This might be the corniest post I ever share, because Rachel Platten's "Fight Song" is so generic and presented from an extremely privileged position - but it's also motivated a lot of folks, because it has a great vibe.
So... I'm going to create a thread of songs that actually inspire me, but this opener is a universal favourite - and a huge invitation to add your own.
What moves you forward (spiritual songs welcome too) when the world feels too hard?
#CoSoMusic
#GoNotGentlyPlaylist
Now THIS is the kind of song I resonate with deeply. It comes from hard-won experience of how difficult life is.
One thing that has *broken* me this past month is not all the horrible videos I've watched to debunk and assess the complexity of war this past month alone... but the keyboard warriors. The people treating this as a game.
We are wounded and it is OKAY to rage.
Just remember what, exactly, you're raging against when you do.
https://youtu.be/bcsCc2kKMUo
And as a good chaser?
I always go back to Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues" - with the original video, which reminds me how much our global crises have NOT changed in 50 years.
We have better gadgets.
But do we have better humanity?
"Make me wanna holla - the way they do my life! This ain't livin', this ain't livin'..."
K'naan is best known for "Waving Flag", but he lived through some terrible survivor's guilt - getting out of a war-torn situation, leaving family behind because he couldn't save them.
I feel that pain every time I liste to this counsel, that we just need to "Take A Minute".
"And any man who know a thing know he don't know a damn damn thing at all. And every time I felt the hurtin' I felt the givin' get me off the wall.."
Where it all began for me, though--the song that really woke me to my humanism--was Oliver Mtukudzi's "Todii". It was like nothing I'd ever heard before. So impossible to sit still to!
But this Tuku classic is about helplessness in the face of an African AIDS epidemic spread by men forcing unprotected sex on their wives, passing on infection to the babies. It's the quintessential "when answers are not easy, let us at least be in harmony with our grief" jam.
How have I gone this far without bringing Nina Simone into the picture?
She's so famous for "Mississippi Goddamn", but her heart pours out in so many pieces. This one, I love because of how universally relevant its longing is.
"I wish I could share
All the love that's in my heart
Remove all the bars
That keep us apart
I wish you could know
What it means to be me
Then you'd see and agree
That every man should be free"
And although I am 100% atheist?
I am SUCH a sucker for a good "take me to the river" song.
It is the human ache - across cultures, religions, contexts - to do something that could wipe away all our wounds, our scars, our failings, our transgressions. OH if it were so easy!
Leon Bridges captures so beautifully the weariness of that shame, blending the spiritual dimension (for some) with the everyday living in which we *actually* have to work to feel reborn.
A good chaser to Leon Bridges, by the by, is Michael Kiwanuka. His "Cold Little Heart" is even better with the video, because it shows the tension we live with, day by day - the hurt we carry, and the life we try to build around it.
Life is so fragile.
If you follow the news, it's just stats.
But it's fragile - and *loved*.
The people we've lost this last month?
All loved.
"Bleeding. I'm bleeding - my cold little heart! Oh, I... can't stand myself."
When I wrote THEN RAISE THE DEAD MAN HIGH, I listened to a great deal of old Soviet music (as befits a story set from 1920s to 1950s USSR), but also Laboratorium Piesni - a group committed to reclaiming traditional songs from Eastern European contexts, including Belarus, the setting of Part II in my grim story.
When war broke out last year, this was the group's response:
"Sound moves and touches in us both what is painful and what is full of hope and love."
https://youtu.be/z2RDVnXtn3I
And while I'm focussing on brilliant women's groups...
"Canción Sin Miedo" (Song without fear) is a modern Colombian resistance classic, in which women from every walk of life--Indigenous, Afrocolombiana, rural, trans--stand together against violence.
Because you can bet your bippy that every group, however righteous it feels in its own demographic cause, perpetuates harm against feminized people at home when frustrated at its lack of external process.
This is the WEIRDEST song for when the world is messed up, but it soothes me every time.
I don't even pay attention to the main lyrics. I'm here for the chorus and the melody. The chorus especially reminds us how small all our problems are, in the grand scheme of things.
And sometimes?
Sometimes that's exactly what one needs to hear.
All of this will pass.
We are not magnificent.
But the sheer gift of existence... is.
Good night, CoSo. 🌙
Go gently, ok?
https://youtu.be/TWcyIpul8OE
(Tomorrow I'm going to start an extreme regimen for my health, because I have no idea how else to get rid of the stress I've been living with this past month - the routine internal tremors, the constant stress headaches - but I appreciate your presence with so much of it. I'm not doing well right now, in part because the world isn't doing well right now. But I am grateful - oh, am I grateful! - I'm not alone in either this precarity or this grief. Thanks for being along for the terrible ride. 💙)
@MLClark It's about the tribe.
@Nick_Searles
Thank you for that affirmation, Nick. On the Bluesky, Mastodon, & X platforms, there are plenty of writers carrying on as if it's business as usual. It's not, though - we're in two wars amid catastrophic climate change - & the failure of folks in creative fields to recognize the onus upon them to respond to the times in which they're living in is... tough.
I sorely appreciate the reminder that I'm not the only one despairing at how to exist creatively amid disaster.
Thank you.