Bruce Springsteen’s new song, Streets of Minneapolis, does not ask to be decoded.

It names names, points fingers and shouts its intent. Written and recorded over a single weekend, it arrives stripped of metaphor and patience.

This is protest music that refuses subtlety.

At the other end of America’s cultural landscape sits Melania, a lavishly marketed documentary about the US first lady.

Designed to soften, humanise and rehabilitate, it instead opened to empty seats, savage reviews and online ridicule.

Taken together, the song and the film offer a revealing snapshot of how rage now moves through the United States, and how poorly attempts to manage it from above are landing.

Blunt force

Springsteen’s song draws on a familiar folk skeleton: spare chords, a chant-ready chorus, a harmonica that echoes the protest anthems of the 1960s.

But familiarity ends there. Unlike earlier classics that wrapped politics in allegory, Streets of Minneapolis is deliberately literal.

It condemns federal immigration enforcement, attacks what Springsteen calls “King Trump’s private army”, and names victims killed during protests.

The Minneapolis of the song is not symbolic. It is concrete and immediate.

Springsteen stages the city’s streets as a battleground, with images of smoke, boots and rubber bullets.

Even time is fixed. He places the story in “the winter of ’26”, as if already pinning the moment to the historical record.

This is not a song meant to age gracefully. It is meant to be heard now.

Critics have called the track blunt, even clumsy. They are right, and that bluntness is its strength.

Springsteen does not hedge or invite interpretation, and documents anger as it exists, raw and unresolved. The result feels urgent because it is.

Yet the song is not purely a howl of rage. It celebrates protest itself: the chants, the unity, the stubborn belief that a city’s “heart and soul persists”.

There is hope here, but it is earned, not sentimental. Rage, in Springsteen’s telling, becomes a form of solidarity rather than despair.

PR collapse

That sense of authenticity stands in sharp contrast to the reception of Melania.

The documentary arrived backed by enormous resources and an aggressive promotional push.

It promised access, intimacy and a reframing of a deeply polarising figure.

What it delivered, according to critics, was a glossy puff piece that mistook proximity for insight.

Audiences were unconvinced. Advance ticket sales were weak, screenings were cancelled and reviews were brutal.

Critics described the film as artless, hollow and, at times, unintentionally comic.

Online, the reaction turned merciless. Empty theatres became memes.

The film itself became a punchline and its failure is not simply a box-office misfire. It is a lesson in legitimacy.

The documentary represents a familiar strategy in modern politics: when anger grows, counter it with narrative. Offer a carefully shaped story that redirects emotion from outrage to empathy.

In this case, the strategy collapsed.

Where Springsteen’s song feels urgent and communal, Melania feels closed and defensive.

Earned anger

One invites participation; the other demands sympathy. One confronts power directly; the other avoids confrontation altogether.

The public response suggests which approach now carries weight.

This contrast reflects a wider cultural shift. Protest music has returned to prominence, fuelled by movements against police violence, immigration crackdowns and political impunity.

Artistes release songs quickly, sometimes within days of events, favouring clarity over polish. Speed matters. so does sincerity.

Film, by contrast, remains slow and expensive. It is shaped by investors, distributors and political considerations.

When a documentary appears less interested in inquiry than in image management, audiences sense it immediately.

In an era saturated with content, trust is fragile.

There is also a quiet irony here. Springsteen, long caricatured as a nostalgic liberal voice, has produced one of his angriest and least ambiguous songs at 76.

Meanwhile, a film backed by vast resources struggles to persuade viewers that it has anything meaningful to say.

Age is not the dividing line. Power is.

None of this suggests that every protest song reshapes politics, or that every political film is doomed.

But the pairing of Streets of Minneapolis and Melania is instructive.

One emerged quickly, with minimal mediation, and spoke directly to public anger.

The other arrived polished, insulated and overproduced, and found little appetite.

In today’s America, rage that feels grounded and earned still finds an audience.

Rage that is denied or smoothed over often returns as ridicule. That difference matters.

On the Streets of Minneapolis, Springsteen sings, people are still chanting. In cinemas across the country, many seats remain empty.

That contrast says more about the state of American culture than any review ever could.