Responding to tragedy in song is an age-old American tradition. From slave spirituals to civil rights-era protest songs to the YG and Kendrick Lamar songs that soundtracked the last decade of Black Lives Matter protests, musicians across genres tend to react to our country’s horrors with music.
In the 48 hours since Renee Good was killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross earlier this week, a number of musicians have written and released songs struggling to make sense of the cruelty and heinous display of state violence. All of them so far are folk-based and in alignment with social media attention spans: None are more than two minutes long. But each mourns for Good’s life and decries the American tragedy that is her killing.
The following list is not exhaustive, and there are surely more songs to come, but here are five songs songs that have caught our attention:
Welles has become famous for his quickly turned-around topical tunes. And even if he’s not a fan of stating his partisan politics, “Good vs. Ice” expresses the outrage and hurt many Americans are feeling after watching footage of Good’s killing. “You probably don’t need to shoot someone in the face,” Welles sings, “to do the thing that you’re calling a job.” This is not the first time Welles has called out ICE in song.
This ballad from the Nashville based singer-songwriter Zach Schmidt zeroes in on the fury and dissonance of trying to square the footage of Good’s killing with the story being told by the current administration, which has attempted to claim Good committed an “act of domestic terrorism.”
Many of the “straight to TikTok” protest songs that respond to the news these days tend to be the type of talk-singing, viral-friendly, to-the-point tunes that do best on that platform. This song from West Coast singer-songwriter Odin Coleman takes a different sonic approach, conjuring centuries-old Appalachian traditions in this banjo broadside. By doing so, Coleman places Good’s tragedy into the tradition of the American murder ballad: “There can be no justice,” he repeats, “in our broken country.”
“She’s less than a mile from where George Floyd laid,” Kata sings in this TikTok-ready talk-singing original. “It’s by the laptop repair shop and the torn Speedway.” The power of this viral lament comes from the way Kata situates Good’s death within the haunted geography of the Minneapolis uprising that took place in 2020 following Floyd’s murder. This is far from the first polemic from Kata; see his past untitled song labeled “a song for dictators,” or this poem set to chords he wrote in May 2020.
Cook’s song is an affecting attempt to honor Good’s life as a poet and mother, as the comedian-musician tenderly mourns how abruptly and senselessly Good’s life was taken from her. “I didn’t know you but you were a poet,” Cook sings. “Now everybody knows it/They’re screaming your name.”
