Activism, Identity Politics, and Pop’s Great Awokening

From Beyoncé to Kendrick to Kesha, pop’s turn to political activism produced some of the decade’s most memorable moments.
Illustration by Drew Litowitz and Arjun Ram Srivatsa. Images via Getty Images.

After maintaining a 20-year career largely based on affable crooning, razzle-dazzle dancing, and washboard abs, Usher released his first protest song in 2015. “Chains” is a scathing critique that calls attention to anti-black racism and gun violence. But it’s most memorable for a companion interactive video in which the faces of real-life black victims of police brutality, like Sean Bell and Trayvon Martin, fade in and out, one at a time; using your laptop or smartphone’s camera in tandem with facial recognition software, the video eerily pauses if it catches you averting your eyes from the screen.

The video experiment is meant to confront—or maybe shame—viewers who lapse into indifference about racial injustice. It’s a product of its time, tapping into the decade’s #BlackLivesMatter ethos and the pressure-cooker fury that we who are darker than blue feel about our state-sanctioned disposability. Its combination of storytelling and technology, delivered exclusively by way of the streaming service Tidal, is a version of agitprop pop that wouldn’t and couldn’t have existed before the 2010s. Staying woke—remaining alert, informed, engaged, and attentive to the onslaught of existential threats that could circumscribe and negate your freedom—became so compulsory this decade that even a peppy, anodyne artist like Usher got swept up in the vortex of speaking truth to establishment power. It’s a telling snapshot of the development of “wokeness” in the 2010s—equal parts socioeconomic political statement, boundary-pushing technology, social media movement, and corporate branding.



The ’10s trend of pop stars who either got woke to social injustice, like Drake and Taylor Swift, or helped define the terms for what it means to be a politically engaged musician, like Janelle Monáe and Frank Ocean, reflected a larger cultural turn to civic and political engagement. Millennials embraced an entire lexicon of terms and phrases to make sense of the anatomy of power relationships: cancel culture, intersectionality, allyship, white privilege, misogynoir, patriarchy, and microaggressions leaped out of the ivory tower to take root in everyday parlance. The decade’s decisive turn to identity politics—a subject of controversy and criticism on both sides of the political aisle—helped bring into focus how structural forces like racism and sexism work through acts and policies that repress minorities and keep power in the hands of the already powerful.

A series of seismic upheavals in the aftermath of the 2008 economic recession enabled the rise of woke music in the ’10s: the Arab Spring uprisings, the short-lived Occupy Movement, and the struggles to pass LGBTQ+ protections and same-sex marriage legislation all demonstrated that seemingly intractable entrenchments of power might not be so fixed in stone. (That same year, R&B luminary Erykah Badu first popularized the phrase “stay woke” in a lyric from her song “Master Teacher,” co-penned by Georgia Anne Muldrow.) Though some folks imagined that Obama’s groundbreaking 2008 election as America’s black president would herald a new Aquarius-style era of post-racial harmony, it actually showed that access to power alone was not the answer. Instead, access had to be met by an interrogation of the mechanisms of power itself.

In that spirit, throughout the ’10s, audiences strove to hold artists accountable for their actions and statements as never before, and some superstar artists like Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar came to expect the same from their fans. Citizen oversight has become particularly essential in light of the Trump administration’s reactionary initiatives and policies that threaten long standing democratic traditions. In such a divisive era, where every tweet or lyric carries the potential for close scrutiny, staying woke and politically engaged has become an imperative, rather than an option, for an increasing number of pop musicians.



The resurgence of protest pop in the ’10s is the latest chapter in a rich continuum of dissent and free expression that includes touchstones like Billie Holiday courageously singing about lynching on “Strange Fruit” in 1939, Bob Dylan and the Staples Singers decrying the immoral Vietnam War in the ’60s, and Public Enemy railing against Reaganite conservatism in the ’80s. But by and large, mainstream recording artists have always tended to avoid making partisan music or polarizing statements that could offend, and cause them to lose, segments of their audiences.

For decades now, fans have drawn a line in the sand between entertainment and politics, imploring their favorite artists to simply “shut up and sing.” In 1992, Sinéad O’Connor infamously ripped up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live to protest abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. Days later, the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizers rented a 30-ton steamroller to crush a massive pile of the Irish pop iconoclast’s records outside of her label, and she never professionally recovered from the controversy.

