The future that liberals want currently costs $30 and is located behind a ravaged warehouse door in downtown Los Angeles. Here, in a cluster of glass-scattered, splinter-strewn rooms called Rage Ground, patrons indulge their most destructive impulses, smashing sledgehammers and steel pipes into TV monitors, windowpanes, baby pianos, and more. The house special: Donald Trump piñatas, distended and tangerine, ready for a drubbing.

According to management, the piñatas have sold out every week since debuting in July. Meanwhile, demand has nearly tripled. The dummies offer a uniquely emotional experience; customers have been known to sob as they destroy them. People also often request to hear one band to complete the experience: Rage Against the Machine, the angry uncles of modern protest music. They want a soundtrack that gives voice to their turmoil as primal forces consume them.

It’s a tempting prospect, flinging a hammer after months of being hammered politically, whipping a bat while chanting all of the Trump administration’s social, racial, and moral antagonisms. For those of us who despise the leadership of this country, or anyone who’s just tried to keep apace of its fulminating news cycle, 2017 limps to a close as a sum of destructions, a torrent of crises and outrages interrupted only by bouts of bodily fear. But it’s also been a year buoyed by civil demonstration and dissent in droves, with a tow of grassroots urgency that may just continue to springboard diverse politicians forward.

And the music of 2017—well, it has tried to land its blows, too, however it could. This year redefined our notions of politically reactive music: what it sounds like, who it comes from, and how much identity ignites its contents. Unlike other modern eras of American populist resistance, there was no single, centralized scene for discordant song: Instead of looking to waifish folk bards to deliver broadsheet laments, as in the 1960s, or hoarse hardcore punks to rail against Reaganomic hypocrisies, as in the ’80s, we took solace in a wide range of styles. Sometimes they explicitly condemned the policies and people who dominated the year. And, just as often, for many artists, visibility itself was the defiance; this was music made by the marginalized voices Trump was working to exclude. Truly, in 2017, “protest music” seemed like a redundant term; when all identities are this politicized, all music feels political.

In a year of borders, protest music floated through them, with artists reacting to headlines while also resisting via assertions of personal identity. The innate political consciousness of hip-hop took new strides; within Trump’s first 100 days, Joey Bada$$ lamented the “Three K’s, two A’s in AmeriKKKa,” and Kendrick Lamar parsed the prejudice pulling at society’s ever-tenuous seams. The punk band Downtown Boys, led by Latinx frontwoman Victoria Ruiz, flung their stones against “A Wall.” The electrosoul twins Ibeyi remixed Michelle Obama’s wisdom into an elegy, and Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra, a queer Puerto Rican singer-songwriter, refracted Trump’s hostility towards minorities into a bilingual cry for courage. Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas, who is gay, reveled in the euphoria of self-acceptance and teased the zealotry that would blithely stomp his civil rights. With their work and presence, these artists created openhearted, safe spaces away from political rancor.

It’s remarkable that—in a year hijacked by Trump’s reckless, witless Twitter belches—artists didn’t dive to meet his level. Far and away, in the music of 2017, we heard more broad, embracing statements of community than we did rebukes and secessions; as passions flared, cool heads somehow still prevailed. Musicians weren’t clamoring to dispatch the first topically reactive songs anymore, a notable schism from the 1960s—often because they were taking to social media, swiftly, with their stormy initial reactions. They also were mobilizing through projects for progressive causes, including fundraising compilations 7-Inches for Planned Parenthood, Our First 100 Days, and 1,000 Days, 1,000 Songs. In this process, through this larger creative pause, they could create art filled with more than indignant retorts and spiking rage. They could fill their music with visions beyond the next grim moment; they could turn our eyes from dark and frightening horizons, help us push onward against ignorance and hatred. Together, we made another world, if only for a few minutes at a time. –Stacey Anderson