Conference Agenda

Since mid-2025, over a hundred protest songs against ICE have been produced, of which a substantial portion is AI-generated. These AI songs sound well-produced with catchy choruses, despite stereotypical musical and lyrical patterns. Some AI protest songs have attracted more clicks than human-produced ones. This paper considers the musical content, reception, and political and ethical ramifications of AI-generated music opposing ICE compared with human-made protest music. First, I outline political roles of protest music—attracting attention, recruiting followers, educating the public, and providing an affective outlet and vehicle for participation. I consider the affordances of AI protest music, particularly speed of creation, and the preexisting forms of protest song, particularly contrafacta and remixes, that AI is replacing. Through interviews with creators, I ascertain their motivations and processes. I analyze the songs as products (musical characteristics, lyrical patterns) and as social process (political messaging, reception). While AI affords fast generation of professional-sounding protest songs, it takes attention away from heartfelt songs by humans or innovative, humorous forms like remixes of past decades. AI-produced “Minnesota Anthem” combines lyrical clichés in nonsensical ways, muddling its message. Yet at 400,000 views, it has outpaced Billy Bragg’s “City of Heroes,” which has a clear political message and vocals conveying anger and authenticity. AI also introduces issues of bias in training materials and the potential for pseudonymous bad actors to produce misleading songs. My analysis highlights how AI protest songs have the potential to both stimulate and deaden affective response to political events.

On January 7, 2026, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey appeared on national news demanding that ICE agents “get the fuck out of our city.” In the following weeks, Minneapolis musicians released new songs with titles like “Minneapolis (Fuck ICE)” and “Fuck This.” Others wrote and released songs of political awareness, action, and hope. This paper chronicles and reflects on local Minneapolis protest music written and released in January and February 2026 in response to the federal occupation. Operation Metro Surge began on December 1, 2025, initiating over four thousand ICE and CBP federal agents in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Thousands of black, brown, and indigenous Minnesotans went into hiding and white allies armed themselves with whistles and car horns to alert their neighbors of ICE vehicles appearing in front of homes and businesses. On January 7^th, after five weeks of illegal ICE activities, a federal agent murdered Renee Good; less than two weeks later, they killed Alex Pretti. Traumatized, local musicians responded by writing songs that registered community outrage and demanded ICE’s immediate exit from Minnesota. Like the role of print media in Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities, I argue that these protest songs, released online and shared on social media, served as important touchstones in the development of political affinity groups of occupation resisters who share a common understanding of what it means to be a radical ally and good neighbor. As recorded artifacts, these protest songs are an index of the brutal occupation and human rights atrocities in Trump’s America.

This paper explores how protest music both illuminates and consistently refracts Taiwanese national identity through the pop anthem “Island’s Sunrise,” which has mobilized across recent social movements. As an imagined state uneasy in hegemonic conceptions of nationhood, Taiwan has, over the past decade, witnessed the rise of grassroots protest movements responding to escalating interventions from China. Paradoxically, appeals to unity have intensified the historical precarity of this national identity. This paper examines the creation, enactment, and effects of “Island’s Sunrise,” outlining a semiotic analysis of the music itself alongside semi-structured interviews conducted with protester-musicians. Preliminary findings suggest that “Island’s Sunrise,” imbued with cosmopolitanism, interweaves verbal and nonverbal signs inherited from Taiwan’s serial colonial history. Building on Dylan Robinson’s concept of critical listening positionality, I decipher these signs through what I term post-serial-colonial listening in contemporary Taiwan, whereby the semiosis generates a political collective affect oriented toward Taiwanese sovereignty. Yet in practice, this song operates as a discordant semiotic mediator, revealing a peculiar double-edged force: for protester-musicians, it is powerful yet fragile, communicative yet prone to slippage, crafting collective belonging while cracking it from within. Across song-related multi-scalar episodes, it trumpets partisan tensions between pro-Taiwan and pro-China positions and, through its prohibition in China, reverberates conflicts between democracy and authoritarianism. Through “Island’s Sunrise,” this paper extends Thomas Turino’s framework to examine the generative dynamics of participatory music-making amid multidimensional political pressures, inviting a rethinking of music as carrying, at once, the potential of political mobilization and the conditions of its undoing.