During the Bush-Cheney aughts, the threat of being penalized by a risk-averse industry became especially acute for pop artists. Given Clear Channel’s conglomeration of commercial radio and the lack of outlets willing to piss off corporate advertisers, political artists like M.I.A. and the Roots sometimes struggled to garner industry support. In 2003, country stars the Dixie Chicks received blowback for daring to criticize George W. Bush leading up to the American invasion of Iraq.

This context is what makes ’10s albums like Beyoncé’s visual masterwork Lemonade, Kendrick Lamar’s sprawling To Pimp a Butterfly, D’Angelo’s sly Black Messiah, and Solange’s probing A Seat at the Table even more remarkable. Those releases heralded a watershed moment in which mainstream musicians were finally able to assert specific aspects of their identity while challenging the powers that be. While in the past those artists might have been subject to career-withering controversy, marginalization, or neglect, they were instead met with outsize critical and commercial praise. Black Messiah won the R&B Album of the Year Grammy. Lemonade went triple platinum and was nominated for Album of the Year—though it controversially lost to Adele’s weepy, inoffensive 25, a decision even the British torch singer thought was bone-headed. Kendrick Lamar became the first hip-hop artist to garner the prestigious Pulitzer Prize.

Pop music’s celebration of wokeness wasn’t limited to race either: LGBTQ+ acts like Tegan and Sara, Against Me!, Frank Ocean, Sam Smith, Troye Sivan, and Lil Nas X enjoyed fan support for either coming out of the closet or offering up lyrics or music videos about queer desire, in sharp contrast to the way artists of the recent past like Tevin Campbell and George Michael were outed, and then marginalized or censored for disclosing their sexual preferences.

Effects of the #MeToo movement, aimed at illuminating and preventing gender bias, discrimination, and abuse, were felt throughout the industry. At the 2018 Grammy Awards, Kesha, who had fought, and ultimately lost, a legal battle against her producer Dr. Luke involving charges of sexual assault and battery, was joined by a cadre of female pop stars including Camila Cabello and Cyndi Lauper to perform “Praying,” her anthem of overcoming.



The transforming music ecosystem is also partly accountable for pop music’s turn to political engagement this decade. The consumption of streaming music has become so fragmented that a musician’s controversial political statement hardly generates the rancor or attention it might once have. That makes political music less noteworthy, but also more ubiquitous. An extroverted rapper like Cardi B, who describes herself as a political science obsessive, can regularly post Instagram videos praising liberal politicians like Bernie Sanders (they even filmed a campaign video together) while dressing down conservatives without fear of its effect on her success. Politically outspoken and no-filter from the outset of her career, Cardi B is part of pop music’s activist new normal.

Pop stars have become more free to say what’s on their minds, not only because they have access to social media platforms, but also because they are sometimes speaking to far more decentralized fan bases—and far more loyal ones, too—than they might have in earlier eras, when a smaller number of big platforms like MTV and terrestrial radio purported to function as a kind of monoculture.

Today’s overwrought media-tech industry complex has also played a part in the turn to wokeness. Tech companies’ insistence that consumers need to be always on and plugged into our devices 24/7 has made the “breaking” news cycle seem more gloomy and chaotic than ever: Between the opioid epidemic, school mass shootings, police brutality, and the rise of migrant detention centers, who can keep up when it feels like the sky is constantly falling down?

Given these high-anxiety times, it feels impersonal for pop stars to sit by idly without offering publicly commentary about how world-defining issues affect them personally. Activism in ’10s pop music became the default because audiences imagined that artists who remained silent about their political allegiances—like Taylor Swift, until recently—were automatically confirming and corroborating their right-wing affiliation. And because gun-wielding terrorists sometimes chose to target live music venues like dance clubs, large-scale concerts, and music festivals, musicians like Eagles of Death Metal and Ariana Grande became unwitting victims of circumstance, thrust into their own versions of wokeness as a consequence of being caught in a war of ideological extremism.

