6OG Special: Is Jesse Welles the Voice of the Resistance?
We’re full-on into the holiday season. The days are short, the weather is cold (at least where I live) and the Thanksgiving leftovers are finally gone. It’s time for holiday parties, ugly sweaters, the whole schmear. It’s also end-of-year list season for music writers, which means that the album release calendar continues to be light (all due respect to the Zac Brown Band, but we won’t have a Quick Take this week due to a dearth of interesting new albums; I hope he enjoys the Sphere and his next beach house).
So while we here at 3A6OG HQ organize our thoughts and prepare our year-end lists for 2025, we’re breaking with our regular format this week to offer up a special report on an artist that, for better or worse, might sum up 2025 as a year and an experience more than any other.
New Album Song Viral Trend: Jesse Welles. I tried. I really did my best to ignore this singer and self-professed songwriter. Up until now he has mostly been active on TikTok, the social media app that I have gone out of my way to avoid and on which he built a devoted following. His videos carried over to Instagram reels and YouTube, both of which I view with some regularity, although my algorithm mostly feeds me concert footage and clips of movies that I can already recite verbatim off the dome (“THIS IS THE BUSINESS WE’VE CHOSEN”). Occasionally I’d hear about him on a podcast or read about him in an article. But I’m able to compartmentalize. He’s a fad. He’ll come and go and barely cause a ripple.
But then the dude went on late night network TV and I realized we will have to reckon with him for a while longer. Possibly for the next few years at least. Cue the clapter…
The dude in question is Jesse Welles. He’s a folk singer in the era of TikTok. He sings about being against all the things a person with a brain and a heart should be against. He’s anti-Trump and anti-MAGA… we think. He comes across as having strongly held beliefs… right up until he sounds like someone who’s just asking questions or doing his own research. He’s at the forefront of online DIY protest music… and the recipient of four Grammy nominations. He’s been called “the next Bob Dylan” due to his raspy voice and his protest-themed lyrics, and yet… actually, he seems to be embracing that absurd notion, as evidenced by his recent duet with Joan Baez on a cover of “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright.”
(Lest you think I’m piling on, it’s absurd to compare anyone to Bob Dylan. Between the releases of Infidels and Time Out of Mind, even Bob Dylan wasn’t Bob Dylan anymore. So If Jesse Welles manages to attain cultural icon status in 50 years or so, I’ll apologize from the great beyond.)
But even if we wanted to entertain the notion that Jesse Welles is the TikTok version of Bob Dylan or Woody Guthrie, there is a key difference between those two legends and Welles, apart from longevity and influence. Dylan and Guthrie wrote songs. Their lyrics incorporated imagery and told stories and used metaphors. Even some of Dylan’s most explicit protest songs (“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Hurricane”) contained narrative descriptions that dropped the listener into a vivid scene. And their music contained actual melodies. They could be tuneful or rousing or downbeat or engrossing, with the music itself bringing out an emotional response from the audience. For proof check out some of Dylan’s most personal songs like “Girl From the North Country” or “Tangled Up in Blue.” Or go back to that 1964 TV performance of “Hattie Carroll.” Before a word is uttered, Dylan has your full attention with the harmonica intro.
Jesse Welles does none of these things.
We can dispense with the music quickly, since there’s no “there” there. It’s just bland, melody-free background strumming like you’d hear at a protest. He might drop in the occasional pedal steel on a song like “The Great Caucasian God” or thoroughly rip off a White Stripes track on “Boot Straps,” but overall the music is wallpaper. The point, aside from feeding the algorithm, is for you to hear his lyrics.
As for those lyrics? Woof. I’ve seen more subtlety and nuance in a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Let’s start with the song he performed on Colbert – “Join ICE.” “Well I failed the academy, the cops weren’t havin’ me / The Army didn’t sound that fun / So I found me a paramilitary operation / That was keen to hand me a gun.” I get the sarcasm, I get what he’s going for, but there’s nothing lyrically beyond the sarcasm. The song is pure trolling and red meat. Think Warren Zevon’s “The Factory” only if the entire song was “punching out Chryslers” and “polyvinyl chloride” but left out any description of waking up early on a chilly morning when the factory whistle blows.
“No Kings” sounds as if it was written by a teen for his first open mic night rather than a 33-year-old man (“No hatred, no violence / No starvation and no greed / And no kings”) which might be fitting considering Welles’ TikTok audience. But there’s also no thought and no insight. Co-opting the name of the very serious, very widespread protest movement screams of bandwagon-jumping. And of course Welles has a song called “The List” that explicitly name-checks Epstein, Dan Bongino, Kash Patel and Santa Claus (“If you wish to persist, you probably ought to forget that list”).
