I can whistle almost the whole of the Fifth Symphony, all four movements, and with it I have solaced many a whining hour to sleep. It answers all my questions, the noble, mighty thing, it is “green pastures and still waters” to my soul. Indeed, without music I should wish to die.
Edna St. Vincent Millay letter to Allan Ross MacDougall
To imagine existence without music might be biologically possible but it would be emotionally smaller. Music operates on a frequency that bypasses the intellect and speaks directly to something primal within us. Unlike spoken language, which divides us into linguistic communities, music creates a universal grammar of emotion. A minor key can evoke melancholy in a child who has never learned the word “sadness.” A triumphant major chord can lift spirits across cultures, generations, and personal circumstances. This universality suggests that music doesn’t merely accompany human experience—it is woven into the fabric of consciousness itself.
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. One does not have to know anything about Dido and Aeneas to be moved by her lament for him; anyone who has ever lost someone knows what Dido is expressing. And there is, finally, a deep and mysterious paradox here, for while such music makes one experience pain and grief more intensely, it brings solace and consolation at the same time. (Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain )
When we consider a world stripped of this universal language, we imagine not just silence, but a profound disconnection from our own emotional landscape.
First dances, lullabies, funeral hymns, graduation marches—these melodies become the soundtrack to our most significant moments. They don’t merely accompany these experiences; they preserve them in a form more vivid than photographs, more immediate than written words. A few notes can transport us instantly across decades, reconstructing not just the memory but the emotion of a moment with startling clarity.
Without music, our memories would lose this dimensional quality, the emotional peaks and valleys of our lives would lack their soundtrack, making the landscape of personal history less navigable, less meaningful.
Even beyond its role in significant moments, music provides the rhythm that makes daily existence bearable, even beautiful. Work songs have existed in every culture because they transform labor from mere drudgery into something approaching art. The person who whistles Beethoven during difficult hours understands that music doesn’t change circumstances—it changes our relationship to circumstances. It provides the cadence that makes the unbearable bearable, the monotonous meaningful.
Consider the silence that would replace this constant, subtle soundtrack.
That life without music would not be worth living might initially seem hyperbolic. However, it points to a deeper truth about being human, we don’t merely survive on bread alone—we require beauty, meaning, connection, and transcendence. Music provides all of these simultaneously. It is the art form that most directly addresses our need for both individual expression and communal belonging, for both intellectual stimulation and emotional release.
Life may be technically possible without music, but it would be missing a profound transformation: the ability to turn time into beauty. Music does not change the fact that hours pass, that we suffer, or that we long for what is lost. But it alters how we inhabit those hours, how we carry that suffering, and how we hold on to memory. In this way, music does not merely decorate time — it redeems it. And in that redemption lies its deepest necessity.
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
P.S. I read this today:
As a graduate student, I cared for my grandmother, who was a big fan of Ozzy’s band Black Sabbath herself. Any time we went anywhere, we put on our playlist and sang along. When, during the Covid-19 pandemic, I cut off part of my fingertip and lost access to my campus library, I had Ozzy in my ear for much-needed heavy metal pep talks as I took my PhD qualifying exams.
And when I lost both my grandmother and my California home the following year, I still had Ozzy. His music was the score as I finished my dissertation from my parents’ basement and landed my dream job at Iowa Wesleyan University. Through the submission of my dissertation and driving nearly 1,200 miles across the country to start my new job, I listened to the Blizzard of Ozz album.
Picture this: It’s 1990, and the Scorpions are belting out “Winds of Change” to massive crowds across a transforming Europe. Just a year earlier, people around the world had woken up to the impossible news that the Berlin Wall was actually falling—that the concrete symbol of Cold War division was being torn apart by ordinary people with hammers and hope.
For those who were 19 in 1990, watching this unfold, the song became more than just a power ballad. It was an anthem of hope that seemed, for a while at least, to materialize into genuine possibilities. The world felt suddenly malleable in a way it hadn’t for decades. Meanwhile, in academic circles, scholars were beginning to re-examine how fear has shaped our world, while Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting “Freedom from Fear” continued to hang in museums and some collective memories as a reminder of what we’re all supposedly working toward.
What connects these seemingly disparate cultural moments? They all grapple with the same fundamental question: How does fear drive human transformation?
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world
Franklin D. Roosevelt Annual Message to Congress, January 6, 1941; Records of the United States Senate; SEN 77A-H1; Record Group 46; National Archives.
I have started reading Robert Peckham’s “Fear: An Alternative History of the World”which reads like a detective story where the criminal and the hero are the same person. Starting with the Black Death in the 14th century, Peckham traces fear’s dual role throughout history—sometimes as a tool of oppression, sometimes as a catalyst for progress.
His central insight is provocative: fear has served “both a coercive tool of power and as a catalyst for social change.” Think about it. The same emotion that allows dictators to control populations also drives revolutionary movements. The fear of injustice motivates protests. The fear of environmental collapse spurs climate action. The fear of authoritarianism strengthens democratic institutions.