To a far greater degree than in the ’60s or even the ’90s, artists in the ’10s could choose from a range of options to express their political viewpoints. Rather than release a political song or put out a controversial press release, contemporary pop music activism might manifest as an off-the-cuff tweet, an Instagram post, or a GIF. Even relatively bubblegum pop artists like Demi Lovato and Justin Bieber, who typically shy away from political messages, used social media as a pulpit to espouse progressive views: Lovato is passionate about gun control and has a long history of allyship with LGBTQ+ causes; Bieber offered a 2017 Instagram post that he was willing to stand up for #BlackLivesMatter. In 2014, half-Pakistani singer Zayn Malik, then a member of superstar boy band One Direction, sent out a “Free Palestine” tweet; despite receiving an onslaught of death threats, he never deleted it.

Protest in the ’10s could look and feel like many things: a refusal to participate in Trump’s presidential inauguration; or Bandcamp’s progressive “Our First 100 Days” project, where consumers signed up for a small subscription fee to receive a song each day of Trump’s first 100 days in the White House. Sidestepping the inspirational political anthems of the past, like John Lennon’s “Imagine,” protest music in the ’10s could sound interior, self-directed, and contemplative, like the #MeToo-inflected intersectional work of Jamila Woods, whose 2016 album HEAVN tackled freedom fighting and self-care; or Kacey Musgraves’ queer-friendly 2013 hit “Follow Your Arrow,” which breezily challenged the concept of country music as an exclusionary country club. The decade’s protest music could be instrumental and abstract like the hard-hitting jazz of Kamasi Washington, or it could consist of hip-shaking pleas for unity and collectivity like Drake’s “One Dance” and J Balvin and Willy William’s “Mi Gente”—boundary-melting jams that stand in stark relief to anti-migrant efforts around the globe.



There were plenty of seismic shifts in the ’10s, but the tragic murder of black Florida teenager Trayvon Martin in February 2012 catalyzed public outcry like no other single event. Wearing a hoodie and taking a stroll, Martin was shot to death by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman, who disregarded police instructions to disengage. No federal charges were brought against Zimmerman, who claimed self-defense, even though Martin was not armed. For the throngs that protested, the lack of justice for Martin seemed to confirm the paradox that institutional racism would endure, and thrive, in American culture regardless of the election of the first black president. Martin’s murder, in tandem with Zimmerman’s acquittal, shook people out of indifference by exposing the myth of post-racial wish fulfillment, provoking an immediate musical response. Among the musicians who spoke out, Young Thug released the chilling “Let Me Live,” and Lil Scrappy delivered “Trayvon Martin.”

The abject horror show of routine law enforcement murders of black civilians like Tamir Rice and Eric Garner soon followed. The lack of justice for the victims in many of those cases enabled a vista of urgent responses, from Dev Hynestender tribute to Sandra Bland, who was found dead in a jail cell after being arrested during a traffic stop, to Drake’s 2016 Instagram letter referencing the police shooting of Baton Rouge’s Alton Sterling.

Social justice movement #BlackLivesMatter formed in July 2013, and went onto gain mainstream visibility after the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the resulting protests there. Echoing and drawing on the achievements of black power movements of the ’60s, #BlackLivesMatter helped many people come to understand the political importance of explicit assertions of identity, as well as self-care, self-esteem, and community.

Black hip-hop and R&B artists put forth music that served as a veritable soundtrack for #BlackLivesMatter activism. Kendrick Lamar’s searing, existential 2015 sophomore set To Pimp a Butterfly explores the vagaries of black masculinity and racism. On “The Blacker the Berry,” Kendrick takes on the complexity and complicity of black genocide: “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street/When gang banging make me kill a nigga blacker than me?” Deploying a tapestry of ’60s and ’70s jazz and P-Funk grooves, the album gave us the decade’s most ubiquitous political anthem, the optimistic “Alright.” The song was chanted at marches and rallies, reminding us of the eternal power of protest music to connect people in the service of a mutual emancipation enterprise, and to serve as moral affirmation for on-the-ground human rights struggles.



