This content originally appeared on Go Make Things and was authored by Go Make Things
It’s been a long time since a song has really, truly made me feel all the things.
I don’t just mean like, “this song makes me happy” or “this song gets me pumped up” or “this song makes me feel sad.”
I mean the kind of music that puts you deep in your feelings, where the emotion just totally overwhelms you.
And then Spotify recommended “Hinds Hall 2” by Macklemore…
The song is a follow-up to his first song about Palestinian liberation.
Unlike the original (which is also quite good), this one features three Palestinian artists: Anees, MC Abdul, and Amer Zahr.
I made it exactly 25 seconds in, to the end of the opening bars, before I started crying….
In our lifetime we will be free
One day when the light shines we will be free
In our lifetime we will be free
And they can bury us
But they will find out we are seeds
I don’t just mean a few tears. I mean full-on ugly sobbing.
I was literally walking my dog and had to take a shortcut home, I was so overcome with emotion. This song cracked open a fucking dam of feelings about all the things I’ve been compartmentalizing for a while.
Near the end of the song, Macklemore himself raps…
We don’t own the Earth, don’t own the Earth
We’re killing each other over some lines in the dirt
It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Carl Sagan’s book A Pale Blue Dot, which accompanies a photo taken by the Voyager 1 probe of Earth suspended in a refracted beam of light…
Consider again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.
On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
I don’t know how to fix this.
Hating each other often feels like it’s part of the human condition.
But I know from my background in Anthropology that humans are capable of immense amounts of empathy and cooperation. Whole societies have existed around and thrived around cultures of sharing and communal care.
And we see it in modern societies, too.
Think about the mutual aid you see during disasters. The way neighbors look out for one another in times of crisis. The way people can come together, when the occasion arises.
I want to live in a world where that’s an every day thing.
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This content originally appeared on Go Make Things and was authored by Go Make Things
Go Make Things | Sciencx (2025-03-01T14:30:00+00:00) Music that moves you. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/03/01/music-that-moves-you/
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