie Kirk, came out six days and one day, respectively, following the events that inspired them.