![]() ![]() Listen to the full playlist on Spotify right here.įinding solace in the music of someone who has passed away is a meaningful experience. Dig into 25 classic songs about the resiliency of the human soul. We’ll allow one exception to this rule, and that’s a Queen song, but it’s only because they recruited David Bowie, and it’s genuinely poignant as opposed to those two previously mentioned tracks. This isn’t a time for the trite theatrics of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” or the overwhelming garishness of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” We need the riches of gospel and soul music and heartfelt, melancholy classic rock-music that’s been bruised and lived to tell the tale. If you’re looking for some music with a bit more lived-in wisdom and durability than your average songs of today, look no further than this list. But we’ve been tested before, and previous generations will certainly credit music as a guiding light during their struggles. People are feeling dejected and powerless, and it can be easy to just hang our heads and wallow in sorrow. This coronavirus pandemic is testing our will power, and we’re not even sure how long we have to endure these circumstances. “We’ve been fighting for this for years.When we feel at our weakest, sometimes the best pep talk can come from a song. While 2015 will be remembered as a pivotal year in Black radical politics, “This ain’t nothin’ new,” my mom once told me. Today, many of us will come together singing “We Shall Overcome Someday” with a sinking feeling that someday isn’t coming soon enough. In an imagined conversation between Lamar and 2Pac, the groove grinds to a halt, becoming a distant memory as Lamar reminds us, "In my opinion, only hope that we kinda have left is music and vibrations, lotta people don't understand how important it is." Complex, twisted, and unrelenting from the first track to the last, distrust and depression go hand-in-hand, as the music swerves in and out of its own frenzied funk. However, the most in-your-face discourse comes from Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. While the rallying cry for today’s movement comes in the form of a hashtag, we can identify a powerfully-sustained response from the creative community, including D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Rhiannon Giddens’s “Cry No More,” and Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout.” Black bodies were on the brink of extinction, and it is this primal fear that provides the fuel for the #BlackLivesMatter movement. When Bobby Seale and Huey Newton established the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, they called for freedom and power, addressing the most basic human instinct, survival. In the words of Stokley Carmichael, the time had come for “no more long prayers, no more Freedom songs, no more dreams.” It was time to “go for power.” This was low-level warfare raging on American soil, and in was response, a new era of the movement was beginning to take shape. One year later, protests and violence erupted in the West Side of Chicago, followed by riots in major cities across the country. 14,000 National Guardsmen descended upon the scene, and over the course of several days, 34 individuals were killed, with the cost in damage coming to about $35 million. ![]() Late in the summer of 1965, a riot broke out in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. ![]() "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)" With its simple, yet poignant refrain, and a melody that slowly rises over the third statement of the title phrase, the song quickly became a symbol of hope for a new society, governed by its founding principle of equality for all. At the founding convention of the Student for Non-Violence Coordinating Committee in 1960, members joined together in singing, “We Shall Overcome,” and it was at that moment that the freedom song became officially linked with the civil rights struggle. In 1945, during a labor strike of the Negro Food and Tobacco Union Workers, Zilphia Horton, then music director at the Highlander Folk Center, learned the hymn-turned-protest song as “I’ll Overcome Someday.” As the story is told, she then taught it to Pete Seeger, who replaced “I” with “We.” It was this revised version of the song that Seeger shared with the Center’s new music director, Guy Carawan, who introduced it to student civil rights activists in the 1950s. ![]()
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