Art is rarely neutral. And it shouldn’t be. Not in a time such as this. And that’s why what Hayley Williams did on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon—playing “True Believer” and ending it in an almost full-blown homage to “Strange Fruit” with a nearly all-Black female orchestra—is not just performance but an intervention.

Art as a Weapon, Art as a Lift

When you feel crushed by systems built to grind you down, art becomes one of the few arms you have to fight with. It reminds the oppressed that they are still seen, still felt, and still fully human. It is a call, a mirror, a scream, and a hymn all at once. Williams knows this. And what she offered on Fallon was not performative solidarity. Rather, it was real, raw, and rooted. Let me walk through why this matters.

Layers in “True Believer” and the Strange Fruit coda

From her recent interviews, Williams says that “True Believer” is a reckoning with the South and its history, spiritual hypocrisy, and unspoken terror. She does not shy away from the hard lines. In the lyrics she sings:

“The South will not rise again / ‘Til it’s paid for every sin / Strange fruit, hard bargain / Till the roots, Southern Gotham.“

That line “won’t rise again” is a retort to the old, twisted myth that the South is wounded, that it just needs to heal. Instead, she insists that it cannot rise until it pays for every sin and ever atrocity. Not in some vague metaphoric sense, but in accountability, in restitution, in truth.

The phrase “Strange Fruit” is not poetic padding. It carries with it the weight of one of America’s most unflinching indictments—Billie Holiday’s 1939 song about Black bodies hanging from trees, the Southern spectacle of lynching that terrorized generations. Williams didn’t just reference “Strange Fruit.” She invoked it, closing her set with its echo, letting the orchestra whisper those horrors into the hollow spaces left by her own voice.

It’s as though she’s saying: “Don’t just hear me. Listen to her. Listen to what was done, what was hidden, what still bleeds.”

The Performance as a Symbol

Now, let’s talk about the staging. Williams is seated at the Rhodes piano, looking toward a Black female orchestra in front of her, who carry out the outro like conduits of history. None of this is accidental. It’s alignment and deference not to visibility, but to lineage. It says: I sit here, but they carry the weight. They channel the memories.

Such an image takes steps toward undoing centuries of erasure. The legacy of Black women’s labor in music—unseen and undervalued—is made visible.

Mississippi, the Sig Runes, and the Lightning-Bolt S’s

Here’s where I want to lean into something I haven’t yet heard commentary on—those two first S’s in MiSSissippi.

You’ll note that those S’s are drawn differently than the later ones, almost like twin lightning bolts. Some might shrug it off as sloppy penmanship, but as Kendrick Lamar says, everything means something. And when an artist of Williams’s caliber inscribes a word that way, I refuse to believe it’s accidental.

In white supremacist symbolism, the double Sig rune (ᛋᛋ) is a known appropriation by Nazis (especially the SS) as signifying power, purity, and white domination. I have seen it in tattoos, etched in hate graffiti, and twisted into modern “white power” iconography. In 2005, working at a juvenile hall, I encountered white supremacist youth bearing these sigs and they knew what it meant.

So what happens when you write “Mississippi” with two s’s like that? You collapse two layers of meaning:

• Without context, it reads as white supremacist sigs—“white power,” terror, threat.
• In the context of Mississippi Goddam, of recent lynchings, of Nina Simone’s outrage, of Billie Holiday’s blood in the fruit—those S’s become sharpened symbols.

It’s an act of reclamation. It’s transmutation of a threat into a warning: “We see you. We remember. We still sing.”

And Williams, by evoking Mississippi Goddam in her song, is not just citing an old protest hymn. She is glancing backward to Simone’s fire, bringing that temperature forward, letting it burn in our ears again.

What “Strange Fruit” Means

If the performance reminds us of nothing else, it reminds us that strange fruit is flesh. It is a body lynched for daring to breathe beyond the white gaze. It is terror, spectacle, intimidation, and control. And once it was nightly news in certain corners of America and photographed, postcarded, and embedded in menus of white southern pride.

To sing it—or to let its echo drift in an orchestral hymn—is not to sentimentalize it. It is to resurrect what has been buried, to open up the wound, force air into it, and demand it to heal. It is to say you cannot pretend this didn’t happen, or that it doesn’t still happen in new forms—police violence, mass incarceration, racial terror policing, structural predation.

“Rise” and “Pay Every Sin”

The line “the South will not rise again ’til it’s paid for every sin” deserves intense unpacking, because “rise” is a myth: what Southern white elites mean by “rise” is renewal, greatness, legitimacy, all while the labor, soil, and sacrifice were borne by Black hands.

Williams turns it inside out and insists that you cannot rise while debt is unpaid. Not moral debt. Not cultural debt. Not material debt. Not spiritual debt.

That line echoes Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam, where she relentlessly demands urgency in justice now.

Christianity, the Whitening of Jesus, and Privilege as Burden

Let’s mention theology for a minute, because Williams has also crawled under that skin. Part of what she critiques is the way Christian imagery in the South helped uphold hierarchy and dehumanization.

We know that white supremacists turned Jesus white—and not just in paintings—so that worshipers wouldn’t have to see their God as “other,” as brown-skinned, as burdened, as vulnerable. It’s a spiritual violence to deny the reflection of the oppressed in the divine and collapse God into a mirror of privilege.

Williams, in her spiritual wrestling, refuses that. She forces us to reckon that faith, when untethered from justice, becomes complicity. She sings of religious ideology as a trap, an anesthetic, a lie when it doesn’t call out sin precisely where it lives.

Which brings us to the reference to Lauren Boebert’s family and those grotesque Christmas gun photos from some years back. That image is the portrait of privilege weaponized. A white, armed family posing with guns as big as their children, as though to say, “we will defend everything we think is ours, even against what we claim to love..”

But when someone like Williams—white, Southern, evangelical in her background—calls that out in the context of a song about racial terror, it is precious. Because she uses the platform she has to refute entitlement and utterly humble it, which is exactly how privilege should be used.

Art Lifts, But It Also Exposes

Here’s the hard truth: art doesn’t magically cure oppression or dismantle systems. But it can lift souls. It can open windows when windows are shuttered. It can carry memory, evoke empathy, spark fury, and demand justice. And it can stitch together communities of witness.

In a time when so many platforms censor, Williams didn’t just use Fallon’s stage, she transmuted it. She turned a late-night entertainment format into divine reckoning. And in my humble opinion, that’s how you do art in the face of fascism, racism, bigotry, and white supremacy in America. You do it with courage, with humility, with witness, with lineage, and with love.

So, yes, there is so much to say about “True Believer,” about Mississippi Goddamn, about Strange Fruit, about the performance, about the lightning bolts, about the theology, about the agency. But let me end like this:

When an oppressed people are drowning in silence, when history is buried, when terror is normalized, art speaks. And if it’s done well, it lifts. It restores your lungs and therefore your voice. It helps you believe in your own impossible hope. That is what Hayley Williams gave us that night. Let her voice rise. It’s long past time the South—and all of America—pays its debt.

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