Rock icon Joan Jett recently opened up about the intersection of music and social issues, making it clear that she has no intention of staying silent on matters that are important to her.
During a recent appearance on the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame‘s “Music Makes Us” podcast, hosted by Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre), Jett was asked whether music can still influence how people respond to the world around them, particularly in light of current events in the U.S. She immediately affirmed that it does, pointing to recent high-profile performances as proof.
“Absolutely. Ask Bad Bunny [whose 2026 Super Bowl halftime performance concluded with a unity-focused message, ‘The only thing more powerful than hate is love’, while critics said the Puerto Rican star made no effort in his Spanish-only performance to include the 78% of American households that speak only English]. Even if he’s not saying something specifically with his lyrics, he’s using this huge platform that he’s been given to discuss issues that are really important to Americans and to more and more Americans as they’re realizing what’s happening — and around the world,” she said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
Jett noted that global audiences are paying close attention to American politics. She explained that while an artist cannot dedicate their entire stage time to political discourse, they still have a historical role in addressing the state of the world and providing comfort to listeners who feel overwhelmed by the daily news cycle.
“We just got back from New Zealand, and everybody was asking us, ‘What’s going on in your country?’ So everybody is interested, and I believe that you kind of, as a person with some kind of platform where you can speak to people — I’m not saying you have to go all in the way you would if you were sitting down having a face-to-face conversation. You can’t — you can’t utilize your time like that — but I think you can certainly have a few well-thought-out sentences to let people know when what’s going on and whatever it is you wanna say. But saying ‘shut up and sing’ has never really been what musicians or artists do, from way on back. When people talk to me about other songs that touched them, whether it was really bad times the music got them through or really good times, it shows that the music really connects and fills an important space, if you allow it, in people’s capacity to deal with all this stuff that we’re dealing with. I don’t know that our brains are meant to deal with so much input, which is probably part of the intent, that you can’t think about all this stuff, so you’re just gonna turn away and let somebody else deal with it. And I get that impulse too — I do — but I also don’t feel that I can do that.”
True to her philosophy, Jett used her stage time earlier this year to make a powerful political statement. In January, while performing in Wānaka, New Zealand, during a tour headlined by Iggy Pop, she spoke out in solidarity with protests sparked by the killing of two U.S. citizens by ICE agents in Minneapolis.
Addressing the crowd, Jett delivered the following statement:
“Many of us here and in the U.S. are horrified daily at what’s happening in my country, America, to America, by this trumped-up government regime. We in the U.S. do not have to accept what this administration is doing to Minneapolis, St Paul and other cities and towns all across North America.”
“To our neighbors — north and south, and frankly, the whole world — we don’t accept it. We don’t accept the brutality, the lies, the loss of our simplest pleasures. So over the next year, as many of us in the States have been and will continue working hard to mitigate and lessen all the damage done, we’ll keep at it. The change is gonna come. Yes, it is.”