“Trump Trailers” envisions a world where Donnie was born in a trailer park and “he’d drive his daddy’s old Trans-Am, say he earned it with hard work.” It would be different if this was clever or funny. It’s neither of those things, and in terms of making a point it brings nothing to the table beyond any basic “Trump bad” message (and yeah, I get that there’s an audience for that).
He also has songs that leave you raising an eyebrow. In “War Isn’t Murder” he sings, “When you’re fighting the devil, murder’s okay / War isn’t murder, they’re called casualties / There ain’t a veteran with a good night’s sleep.” Wait, what? Are we criticizing war or are we blaming the vets? And then there’s “Fentanyl” (guess what that’s about): “Tell the folks to quit / Well of course / Like they haven’t thought of that / How ‘bout cuttin’ off the source?” Yeesh, that one might not have aged well. “United Health” purports to criticize our thoroughly awful health care system but the lyrics are essentially a Wikipedia dump and this little nugget is something to behold: “CEOs come and go and one just went / The ingredients you got bake the cake you get.” It’s MacArthur Park-meets-Luigi Mangione.
There is nothing among Welles’ lyrics that even attempts to approach “How many roads must a man walk down / Before you can call him a man?” or “As I went walking that ribbon of highway / And saw above me that endless skyway.” When Dylan told senators and congressmen to heed the call, that was only one part of his recognition of generational change. For Welles, the people in power are the whole song. He’s all speechifying, no poetry. All trees, no forest.
Just so there’s no confusion here, I agree with a lot of what he says, particularly about the current state of the world and the people running it. I take issue with Welles’ method of conveying this message and possibly the motivations of the messenger.
I’ll acknowledge this might be a “me” problem. It’s possible that Welles, like many of us, is genuinely outraged at what he’s seeing. It’s possible that this is who he is, a proud and bold voice of protest for an online generation. But then my inherent cynicism takes over, and I ask why his lyrics sound like nothing more than a recitation of his social media feed. Why is there no perspective or personality in his songwriting? Why doesn’t it feel honest? And where has he been for the last 10 years, aside from trying to make it as a straight-up rocker?
If this is who Welles is now, great. Welcome to the resistance. But I’m skeptical. I can’t shake the feeling that Welles is more opportunistic than outraged. I hope I’m wrong and he’s the real deal. But being a true voice of conscience and protest requires conviction, sacrifice, and to some degree outsider status (think Ian MacKaye, Billy Bragg, Gil Scott-Heron). I’m not getting that vibe from Jesse Welles.
Welles is emblematic of a larger problem in this country – politics as entertainment. The endless scroll, the inability to shut off, viewing the loudest and most extreme among those who disagree with you as representative of the group as a whole (and as a threat to civilization itself). The tendency for the online horde to attack anyone seeking to have a nuanced discussion (go back three paragraphs and note that I felt the need to establish where my own beliefs stand). We’ve taken our responsibility to be informed about current events and turned it into an online gladiatorial battle. Are you not entertained?
To be clear, I’m not talking about satire. When done well, satire is still one of the best checks on power (especially as daily newspapers cease to exist and the media that’s left routinely abdicates this responsibility) and we are lucky to have several great practitioners in this country. I’m talking about a word I used earlier – clapter, a portmanteau combining “clapping” and “laughter.” Clapter occurs when a comedian (usually, but not always, a late night host) criticizes a politician (usually, but not always, a conservative) or references an online talking point (usually, but not always, from the left) to induce applause from the audience without actually telling a joke. Sometimes even our best satirists rely on this crutch for easy applause. Today Donald Trump tweeted out that I’m a loser. Well, Donnie, takes one to know one. WOOOOO!!!!!!
It’s true that politics has always, in some ways, been reduced to entertainment. Tabloid broadsheets (Ford to City: Drop Dead), the rise of 24-hour cable news (remember the Scud Stud?). But now your algorithm can create a silo for you and feed you a constant stream of worldview-affirming content, which creators have a financial interest to keep cranking out. We may not have a monoculture, but we have apps shoving diatribe-shouting hacks like Jesse Welles down our throats. Makes me nostalgic for poptimism. Charli XCX wasn’t my jam, but at least she was upfront about her commercial ambitions. Count this among the many reasons I wouldn’t mind going back to Brat summer.
Jesse Welles is the musical version of clapter. He’s a human doomscroll with an acoustic guitar. And sadly, in an era defined by Trump and Musk and Twitter and Bluesky and TikTok, he was probably inevitable. (Brian)