MauryTHINKS

I’ve been listening to protest music for the last couple of days. Wandering hither and to through my iPod and lighting first upon Joan Baez then on CCR before rounding off with some Gil Scott Herron.
Listening to Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction, it hit me that, though we have similar situations facing us today, you don’t really hear these types of songs.
Sure they are around. Sheryl Crow’s new album tackles them. But the radio, what’s left of it, is rather devoid of angry world changing music.
Where are the Bob Dylans lashing out at the Masters of War? Where are Bob Marleys urging us to catch a fire? Social change starts with the individual and rock and roll has always played such an important part in its movements through society.
It is the youth that are subsequently at the forefront of the music movement. It is they we rely on to lead the marches, to keep buring that flame of rightous indignation that as we age consumes itself til it is but a smoldering coal.
I look around and wonder where these people are. Who do I give my anger to? Who will take my burden of the injustice of the world?
Crickets.
Have we breed an age so cynical that youth cannot over come it? Foreswear it almighty. Say it ain’t so. I know somewhere there are kids pissed off at how the world works. Somewhere they are still too young and naive to believe it won’t change. Somewhere there are kids too stupid and too stubborn to think that the world has always been this way and always will.
Where ever you are, its time to come out. We need you. We need you to start a band, not for money, not for the chicks (OK, partly for the chicks) but because your music is going to change the world. Because you are going to write the song that finally makes it all better, or by God you are at least going to try.
See Barry McGuire was right, we are on the eve of destruction. We always have been, but that doesn’t mean we always will be. George Benard Shaw said the unreasonable man is the most important person in the world, because while the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable man seeks to adapt the world to himself.
We need some unreasonable men and women. Now.