Peckham’s “shadow history” approach reveals how our most transformative moments—from the Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement—often emerged from confronting our deepest collective anxieties rather than avoiding them.
Now flip to Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom from Fear.” Painted during World War II, it shows parents tucking their kids into bed while war headlines lurk in the background. It’s pure Americana—the suburban dream of safety, stability, and sleeping soundly despite the chaos outside.
But here’s what makes it powerful: Rockwell wasn’t just painting propaganda. He was painting aspiration. The image says, “This is what we’re fighting for—not just victory, but the right to live without constant anxiety.”
The painting represents the endpoint that Peckham’s historical analysis points toward: societies stable enough that families can exist in protective bubbles of normalcy, even when the world burns around them.
Which brings us to the Scorpions’ “Winds of Change.” Released in 1990, the song became an unofficial anthem for the end of the Cold War—but more than that, it captured something profound about generational hope. For those who were teenagers and young adults watching the impossible become possible, the song wasn’t just about political change. It was about the sudden realization that the world was far more malleable than anyone had imagined.
Whatever one might think about the song’s musical merits, it became a soundtrack for hope that, for a while, seemed to materialize into real possibilities. The fear that had held Europe in a stranglehold for decades—fear of nuclear war, of permanent division, of unchangeable systems—suddenly transformed into collective action and unprecedented change.
The song works because it embodies Peckham’s thesis in three-and-a-half minutes of soaring guitar solos. The fear that had held Europe in a stranglehold for decades became the very force that motivated people to tear down walls and demand change. The “winds” weren’t just meteorological—they were the accumulated anxieties of generations finally finding release.
Like Rockwell’s painting, the song also represents an aspirational moment—the belief that we could move from a world defined by fear to one defined by possibility.
We’re living through our own “Winds of Change” moment. Collective anxieties about technology, climate change, political polarization, and social inequality are reaching tipping points around the world. The question isn’t whether these fears are justified—Peckham’s analysis suggests that’s the wrong question entirely.
The real question is: Will we let fear paralyze us, or will we harness it as a force for positive transformation?
Peckham’s historical analysis gives us the intellectual framework to understand fear’s complexity. We need to recognize when fear is being weaponized against us and when it’s signaling genuine problems that require action.
Rockwell’s vision reminds us what we’re aiming for: societies where people can sleep peacefully, secure in their freedom from existential anxiety.
And the Scorpions? Well, they remind us that transformation is possible—that the walls we think are permanent can come tumbling down when enough people decide they’ve had enough of living in fear. For those who lived through 1989-1990, watching seemingly impossible changes unfold in real time, the song captured not just a political moment but a feeling of generational possibility that the world could actually be different.
That sense of hope materializing into reality—however briefly—offers a template for how accumulated fears can reach tipping points and transform into collective action.
They are not human beings, they are human resources. They do not have names, they have productivity metrics. They do not have faces, they have employee ID numbers. They do not have hearts, they have performance indicators.
Eduardo Galeano’s poem “The Nobodies” pierces through the comfortable abstractions we use to distance ourselves from human suffering. In its stark repetition, it reveals how modern systems transform people into categories, individuals into statistics, and pain into acceptable externalities. But Galeano’s vision, written decades ago, has evolved into something even more insidious in our contemporary moment: we have built a machinery of indifference so sophisticated that it operates without malice, so efficient that it barely requires conscious cruelty.
The Architecture of Abstraction Modern society has perfected the art of making suffering invisible through layers of abstraction. We speak of “market corrections” rather than families losing their homes. We discuss “labor optimization” instead of communities destroyed by factory closures. We analyze “demographic transitions” while people flee wars we barely acknowledge. The language itself becomes a buffer, creating distance between decision-makers and consequences, between the comfortable and the expendable.
This linguistic sleight of hand serves a psychological function as much as a political one. When a pharmaceutical company prices medication beyond the reach of the dying, executives sleep soundly because they are “maximizing shareholder value.” When a social media algorithm amplifies hate speech because it drives engagement, engineers rationalize it as “user preference optimization.” The suffering is real, immediate, and measurable, but the responsibility is diffused through systems so complex that no individual feels accountable for the human cost.
The efficiency obsession that defines our era has transformed this indifference from a moral failing into a virtue. To pause and consider the human impact of our decisions is seen as inefficient, unprofessional, naive. The manager who agonizes over layoffs is less valuable than one who can execute them cleanly. The doctor who spends time comforting patients is less productive than one who processes more cases per hour. We have created incentive structures that systematically reward the suppression of empathy.
The Cruelty Inheritance But beneath these institutional failures lies something more troubling: the persistence of human cruelty across all attempts at moral progress. The armed conflicts ravaging our world today follow patterns established thousands of years ago. In Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, and countless other places, human beings wake up each day and choose to inflict suffering on other human beings. They do so not despite their humanity, but because of it.
