Long ago, I was seduced by Shelley’s Defense of Poetry, which concluded with a bold claim: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

At some point, I became skeptical of that notion, and came to think that poets were justly unacknowledged in political affairs. I ended up in graduate school.

I overreacted. Obviously.

The right song at the right time draws attention to a grievance and to a movement. It can unite a campaign and provide some sustenance to people trying to change the world–or at least a little part of it. Listeners can learn about an event and the cause, and the song can push them to dig a little deeper. It can become a touchstone for a movement.

Bruce Springsteen dropped a new song, Streets of Minneapolis, in response to the ICE murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Right below, you can see a professionally produced music video featuring images of protest and of ICE abuse.

Springsteen also posted a live performance of the song.

As music and poetry, it sounds a lot like Springsteen, detailed poetic images, although maybe a little more on the nose than most of his stuff. (Sometimes it takes heavy hands.) Choreographing multiple rhymes with Minneapolis is a creative challenge on short notice.

As a timely response to unfolding tragedy, it evokes Neil Young’s Ohio, written just in the wake of the deaths of four students at Kent State University in May, 1970. National Guardsmen had opened fire on an antiwar protest, killing two protesters and two students cutting across campus on the way to classes. (Read more about it here.)

Young enlisted bandmates David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Neil Young to record and release the song quickly. And it sounds like Neil Young, with spare lyrics and a hard edge guitar lead supported by very high harmonies. It circulated everywhere quickly, which meant a lot of radio play. It became a touchstone for the antiwar movement.

Digging around, I found another style of protest song, Jesse Welles’s satirical take on ICE’s aggressive recruiting effort, dropped a couple of months ago.

I’ve stumbled across Streets of Minneapolis more than a few times over the past few days. Students, who feel compelled to tell me that Springsteen usually isn’t on their playlists before announcing how much they like the song. They appreciate the Boss weighing in, and want musicians of their age to follow along. The lyrics have been reprinted, and the quick release has kept a cultural and political focus on ICE in Minneapolis. Politicians, including those at the White House, have been peppered with questions about it, sometimes feeling compelled to run it, and Springsteen down, as in this White House statement. It’s a bad look.

It’s also part of a story about how movements work.

Not by themselves and not always very quickly, but by drawing attention to problems, offering prospective solutions, and assembling a large enough following to give incentives to others to sign on.

Hard work, and time-consuming, but it all matters.

For a bit of humility, listen to Tom Lehrer’s Folk Song Army. Lehrer had a brief and brilliant career at the piano as a satirist on the way to a long career teaching Math at the University of California.

Tom Lehrer, “Folk Song Army”