Margo Price makes a borrowed battle cry her own on “Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down”

An anthem of defiance is one of the easiest songs to write badly. Slap a fist-in-the-air title on three chords, gesture vaguely at “the bastards,” and you’ve got a bumper sticker. What keeps Margo Price’s “Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down” off that shelf is that the defiance has an address — it’s aimed, specific and earned by a writer who has spent a career being underestimated and saying so out loud.

The title itself carries weight Price didn’t have to manufacture. The line came to her through Kris Kristofferson, who reportedly whispered it to Sinéad O’Connor after she was booed off the stage at a Dylan tribute, two weeks after she tore up a photo of the Pope on live television. That lineage — Kristofferson to O’Connor to Price — turns a familiar phrase into an inheritance, and Price sings it like someone consciously taking up the torch rather than just quoting it.

Musically it’s rooted exactly where it should be: alt-country with dirt under its nails, never sanded down into something palatable. This is the quality worth prizing in Price — she’s traditional without being house-trained, working inside the country form while refusing its more conservative manners. The arrangement gives her room to be plain and direct, which is the only way a song like this works.

The writing is at its best when it gets specific — naming the worn-down, the outnumbered, the told-to-behave — and at its most ordinary when it leans on the title’s built-in uplift. There are a couple of moments where the song coasts on the chorus’s inherent rallying power rather than earning a new image, and in a lesser singer’s hands those would be the cracks. Price’s conviction papers over them, but they’re there.

What sells it, finally, is that Price has the biography to mean it. She and Jeremy Ivey started writing the song years ago, for a film loosely based on her own life, and it shows: the defiance reads as remembered, not posed. When she later changed the lyric to take aim at “fascists” on late-night television, it wasn’t a stunt so much as the song doing in public what it was always built to do.

Final take: “Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down” is a defiant, rooted alt-country anthem that survives the slogan trap because Price has earned every word of it. The title is borrowed; the conviction is entirely hers.