This cruelty is not random or inexplicable. It follows a logic as old as our species: the logic of payback, of transferred pain, of suffering seeking outlet. The person humiliated by their superior finds someone weaker to humiliate. The community traumatized by violence becomes willing to traumatize others. The nation that has been invaded becomes, when strong enough, an invader. We pass our pain down like an inheritance, each generation finding new ways to make others pay for what was done to them.
Modern life has not eliminated this dynamic but has made it more sophisticated. Our frustrations are more diffuse—traffic jams, automated phone systems, bureaucratic mazes, jobs that feel meaningless. None of it is dramatic enough to justify real rage, but it accumulates into a background resentment that seeks expression. The road rage incident, the cruel comment on social media, the casual workplace bullying—these are not aberrations but pressure valves in a system that generates more frustration than it knows how to process.
The Adaptation of Numbness Perhaps most disturbing is how indifference becomes a survival strategy. Healthcare workers learn not to get too attached to patients who might die. Social workers develop emotional barriers to protect themselves from the endless parade of human misery. Politicians master the art of discussing mass suffering in abstract terms because the alternative—feeling it all—would be paralyzing.
This numbness serves a function, but it comes at a cost. The protective callousness that helps us navigate a cruel world gradually becomes genuine indifference. The executive who starts by reluctantly cutting benefits to save the company ends up seeing employees as line items on a spreadsheet. The soldier who learns to dehumanize enemies to survive combat struggles to see civilians as fully human afterward.
The adaptation becomes the identity. We have built economic systems that reward this emotional numbness. The most successful leaders are often those who can make decisions without being burdened by empathy. They advance not despite their indifference to suffering but because of it. Meanwhile, those who remain sensitive to human cost find themselves at a systematic disadvantage, gradually filtered out of positions where they might make a difference.
The Persistence of Patterns Look at the armed conflicts tearing apart our world, and you see the same dynamics Galeano observed in economic exploitation applied to violence. The victims become statistics, their names unknown, their faces unseen. A hospital becomes a “military target.” A school becomes “collateral damage.” Children become “enemy combatants.” The same abstraction that turns workers into resources turns civilians into acceptable losses.
These conflicts reveal something uncomfortable about human nature: our capacity for systematic cruelty seems inexhaustible. We have international laws, human rights frameworks, global communication that makes suffering visible, and yet the violence continues. Each generation discovers new ways to inflict ancient forms of pain. The tools evolve—from swords to drones—but the willingness to use them against other humans remains constant.
What makes this particularly disheartening is how quickly victims can become perpetrators. The oppressed, when they gain power, often replicate the systems that oppressed them. The colonized become colonizers. The abused become abusers. The pattern suggests that cruelty is not a deviation from human nature but an expression of it, waiting to emerge whenever conditions permit.
The Illusion of Progress We tell ourselves stories about moral progress, about civilization advancing toward greater compassion and justice. And there is truth in these stories—slavery is now universally condemned, democratic ideals have spread, human rights discourse has global reach. But these advances exist alongside unchanged patterns of cruelty and indifference. We have become more sophisticated in our methods, more subtle in our violence, more efficient in our exploitation.
The plantation becomes the sweatshop. The colonial administrator becomes the international development expert. The inquisitor becomes the algorithm that decides who gets healthcare. The forms change, but the fundamental dynamic persists: some humans deciding that other humans are expendable in service of larger goals.
Perhaps the most honest conclusion is that the brief periods of peace and cooperation in human history are the anomalies, not the norm. The moral frameworks we construct—religions, philosophies, legal systems—are elaborate attempts to contain something that remains fundamentally unchanged within us. They work, sometimes, for some people, in some places, for limited periods. But they are always fighting against gravity.
The Acceptance of Limits There is something oddly liberating in accepting the persistence of human cruelty rather than continuing to believe it can be eliminated. If indifference and violence are permanent features of human society rather than problems to be solved, then the question becomes not how to create a perfect world but how to minimize harm in an imperfect one.
This acceptance does not mean resignation. It means working within reality rather than against it. Building systems that assume humans will sometimes be cruel rather than systems that assume they won’t. Creating redundancies and safeguards that limit the damage any individual or group can inflict. Recognizing that moral progress is temporary and fragile, requiring constant maintenance rather than being a permanent achievement.
Galeano’s nobodies are still with us, multiplied by technology and globalization. They work in factories we never see, fight in wars we barely acknowledge, suffer from diseases we could cure but choose not to fund. They remain nobody not because we cannot see them but because seeing them clearly would require us to confront uncomfortable truths about ourselves and the systems we maintain.
The machinery of indifference grinds on, fed by our small cruelties and large abstractions, our inherited pain and systemic incentives. It operates with or without our consent, but never without our participation. We are all complicit, and we are all victims, caught in patterns older than civilization and seemingly more durable than any attempt to break them.
Perhaps wisdom lies not in the impossible dream of ending human cruelty but in the more modest goal of reducing it where we can, acknowledging it where we cannot, and refusing to let our necessary numbness become complete blindness. The nobodies are still nobody, but at least we can choose whether to keep pretending we don’t see them.
The nobodies (Los nadies) by Eduardo Galeano, from the book El libro de los abrazos, 1989.