To Pimp a Butterfly spurred on the success of other protest records, including D’Angelo’s Black Messiah—a decided stylistic leap from the sexy boudoir jams of 1995’s Brown Sugar and 2000’s Voodoo. While the album incorporates a wide array of musical ideas, a couple of its most effusive tracks, like the Hendrix-y “1000 Deaths,” feature lyrics that ponder black existence in America in the second decade of the 21st century. On the Prince-esque “The Charade,” co-written with Kendra Foster and Questlove, D’Angelo sings of “crawling through a systematic maze,” and how that experience amounts to “pain,” “strain,” and “degradation so loud that you can’t hear the sound of our cries.” By the time the chorus rolls around—“All we wanted was a chance to talk/’Stead we got only outlined in chalk/Feet have bled a million miles we’ve walked/Revealing at the end of the day, the charade”—we’re meant to realize that black life in America is sometimes an exhausting exercise in futility.

Beyoncé also went political, merging her personal struggles with an expanded cultural awareness that added depth to her art. She incorporated samples from author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “We Should All Be Feminists” Ted Talk on her 2013 track “***Flawless.” To make 2016’s Lemonade, she drew on Christian notions of therapeutic forgiveness and sorority as solutions in the wake of domestic trauma caused by a cheating partner. Along the way, she managed to include trans and queer voices, along with visual references to works like director Julie Dash’s black indie masterpiece Daughters of the Dust into her ruminations on family, marriage, and American history.

Her 2016 Super Bowl half-time performance of the black-themed, trap-infused “Formation”—in front of more than 100 million viewers—while she and her dancers wore Black Panthers-inspired outfits amounted to a display of black power so powerful that it generated boycotts from law enforcement for somehow being “anti-police.” Later that same year, Beyoncé’s strategic performance of Lemonade’s country-inflected “Daddy Issues,” accompanied by the once-shunned Dixie Chicks, at the Country Music Awards stormed the show, generating ire from country fans who felt the right-wing, racial sanctity of their gala had been broached. The ebullient, no-fucks-given performance marked a full-circle from Dixie Chicks’ Bush-era “shut up and sing” dismissal, illuminating how Beyoncé’s mainstreaming of intersectional feminism might be her greatest mic-drop yet.



To her credit, Solange joined her sister in making highly ambitious, highly personal woke music. As if in dialogue with Claudia Rankin’s 2015 volume of poetry Citizen, about the insidiousness of everyday racism, her chart-topping 2016 album A Seat at the Table focused on self-care in an exhausting culture of racial microaggressions. On the song “F.U.B.U.” she sings about ways to deal with and overcome racial hostility: “When it’s going on a thousand years/And you pulling up to your crib/And they ask you where you live again/But you running out of damns to give, oh.” Solange insisted on her own interior celebration of blackness and femininity while clearing safe space just to exist in a loud, hostile cultural moment.

Not all musicians were able to evolve into wokeness as thoughtfully as Beyoncé or Solange, though. White artists like Macklemore and Katy Perry struggled to emerge as suitable allies for #BlackLivesMatter causes. The question of how to make effective protest music without re-centering yourself as a white person, or extending the appropriation of black music, proved no easy task for most. But some artists met the challenge head on: ANOHNI’s world-annihilating 2016 album HOPELESSNESS, for example, continued her ideological commitment to roll back the disastrous effects of neoliberal and conservative repression.

For his part, Eminem delivered a blistering, if awkward, freestyle attack on Trump on the 2017 BET Hip-Hop Awards, and Axl Rose, who once stood for much of the same reactionary white male privilege that Trump does today, took to Twitter two days before the 2018 midterm elections to slam the president for his lack of morals and ethics. The profound spectacle of white male celebrities telling their audiences that the conservative American president can kick rocks is not something any of us have seen in our recent lifetimes. (Even Bruce Springsteen, for all his mettle, rarely went that far.)

Ever the contrarian, Kanye West tried to classify himself as a free thinker by defining Trump’s MAGA sloganeering for himself in defiance or sheer ignorance of the president’s disastrous policies against people of color. Other artists, like Azealia Banks, A$AP Rocky, and UK grime star Skepta, just seemed confused in this woke new world.

If nothing else, it was made clear that staying woke is a complicated and slippery affair, full of potential blindspots and minefields. And while many found ways to confront racism, sexism, and homophobia in their music this decade, few artists had the artistic capacity or insight to make music that explicitly interrogated the dynamics of class and status. Country singer Margo Price’s activism in tackling the gender pay disparity on “Pay Gap,” from her 2017 album All American Made, remains relatively rare in pop music—which is unfortunate, given pop’s declining middle class.



