If music didn’t have power, Russian state media wouldn’t have designated Pussy Riot as “God-hating, Western operatives,” and the band’s members have endured imprisonment on multiple occasions for their open dissent against Vladimir Putin. The U.S., despite First Amendment protections, wouldn’t have a long history of politically motivated crackdowns on musicians taking to the radio and the stage in protest of wars, presidents, the institutionalized oppression of different communities and other policies. Even as bombs fell across Ukraine, thousands flocked to see the bands playing at the Atlas Festival earlier this month.
The soundtrack to resistance varies from movement to movement. But wherever people rebel, there is always a song. The Dallas-Fort Worth scene has no shortage of artists writing those anthems to rally the community.
Yolanda Cruz and the Daydreamers see an inherently musical element to protests in the chants and marching. These days, they get by repeating Dan Savage’s AIDS crisis mantra: “We buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night.” If the oppressor wants you scared and out of sight, your band might as well play a full set at an anti-ICE protest outside Dallas City Hall like the Daydreamers did this past February, in solidarity with the uprisings in Los Angeles.
“We’ve been writing protest music since we started this,” Cruz said during a phone call. “With all of this going on, it made me even more mad. … I've always said that if you have a platform, then you need to be responsible with that platform.”
Cruz and the Daydreamers started as a rock band, writing and playing songs in English. But in the last few years, Cruz said, the time came to give their music “a higher voice” of their Hispanic culture. The music isn’t just an emotional outlet for Cruz’s frustrations; performing it is an act of resistance. When fear is the objective of armed and masked feds snatching people off the streets, tear-gassing protesters and deploying the National Guard, the Daydreamers take the stage defiant in their joy and refusal to capitulate to the hysteria by hiding away. It’s about saying, “I’m still here and you can’t erase me.”
Playing at drag shows over the last month, though not explicitly political, Cruz says, has started to feel like a protest “just by being who we are and playing our songs about our queer experience.” As an all queer women band, the Daydreamers are routinely told they should keep politics and music separate, that mixing the two is somehow less professional. Their social media posts are riddled with comments telling them to stay home.
Even Nick Cave revealed on his Red Hand Files website that he declined an invitation from Morrissey to perform an "anti-woke screed" on a new track. Cave keeps his politics separate from his music, especially political news' daily noise and controversy. Plenty of legendary acts, like Bob Dylan, Green Day, Janelle Monáe, Kendrick Lamar and many others, are only who they are because of their politics.
The Daydreamers even got a personal invite to play at the February anti-ICE protest from the organizers, the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Oppression DFW. Cruz and her bandmates had already planned to go, but to be booked for the gig was a surprise and an honor. “I just feel so lucky that I’m able to do that, just to represent my people in any way I can,” Cruz said.
Music is a lifeline for grassroots organizers like Maritza Rios-Martinez, a photographer for El Movimiento and Vecinos Unidos. Burnout and compassion fatigue are significant issues for people working with such high stakes, and art has a unique, restorative ability to reconnect people to a sense of purpose.
“Resistance isn’t just about saying ‘no’ — it’s about imagining a better world. Art helps people visualize freedom, injustice, and dignity, even in the darkest times,” Rios-Martinez said in an email. “A protest song can ignite empathy and it unites people who share the same struggle; it stirs the soul.”
Checking the audience's temperature for his set at the Dallas Pride Block Party, Cameron McCloud, frontman of Cure for Paranoia, asked the crowd, “Free Palestine?” Nodding his approval at the cheers, he continued, “Fuck ICE? Fuck Trump and anyone who voted for him?” More raucous applause, snapping fans and whistling signaled the audience's approval.
He might’ve been justifiably hesitant to kick off the set with those bold sentiments, especially with the aggressive targeting of pro-Palestinian activists and recent reassignments of Homeland Security counter-terrorism analysts to investigate student protesters. But McCloud would rather take any blows that come to him while standing on his feet rather than just survive under the radar.
“I'm Black and part of the alphabet mafia. I'm in danger daily. It's one thing to be in danger and be in bondage. I would rather be on the run and in danger, than to be imprisoned in my own mind and not wanting to be myself and still be in danger.”
The name of his ensemble is quite literal in its meaning; the music is his daily medicine for psychiatric conditions with symptoms like paranoia. He’s been dropping new verses once daily for over 200 days as part of his Project25, a creative opposition to the Trump administration’s Project 2025. McCloud says he creates from a place of personal rebellion, “of rebellion against the society that tries to dictate what Black people can and can't do.”
He doesn’t count himself as a political rapper writing songs in response to the times. His songs stem from his state of mind. “It's like, because of the times we’re in, I'm gonna carve out this niche, and I'm gonna have this, and this is gonna be my spot where you can't fucking touch me,” he said.
Still, his June 14 verse in solidarity with the nationwide No Kings protests called out the millions of Americans happily indulging in elements of the Hispanic culture they voted for Trump to deport, rapping, “Margarita sipping in a MAGA hat, you dopey bitch / I bet not never hear you talking about no Taco Tuesday / I hear you singing along to Selena songs, and all the while you in support to build walls, take mamas from they child, but then yo ass gon’ take off work every Cinco de Mayo, huh?”
Lorenzo Zenteno, known to most as Smoothvega and others as “The Godfather of Fort Worth hip-hop,” has a long-held commitment to pulling others up behind him and creating infrastructure to support local emerging artists, something he didn't have early in his career. He said over the phone that he believes down to his bones he was born to lead, that he even has the iconic Spider-Man quote, “With great power, comes great responsibility,” tattooed across his back.
Music is Zenteno’s chosen means of influence. “Music is one of the greatest forms of expression to ever exist,” he said. “And you can’t teach influence.”
He owes everything he has in his life right now to music, not just his career, but also meeting his wife and having his children. Zenteno acknowledges that he is the direct byproduct of the American dream his family chased since first immigrating to the U.S. from Mexico. “When we wave the Mexican flag, we're not waving it because we want to go back to Mexico. We're showing pride for our roots,” he said.
He knows people live vicariously through the music, art and entertainment they consume, absorbing it and letting it shape who they become. “We want to be timeless. I want to be timeless,” Zenteno said. “I want people to look up and be proud to see someone of color, someone from their background, of their culture, representing them with integrity, dignity, with all that good stuff.”
“Big artists have massive platforms and resources that can help bring global attention to local struggles,” said Rios-Martinez. “Then we have smaller artists, who actually work with the community; they see firsthand what their fellow neighbors need.” For her, real change begins with this intersection of the global spotlight and the grassroots authenticity of local leaders like Smoothvega. But Rios-Martinez, as an organizer, sees how the same power of art to be deeply personal and interpretive can also lead to mixed messages within a movement, potentially drowning out the core goals.
Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett said recently on the Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know podcast that her hope for organizers like Rios-Martinez is to hold onto the energy driving the anti-ICE and No Kings protests and translate it into action when elections come around. Protests build community by reassuring people they’re not alone in what they’re seeing, but to better leverage what her constituents are asking for, Crockett needs more action than this. “Change comes when we change the lawmakers,” she said, “not by trying to convince them of something they don’t want to be convinced of.”
