Tom Waits has the perfect voice for a protest song
Tom Waits has returned to music for an anti-ICE protest song with Massive Attack.
There’s much to mull over with ‘Boots on the Ground’. But one thing is irrefutable. Tom Waits has the perfect voice for a protest song.
He’s spent his career shunning commercialism, shifting around shady street corners like a mobile Edward Hopper, observing the truth of the American civilisation.
From romantic sex workers approaching parole to the houses in quaint suburbia where nobody goes, he’s skewered society from top to bottom with a wry acceptance about the curious constitution of ‘the way things are’. An empathy, even.
By and large, this has meant that he’s taken an apolitical approach to his art. He’s a gonzo observer of the proletariat and ‘the way things are’ rather than a commentator looking to put things to rights.
Both of these things – the longstanding apoliticism of his work, and his positioning as an artist casually capturing absurdist vignettes of beserk America without judgement – place him in the perfect position to make a profound impact now that things have finally fallen beyond even a surrealist-tinged reconciliation in the most sinister way. For Waits, that’s saying something.
Throw into the mix the fact that he’s never once chased down a top ten hit, and the fact that you sense he couldn’t care less about what the hell is on his rider list, and you have pretty much the perfect protest singer of our times.
Many times over, stars have ascended the stage in a 12 grand outfit and spoken at vague length about inequality and injustice without any great substance. Without visible consequence, these staged gestures began to feel like further ‘industry‘ theatre rather than conviction.
Somewhere along the line, that disconnect has fed a broader public frustration and resulted in a wary sense that comfortable elites, singers, and celebs are very good at talking about problems, but not so good at doing anything at all to change them.
In its more corrosive form, that frustration has curdled into the political backlash shaping much of today’s right-wing populism. When people feel lectured to but rarely see action or feel the weight of genuine substance, the appetite for disruptive or even destructive alternatives grows. Waits’ unerring integrity and fierce commitment to artistry cuts out all the inferences of that celebrity baggage.
But beyond all that, it’s his voice on ‘Boots on the Ground’ that quakes with the rattle of a just reckoning. Like a wise town crier, he sings as though he’s raising an ancient alarm.
Like his iconic scene in The Fisher King, it is as though he is the traffic light for humanity: “Red! Go no further!” Bruce Springsteen has been protesting for years. The latest pop star will say anything that their PR tells them is in vogue. But Waits’ growl sounds like Satan emerging and saying, ‘Fucking hell lads, you’re taking things a bit too far!’
As my esteemed colleague, the author and freelancer, Matthew Ingate, popped up and said in an idle comment exchange on his day off (as you can see below), it is ‘everybodies voice’. That it is. It’s a voice without class, without creed, without borders, even. I’ve heard that guttural garble on Newcastle high street at 3am when I’ve known for a fact that Waits is tucked up on a hay bale under a carousel of Californian stars some 5,000 miles away.
It’s the voice of some wise old sage who has crept out of a forest and lovingly watched us falter for years, but now, in 2026, he’s not prepared to watch us fail. He is, however, prepared to put the worsening ‘way things are‘ to rights in a rally cry that sounds like it echoes back through ages.
That’s quite something given my partner said she couldn’t understand a bloody word, but still wept.