Only a small handful of monied elite superstars have enough of a platform and budget to be able to make certain kinds of highly charged political statements, even in a diminished music economy. But the flipside is that those same artists are not likely to upset, disrupt, or criticize the capitalist system that has facilitated their success—even if that system is trapping some of the audiences they need to thrive in dead-end wage labor or insurmountable poverty. (The stunning 2016 Brazilian documentary Waiting for B, which tracks cash-poor LGBTQ+ Beyoncé fans waiting in line outside her concert in São Paulo, is heartbreaking, given that some wait as long as two months to see her perform, and go broke to do so.)

Superstars increasingly rely on brand sponsorships and deals rather than recorded music streams or sales, which means they’re often pro-corporate, even if only by default. This is especially true in hip-hop, where trap music mythologizes conspicuous consumption and where misguided ideas about black wealth accumulation as a knee-jerk form of revolutionary activity forestall the collective ability to think about deeper relationships between class, race, and gender.

JAY-Z is the ultimate example of this conflict. In 2013, the MC-entrepreneur found himself in the midst of a media spat with veteran musician activist Harry Belafonte. When asked to weigh on the contemporary state of black music and social responsibility, Belafonte chided the mogul for not doing enough, contrasting him to Bruce Springsteen, noted for his enduring, consistent commitment to left liberal political messages and philanthropy. A miffed Jay responded: “my presence is charity. Just who I am. Just like Obama’s is. Obama provides hope. Whether he does anything, the hope that he provides for a nation, and outside of America is enough. Just being who he is.”

To his credit, Jay soon evolved from this defensive stance: his excellent 2017 album 4:44 earned him points for “The Story of O.J.,” a sturdily constructed tale of racism and celebrity. On the same record, he included bars about his lesbian mother and apologies for cheating on his wife. He also allegedly spent his personal money to anonymously bail out #BlackLivesMatter protesters, and to produce a Trayvon Martin documentary, Rest in Power.



But on tracks like “APESHIT,” his 2018 duet with Beyoncé, hip-hop’s first billionaire regurgitates shopworn ideas about commodity capitalism (though, admittedly, the song’s provocative video, which finds the couple situating themselves and other black bodies amid the Louvre’s masterpieces, makes makes more of a woke statement than the single itself). Similar to Childish Gambino’s Grammy-winning “This Is America”—whose commentary on the vicious violence against black bodies in contemporary America offers only the sarcastic rejoinder “get your money black man”—JAY-Z’s uninterrogated money-power-respect triumvirate is a reminder that it is possible to be woke on issues of race and gender while remaining in the sunken place on issues of class. Case in point: Jay’s current deal with the NFL flies in the face of exiled quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police brutality, demonstrating that the music magnate prefers to be a reformist working within the establishment rather than a true revolutionary aiming to create systemic change by redistributing power altogether.

There’s no question that music’s turn to political activism produced some of the decade’s best critical and commercial releases. But because we all have social justice blindspots, the concept of wokeness—which assumes that you’ve arrived at a state of ideological clarity—went stale, fast. To use “woke” these days implies a kind of moralizing judgmentalism, and publicly claiming your wokeness has become little more than a performative act.

So where does woke music go from here, if the concept of wokeness has been increasingly commodified and devalued of its meaning? It would do well to engage with three interconnected issues going forward. For one, it’s better to think of being woke as a process of decolonization that occurs on a spectrum, rather than as a final destination. That way, we’ll better understand that activist musicians are fallible too: some can be progressive on a series of issues, less or not on others, and we can all make mistakes in the process of moving toward collective emancipation. The key is to hold people, and ourselves, accountable for those mistakes.

And finally, while so much pop culture activism is focused on reforming institutional structures, such as the miserable attempt to overhaul the consistently-backwards Grammy Awards, pop musicians would do well to consider building new institutions and coalitions that can sustain marginalized people through the future of existential threats. While striving for a seat at the table helped get us through the difficulties of the past 10 years, we now need new seats, new tables, and new rooms, toward new futures.