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping from poverty, that one magical day good luck will soon rain, that good luck will pour down, but good luck doesn’t rain, neither yesterday nor today,nor tomorrow, nor ever, nor does good fall from the sky in little mild showers, however much the nobodies call for it, even if their left hands itch or they get up using their right feet, or they change their brooms at new year. The nobodies: the children of nobody, that masters of nothing, The nobodies: the nothings, those made nothing, running after the hare, dying life, fucked, totally fucked: who are not, although they were. Who speak no languages, only dialects. Who have no religions, only superstitions. Who have have no arts, only crafts. Who have no culture, only folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who have faces, only arms. Who don’t have names, only numbers. Who don’t count in world history, just in the local press’s stories of violence, crime, misfortune and disaster,. The nobodies who are worth less than the bullets that kill them.
Sueñan las pulgas con comprarse un perro y sueñan los nadies con salir de pobres, que algún mágico día llueva de pronto la buena suerte, que llueva a cántaros la buena suerte; pero la buena suerte no llueve ayer, ni hoy, ni mañana, ni nunca, ni en lloviznita cae del cielo la buena suerte, por mucho que los nadies la llamen y aunque les pique la mano izquierda, o se levanten con el pie derecho, o empiecen el año cambiando de escoba. Los nadies: los hijos de nadie, los dueños de nada. Los nadies: los ningunos, los ninguneados, corriendo la liebre, muriendo la vida… Que no son, aunque sean. Que no hablan idiomas, sino dialectos. Que no profesan religiones, sino supersticiones. Que no hacen arte, sino artesanía. Que no practican cultura, sino folklore. Que no son seres humanos, sino recursos humanos. Que no tienen cara, sino brazos. Que no tienen nombre, sino número. Que no figuran en la historia universal, sino en la crónica roja de la prensa local. Los nadies, que cuestan menos que la bala que los mata
I lose track of time—not just the hours in a day, but the architecture of time itself. Days blur into weeks, weeks into months, and suddenly I’m looking back at years that feel like they happened to someone else, in some other lifetime I can barely access. It’s not simply forgetting; it’s a deeper disorientation, an inability to place the events of my life on any coherent timeline.
This temporal blindness has been building gradually, like fog rolling in so slowly you don’t notice until the familiar landmarks of memory have disappeared. Most of my days feel interchangeable now, lacking the distinct markers that once helped me navigate the story of my own life. Without these anchors, time becomes elastic and strange—months can feel like weeks, years like months, and recent events feel ancient while distant memories seem immediate.
But some moments still cut through the haze with startling clarity. Travel creates these temporal anchors naturally—the sensory richness of new places, disrupted routines, the way my brain has to pay attention when everything is unfamiliar. So do moments of intense freedom and comfort, those rare times when I feel most myself, when social expectations fall away and I’m doing exactly what I want without compromise. And certain people, too, become markers in time—those who draw out different parts of me or create space for conversations that feel like they matter.
What strikes me about these clear moments is their common thread: they’re all times when I feel fully alive and present, when I’m engaged rather than going through motions. They represent pockets of authentic experience in an otherwise routine existence. The tragedy isn’t that I can’t remember what happened—it’s that so much of what happens doesn’t feel worth remembering.
Perhaps the gradual erosion of temporal landmarks isn’t just about aging or the sameness imposed by modern life. Maybe it’s about how rarely we allow ourselves to be fully present, how infrequently we create conditions for the kind of aliveness that makes moments stick. Time may not actually be speeding up—we might just be sleepwalking through most of it, leaving behind a wake of forgettable days that our minds, quite reasonably, choose not to preserve.
The solution isn’t necessarily to manufacture constant novelty or drama. But recognizing what makes certain moments memorable—travel, freedom, meaningful connection—might offer clues about what our minds need to start forming temporal anchors again. Even small acts of presence and intention might help distinguish one day from another. They create the kind of memories that come with their time signatures intact.
The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you don’t mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they don’t sing all the time
The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn’t half so bad if it isn’t you
Oh the world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t much mind a few dead minds in the higher places or a bomb or two now and then in your upturned faces or such other improprieties as our Name Brand society is prey to with its men of distinction and its men of extinction and its priests and other patrolmen and its various segregations and congressional investigations and other constipations that our fool flesh is heir to
Yes the world is the best place of all for a lot of such things as making the fun scene and making the love scene and making the sad scene and singing low songs of having inspirations and walking around looking at everything and smelling flowers and goosing statues and even thinking and kissing people and making babies and wearing pants and waving hats and dancing and going swimming in rivers on picnics in the middle of the summer and just generally ‘living it up’
Yes but then right in the middle of it comes the smiling mortician
’T is you that are the music, not your song. The song is but a door which, opening wide, Lets forth the pent-up melody inside, Your spirit’s harmony, which clear and strong Sing but of you. Throughout your whole life long Your songs, your thoughts, your doings, each divide This perfect beauty; waves within a tide, Or single notes amid a glorious throng. The song of earth has many different chords; Ocean has many moods and many tones Yet always ocean. In the damp Spring woods The painted trillium smiles, while crisp pine cones Autumn alone can ripen. So is this One music with a thousand cadences.
