Day 4,306—The Moon is There Somewhere—

 

        It was so bright this morning that I didn’t need my headlamp. It was so bright this morning that I checked my watch to make sure it was 4:30 a.m. I went back to the cemetery and thought about what I wanted to write about yesterday. I listened to the Bruce Springsteen song about the murderers in Minneapolis by ICE agents. It is a good song, but I doubt it will pierce the ecosystems of the masses the way a song might have done in the 1960s. I thought about writing a letter to Bob Dylan asking him to write a protest song, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it is not him who needs to write a song. Who are the modern pop stars with enough mainstream appeal that could write a protest song that would be both influential and a huge hit? I thought of some of the biggest stars now, like Kendrick Lamar, Bad Bunny, and Taylor Swift. Would any of them write a protest song? I doubt it. Even as Bad Bunny is often referenced as this genre-redefining artist, and as Taylor Swift is supposed to be the best singer-songwriter of a generation, yet she doesn’t have one song that reverberates like “Times Are a-Changing” or “Hurricane.” And what about Kendrick Lamar? He just won a bunch of Grammys, and his songs are usually about something, but again, he has zero songs that you could say have the cultural cache that 1960s protest songs had. I like these artists, but if not for them, who is supposed to write the protest songs? Springsteen and Dylan have done their bit, so why hasn’t someone else come forward yet? I cannot be the only person thinking this.