🎧 Approved: Joseph Terrell

Joseph Terrell isn’t your typical strummy folk protagonist.

There’s an old idea, often paraphrased, that if you want to know how bad things are, you should listen to the folk singers. Billy Bragg once suggested that a political songwriter is only as good as the bad times they’re living through. On ‘Genuine American Hero (Talking Blowback Blues)’ Terrell stands squarely up to the task.

The song lampoons ICE not through rage alone, but through satire, the kind that works because it understands the machinery it’s mocking. Terrell ventriloquises the smug, self-congratulatory tone of American exceptionalism at its most lethal, letting the language of power indict itself.

There’s no fictional allegory here. The song references real policies, real outcomes and the very real human cost, all while maintaining the jaunty cadence of a classic talking blues. 

That contradiction is the point: the music strolls along while the lyrics catalogue devastation, embodying how normalised this violence has become. Lines like “what’s good for the goose is good for the propaganda” mock the moral gymnastics that turn family separation and death into applause-line politics.

It’s a rallying cry from the porch, a dark joke told too close to the truth, a reminder that folk music has always been at its best when it refuses to let power tell its own story. Whether you’re nodding along or squirming at the honesty, Terrell is proof that American folk music still has teeth, and that sometimes the smile comes before the bite.

🎧 Listen to ‘Genuine American Hero (Talking Blowback Blues)’ below