I can’t find a definitive answer. There are some genres—just a few—that don’t speak to me, but almost all music transforms the often banal rhythms of everyday life into something cinematic and wonderful.
I like to think that I’ve got this incredible range that spans from the raw power of punk to the grandiose drama of opera, the passionate intensity of flamenco to the groove mastery of Prince’s funk.
I am drawn to music that has intensity and emotional authenticity. This could be delivered through a screaming guitar, a soaring aria, or Prince’s unmistakable groove. I suppose these seemingly different genres all share that transformative cinematic quality. Each one paints everyday life with bold, dramatic strokes – just in very different colors.
I haven’t written letters in so long that I’m not quite sure how to do this.
If you have made it as far into the future, I suppose you have managed to survive the anxiety and anger you were feeling when everything around you defied a logical explanation. Maybe you have learned that things are not as extreme as you perceive them. Although, being a Leo, I’m intrigued how you have managed to curb your tendency to overreact.
If you have made it as far into the future, I hope you have outgrown therapy or, at least, have found a therapist that does not seem to need help more than you do and, managed to open up and allowed yourself to be helped.
If you have made it as far into the future, I hope you danced as much and often as you could and that you have managed to read all the books you wanted to read and kept your to read pile always high.
If you made it as far into the future, I hope you have understood how to deal with the pain of losing loved ones and that you have kept your friends close by. I hope that living alone has not been too much of a burden and that you have enjoyed your freedom.
If you made it this far into the future, I guess you have mastered your horrible tendency to procrastinate. Maybe you followed through with all your plans and are now living in some Greek island surrounded by blue.
I hope you have always carried with you all the songs that have helped life make sense and that your inner soundtrack keeps growing.
I hope you have not gotten lost inside yourself. I hope you still remember.
I hope you have kept the passion and that you have not become indifferent to people, to beauty. I hope you still believe that elegance is a form of resistance.
I hope you have never stayed quiet in the face of injustice, that you have helped others and, that your world is much better than the one right now. I hope you haven’t given in.
I hope you have owned your choices and that you have always insisted on being the Sun and never a black hole.
Even if you do not look like the AI projected version of yourself, I hope your eyes keep showing that your name is Hope instead of impossible.
I hope you still like poetry even if you have never managed to write a single line of verse.
Dear future self By JP Howard
If I should ever forget you, this is my love note to you
You were loved You were somebody’s lover You were loving You held parts of all the women you loved, somewhere deep in your generous heart
You were heartbroken You were a heartbreaker too, girl Sometimes you were heartache Your heart never grew heavy though, I remember that about you
You were silly You were giggles You were somebody’s Mama You always wanted to be a Mama Mama was the greatest title you ever had
You were jealous as fuck You were selfish You were sad You held other folks’ sadness, especially Mama’s sadness You buried that deep in our heart
You were swag girl Leo charm and confidence Couldn’t nobody crack you up as much as yourself
You were cute and you were vain You wore lipstick under your mask during a pandemic because you were cute and you were vain
You loved your family Your lover loved you for decades Sometimes you would ask yourself, How I get so lucky, girl?
You loved people You were at home on a stage in front of a mic, sitting with community in a circle, or talking one on one with a friend for hours on end in a coffee shop
You were a poet You are a poet This is your love poem to yourself, Juliet
For nations vague as weed, For nomads among stones, Small-statured cross-faced tribes And cobble-close families In mill-towns on dark mornings Life is slow dying.
So are their separate ways Of building, benediction, Measuring love and money Ways of slowly dying. The day spent hunting pig Or holding a garden-party,
Hours giving evidence Or birth, advance On death equally slowly. And saying so to some Means nothing; others it leaves Nothing to be said.
In the late 90s, when Skunk Anansie emerged with their fierce blend of alternative rock and political awareness, frontwoman Skin confronted society’s hypocrisy with unflinching honesty. Their music, to which I confess, I wasn’t paying much attention at the time, but can hear it loud and clear from the first time I saw them live, offered profound commentary on disillusionment, authenticity, and betrayal that remains startlingly relevant today.
In today’s social media landscape, we curate selective versions of ourselves, seeking validation in an ecosystem that promises universal acceptance while quietly enforcing rigid conformity. The anger in Skin’s voice when challenging religious and social hypocrisy reminds us that genuine acceptance remains conditional—algorithms, trends, and social capital determining who is seen and who remains invisible.
The message behind “God Loves Only You” resonates powerfully in an era where people preach inclusivity while practicing exclusion. We’ve traded explicit prejudice for implicit bias, creating environments where belonging still comes with unspoken qualifications. How many of us perform the correct political positions online while failing to embody those principles in our daily lives?
