Zach Bryan has been going viral recently over his unreleased song “Bad News.” In a snippet of the song, Bryan sings: “And ICE is gonna come bust down your door, try to build a house no one builds no more, but I got a telephone, kids are all scared and all alone.” This line has drawn both immense backlash and immense praise on social media. The dig at ICE left the far right up in arms and left many others questioning the politics of Bryan. It came as a surprise to many online that Bryan wasn’t MAGA, which they judged from his denouncement of ICE.
Bryan addressed all this uproar with a post on his Instagram story. Bryan asserted that “this song is about how much I love this country and everyone in it more than anything.” He continued on to explain: “I served this country, I love this country and the song itself is about all of us coming out of this divided space. I wasn’t speaking as a politician or some greater-than-thou a**hole, just a 29 year old man who is just as confused as everyone else.”
Bryan’s level of fame puts him in a position to be publicly scrutinized at all times and for all reasons. Coming from a genre of music that is commonly associated with the Republican party, Bryan’s lyrics undermine this stereotype. Criticism, whether implicitly or explicitly, of the government isn’t common in this era of country music. Bryan’s convictions in “Bad News” seem to echo the legacy of Johnny Cash, a 20th century country artist who regularly criticized the government and expressed his politics in his music.
One might wonder whether “Bad News” was at all influenced by Bryan’s connection with Bruce Springsteen, who appeared on Bryan’s last album, “The Great American Bar Scene.” Springsteen also has a reputation for making political statements in his music, perhaps most famously in his hit “Born in the U.S.A.”
Whatever the influence, Bryan wrote on his Instagram story: “Left wing or right wing we’re all one bird and American.” I think this is an important lesson to take away from the whole situation. Bryan wasn’t necessarily writing from a specific political point of view, he was simply writing from his own human point of view. The song is grounded in his personal morals, experiences, and values, and to construe it as political propaganda from either side is to undermine the essence of Bryan’s words. Specifically, freedom of expression allows him to make his own judgements on the state of the world from a purely humanitarian standpoint.