B-Side Guys

The title is blunt enough that it’s easy to miss what the song is actually about. Ryan Cassata, the Kill Rock Stars-signed folk punk songwriter and LGBTQ+ activist who made history as the first openly transgender performer at Vans Warped Tour, isn’t writing another protest song aimed outward at law enforcement. He’s writing one aimed inward, at the policing that happens inside queer communities, at the “you’re not trans enough” rhetoric, at transphobic trans guys demanding masc presentation, at the impulse to mirror the behavior of your oppressors in order to survive among them. “Queer cops feel worse than them” is the line that reframes everything before and after it.

Written from what Cassata describes as exhaustion and anger at being policed from all sides, the song pulls in Portland folk punk outfit The Taxpayers and hits with the blunt force of something that has been building for a long time. That’s been Cassata’s mode for over a decade and eight albums: raw acoustic energy, emotionally direct, designed to be sung together in crowded spaces. This one fits that template while sharpening it.

The chorus cycles through without apology, accumulating force rather than adding new information, which is the right call. The argument is already made. What the repetition does is refuse to let you look away from it.

All proceeds are being donated to immigration defense and immigrant rights legal aid groups in Minnesota, which pulls the song’s reach beyond any single community’s internal reckoning. The cop in your head and the cop at the border turn out to be part of the same conversation.