Skunk Anansie, Porto 02.28.2025
“It Takes Blood & Guts To Be This Cool But I’m Still Just A Cliché” highlights our contemporary paradox. We demand authenticity yet punish genuine vulnerability. Today’s world expects us to be fearlessly original yet utterly digestible, to stand out while fitting in. The song’s provocative title captures this contradiction perfectly.
Those who dare to exist outside accepted parameters face consequences ranging from algorithmic invisibility to outright harassment. Meanwhile, true boldness gets commodified, packaged, and resold as aesthetic without substance. We’ve developed sophisticated language for social justice while failing to achieve its fundamental aims—much like the performative rebellions Skin critiqued decades ago.
Skunk Anansie, Porto 02.28.2025
“Hedonism (Just Because You Feel Good)” offers another layer to our modern dilemma. In an era of instant gratification and endless distraction, the song’s exploration of pleasure without purpose speaks directly to our attention economy. Social media platforms are designed like casinos—engineered to maximize engagement through dopamine hits while creating little lasting satisfaction.
The chorus question, “Just because you feel good, does it mean that you’re right?” perfectly encapsulates our collective susceptibility to emotional reasoning. From consumer choices to political positions, we increasingly mistake feeling good for being right, comfort for truth. The hollow promise of digital hedonism—endless scrolling, outrage cycles, validation seeking—leaves us, as Skin powerfully articulates, “Empty like the hole you left behind.”
Skunk Anansie, Porto 02.28.2025
Skunk Anansie’s “Yes, It’s Fucking Political” delivers a raw, uncompromising message that challenges our ability to remain neutral in times of conflict. In today’s world, wars rage on physical battlefields and across digital information spaces. The song’s central assertion—that everything is political—cuts through comfortable illusions of neutrality.
As Skin defiantly proclaims in the song, political realities can’t be escaped or ignored; they shape our lives whether we acknowledge them or not. This truth resonates powerfully in our current moment, where algorithms curate our worldviews while creating the illusion of objective reality. The conflicts we witness—from armed struggles to culture wars—aren’t distant abstractions but forces that directly impact human lives.
The song’s visceral intensity highlights the frustration of those whose suffering is reduced to debate topics. Their existence is framed as “political.” Meanwhile, others enjoy the privilege of claiming neutrality. At a time when we can customize our information environments to screen out uncomfortable realities, Skunk Anansie’s confrontational approach reminds us that turning away from conflict doesn’t make it disappear—it merely privileges those who benefit from the status quo.
Skunk Anansie, Porto 03.18.2022
“This Means War” offers a perfect companion to these political themes by bringing conflict to the personal level. The song’s explosive energy captures the moment when diplomacy ends and confrontation becomes necessary—not just in global politics but in our individual lives and relationships.
In today’s world, we’re encouraged to compromise, to seek middle ground, to maintain peace at all costs—even when fundamental values and boundaries are at stake. “This Means War” reminds us that sometimes, drawing a line is not just appropriate but necessary. The song’s defiant stance resonates with anyone who has reached their breaking point after repeated betrayals or violations.
The lyrics speak to personal liberation through confrontation. This theme is particularly relevant today. We increasingly recognize how power imbalances shape even our most intimate relationships. When Skin sings about declaring war, she’s articulating the moment of reclaiming power after prolonged subjugation, of refusing further compromise after continual exploitation.
From setting boundaries with manipulative institutions to refusing engagement with bad-faith arguments, from breaking cycles of abuse to confronting systemic injustice. The song’s message isn’t about glorifying conflict but recognizing its necessity in certain contexts—a message that cuts against our culture’s emphasis on toxic positivity and endless accommodation.
Skunk Anansie, Porto 02.28.2025
I believed in you, well, I was wrong. How many institutions have failed us? How many movements have been corrupted from within? How many public figures have revealed themselves to be contrary to their cultivated image? We’re continually investing faith in platforms, personalities, and communities that promise connection but deliver surveillance, promise empowerment but deliver exploitation. We believed in the democratizing power of technology only to watch it amplify inequality. We believed in the possibility of genuine community only to experience unprecedented isolation.
Skunk Anansie, Porto 02.28.2025
Like the powerful vocals and words that define Skunk Anansie’s sound, perhaps mine (our ) response to today’s challenges should be neither whispered conformity nor performative outrage, but something more raw, more honest, and ultimately more revolutionary—the sound of our authentic voices, raised together. Hope, at this time, might be just naive optimism against all evidence but, it might as well be a deliberate choice made with full awareness of reality’s harshness.
In a world where climate anxiety, political polarization, economic uncertainty, and technological disruption create a perfect storm of existential dread, envisioning alternative futures becomes crucial. It is both a psychological necessity and a political act. My biggest challenge, I don’t think it’s particular to me, is how to simultaneously process difficult truths while maintaining the creative capacity to imagine beyond them.
It does take music to survive. Music like Skunk Anansie’s doesn’t just entertain—it validates our experiences, expresses our frustrations, and offers both catharsis and connection. In a world that can feel increasingly alienating and chaotic, that musical connection is essential. It becomes not just enjoyable but necessary for emotional survival.
Live performances add another dimension entirely. There’s something about being physically present in a space with other fans who understand the importance of these songs that creates a genuine community, even if just for a few hours. It’s a reminder that we’re not alone in our experiences or our reactions to the world.
There’s something comforting about the idea that certain events or connections are “meant to be” – that there’s some larger pattern or purpose to our lives. Many people find meaning in interpreting significant events as part of a larger plan.
On the other hand, I’m drawn to the perspective that we have genuine agency in shaping our lives, and that the future isn’t predetermined. There’s something powerful about the idea that our choices and actions genuinely matter in determining what happens.
Some philosophical traditions try to reconcile these views – suggesting that perhaps certain broad patterns might be destined while specific details remain under our control, or that destiny might operate at a higher level while still allowing for free choice within certain parameters.
I would say I don’t believe in fate but, I’m Portuguese….
Fado, as a music genre, is deeply tied to the Portuguese concept of saudade—a mix of longing, nostalgia, and fate. The very word “Fado” comes from the Latin fatum, meaning “fate” or “destiny,” reflecting the idea that life’s joys and sorrows are inescapable.
Even if you don’t fully believe in fate, Fado embodies a cultural perspective where destiny plays a role in shaping human experiences—especially in love, loss, and hardship. The music suggests that some emotions and events are inevitable, but at the same time, Fado is an expression of personal agency, as singers pour their souls into shaping the narrative.
Portuguese culture carries a certain introspective melancholy—not just in Fado but also in literature, poetry, and even the way history is remembered. There’s a balance between accepting sorrow as part of life and finding beauty in it.
Saudade and Fado are deeply intertwined with Portuguese history, emerging from and reflecting the nation’s unique historical experiences.
Portugal’s identity was profoundly shaped by the Age of Discoveries (15th-16th centuries), when this small nation became a global maritime empire. This period created a culture of separation and longing – sailors and explorers left home for years or forever, families were torn apart, and communities lived with constant absence. Saudade developed as an emotional response to this collective experience of separation.
The economic structure of this maritime empire meant Portugal was often looking outward rather than developing internally. When ships didn’t return or imperial ventures failed, this created a cultural pattern of anticipation followed by disappointment – another dimension of saudade.
After this golden age came Portugal’s long decline – the loss of independence to Spain (1580-1640), the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Napoleonic invasions, the loss of Brazil, and the political turmoil of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This historical arc from glory to struggle embedded a sense of lost grandeur in Portuguese cultural consciousness.
Fado emerged in the early 19th century primarily in working-class urban neighborhoods of Lisbon, coinciding with a period of national difficulty. It became a musical expression of this complex historical experience – not just personal longing but a collective cultural memory of past greatness contrasted with present difficulties.
During the Salazar dictatorship (1933-1974), this backward-looking tendency was sometimes exploited – the regime used a sanitized version of Fado and the concept of saudade in its propaganda. Yet authentic Fado remained a vital way for common people to express their emotional relationship with fate and history.
Eduardo Lourenço described Portugal as suffering from “hyperidentity” – an excessive preoccupation with national identity and destiny based on a mythologized past. Saudade and Fado became cultural spaces where this complex relationship with history could be emotionally processed rather than just intellectually analyzed.
This historical context helps explain why Fado approaches fate emotionally rather than philosophically – it emerged as a way for people to express and make sense of their lived historical experience rather than to theorize about it.
A lot of musical landscapes could exemplify this, I chose my favorite. No Teu Poema / In your Poem. A magnificent poem written by José Luís Tinoco , first sang by Carlos do Carmo in 1976, and here in my absolute favorite version by Amor Electro. Not Fado as such but the melancholy is still there.
This is a beautiful example of how the Portuguese poetic tradition captures both resignation and resistance. The lyrics acknowledge pain, struggle, and fate (a sina de quem nasce fraco ou forte), but they also hold space for courage (o passo da coragem em casa escura), hope (a esperança acesa atrás do muro), and an open future (um verso em branco à espera do futuro). A blank verse without measure exists. It suggests that within fate’s poem, there are still unwritten spaces. These are moments of possibility within destiny’s framework.
Perhaps most powerful is “A dor que sei de cor, mas não recito” (The pain I know by heart, but do not recite). This suggests that fate’s pain is so deeply internalized that it need not be explained or philosophized about—it simply exists as emotional knowledge.
For me, this song beautifully captures how Fado approaches fate—not by explaining why things happen, but by emotionally inhabiting the experience of living within destiny’s constraints while finding both beauty and dignity in that condition.
It’s like life is shaped by forces beyond our control—fate, history, circumstance—but within that, there’s still the individual’s voice, the choice to fight, to persist, or to find meaning. Do you feel like this duality is part of your own outlook on life?
No teu poema Existe um verso em branco e sem medida Um corpo que respira, um céu aberto Janela debruçada para a vida
No teu poema Existe a dor calada lá no fundo O passo da coragem em casa escura E aberta, uma varanda para o mundo
Existe a noite O riso e a voz refeita à luz do dia A festa da senhora da agonia E o cansaço do corpo que adormece em cama fria
No teu poema Existe o grito e o eco da metralha A dor que sei de cor mas não recito E os sonos inquietos de quem falha
No teu poema Existe um cantochão alentejano A rua e o pregão de uma varina E um barco assoprado à todo o pano
Existe a noite O canto em vozes juntas, vozes certas Canção de uma só letra e um só destino a embarcar O cais da nova nau das descobertas
Existe um rio A sina de quem nasce fraco, ou forte O risco, a raiva a luta de quem cai ou que resiste Que vence ou adormece antes da morte
No teu poema Existe a esperança acesa atrás do muro Existe tudo mais que ainda me escapa E um verso em branco à espera Do futuro
In your poem There is a blank verse, boundless and free A body that breathes, an open sky A window leaning into life
In your poem There is silent pain deep within The step of courage in a darkened home And open, a balcony to the world
There is the night Laughter and a voice remade by daylight The feast of Our Lady of Agony And the weariness of a body That falls asleep in a cold bed
In your poem There is the cry and the echo of gunfire The pain I know by heart but never recite And the restless sleep of those who fail
In your poem There is an Alentejan chant The street and the call of a fishmonger And a ship blown forward at full sail
There is the night The song in voices joined, voices sure A tune with just one word, one shared fate Embarking from the dock Of a new ship of discoveries
There is a river The destiny of those born weak, or strong The risk, the rage, the struggle Of those who fall or those who resist Who triumph or fall asleep before death
In your poem There is hope burning beyond the wall There is everything else I cannot yet grasp And a blank verse waiting For the future
when I remained true to myself and moved closer to becoming the person I aspire to be.
when I was able to connect to someone and was genuinely interested in what they had to say
And it would always be a summer day, suspended in timeless radiance—no beginning, no end. Just the feeling of endless warmth and light, a moment stretched into infinity.
Here, in this eternal instant, warmth becomes more than temperature—it is a sensation that permeates skin, memory, and imagination.
No clock measures these moments. No shadow hints at morning or evening. There is only this: pure, uninterrupted radiance. A day that is not a day, but a feeling—boundless, perfect, suspended between breath and memory, where time loses all meaning and only sensation remains.
On a perfect day at the perfect time, when those beautiful colors combine, I’ll be wide awake, I’ll be living free cause that perfect feeling is inside of me
I do not know how I got here. Time is a difficult concept for me and, I really do not know the answer to how do significant life events or the passage of time influence my perspective on life.
I remember a few negative experiences from my childhood but can’t be really precise on the when; up to now I have been fortunate enough not to loose my parents, getting divorced felt more like a failure than a significant life event, most probably because getting married felt like a mistake. This, my therapist says, suggests a kind of emotional self-protection, a way of minimizing the impact of what could have been a deeply transformative experience. Perhaps this speaks to a broader coping mechanism – the ability to reframe potentially painful experiences in a way that doesn’t allow them to become definitional moments.
Loosing my grandmother was hard but I can’t remember the exact year, 2011, maybe. In November 2014 I was alone in Vietnam for work and, on the 16th I received a text message saying that my great aunt (my grandmother’s sister) had died. I can’t remember what the movie on the hotel TV was but the final credits rolled in to the sound of Into My Arms. Violeta, who was also there for work as well and whom I had never met before, and have never seen again but 10 years on still says I’m her “One Night Best Friend Forever” spent the whole day and evening with me the next day wandering the streets, parks, shops and cafés of Hanoi. We spent same time at a particular coffee shop watching life happen on the other side of the street while the radio played a Vietnamese rendition of Seasons in the Sun.
If I could, I’m pretty sure I can’t, speak of myself as a “curator”, I would say that my memories seem to be curated not by chronological accuracy, but by emotional resonance. The day in Hanoi, the loss of my great aunt, these moments have been preserved with a kind of tender, even if painful, clarity.
The inaccuracy of our memories—where dates and childhood experiences are unclear—indicates that we perceive time differently, more instinctively than in a straight line. We don’t recall events in order but through how they made us feel. Memories linger not due to exact times, but because of their ability to change us.
I don’t know if I have changed but I did learn that I too have the ability to be vulnerable, to allow a stranger to witness my grief, and to be remarkably open to human connection.
I have also learned how to find beauty in uncertainty, meaning in transient connections. The Vietnamese rendition of “Seasons in the Sun” playing while life unfolded on a street in Hanoi became a metaphor for what I think is my approach to existence – finding poetry in unexpected moments, creating meaning from seemingly random encounters.
I haven’t created a clear plan for my life and I, definitely don’t have everything figured out. When I’m being kind to myself, I think of my experiences as improvisational music. Maybe because I am too lazy to do it differently, I have accepted that it’s not about sticking to a script; it’s about discovering harmony in unexpected moments and finding meaning in random encounters. The strangers who are briefly but unconditionally there for me and the music that captures emotions too complex for words – these are the true landmarks of my journey.
How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?
Stories from A Closet of Errors 