There's a moment in the movie “Say Anything" where John Cusack's character Lloyd is standing outside the house of the girl he loves with a resigned look on his face holding up a boombox while Peter Gabriel's “In Your Eyes” plays over the speakers.
Looking back at it now, we can recognize it as the kind of creepy stalkerish behavior it was, but the moment was so iconic that it still continues to be referenced, parodied, memed, and turned into art decades later
That's because the scene isn’t really romantic- it's a one-man protest against what he sees as unfairness and injustice. It's about not being allowed to love someone because other people don't think it's right. It's about rejecting rejection, refusing to take no for an answer, and demanding that people see you for who you are and not the stereotypes in their heads.
The reason that moment strikes such a chord is that it's a moment we've all found ourselves in. Maybe our situation wasn't exactly the same, but we've all been in a moment where we've decided that we are going to stand our ground and say “no this is not okay”, “it isn't right”, “this stops here”, or “enough is enough”.
And that's the part that resonates with us. We have all been that person resigned to holding the line and fighting for something we believe in. We've all stood there feeling helpless and frustrated when the words have run out and there's nothing else we can do, but we keep standing anyway. We choose to not be moved. We choose not to give up and to remain where we are until we either win or get dragged away screaming.
People stand their ground against bean bags, smoke bombs, gas canisters and pepper spray. Some of them even hold it against actual bullets despite being unarmed themselves.
And more often than not, they do it to music.
Music has fueled popular movements and protests for as long as there have been popular movements or things to protest against. When all else has failed, it’s our last, best chance for expressing what we need to have heard when no one is listening.
When our voices are raw from chanting, when the screams are falling on deaf ears, when a young black man is dead and his so called friends are lying about why, when a man is killed in front of his child while she’s still in her pajamas, when a baby is shot over false accusations, when the outrage is so great that words alone just aren’t enough, we can still lift those speakers and rely on the music to say what we can’t.
Because you don’t just hear music, you feel it- both emotionally and physically. And if they’re still not listening, we’ll just turn up the volume 'til the walls shake and their bones rattle.
Like smoke or water, like the very air itself, music is pervasive. It slips through the cracks and fills any space it can find, reaching places nothing else can. It can carry strength and hope even into places of darkness or despair.
Music walks with us in joy and grief and carries us through all our seasons. It feeds our souls the way food nourishes our bodies. We can be denied food, water, freedom, even our lives, but they can’t take the music because we hear it in our hearts even in the silence.
Music is the very rhythm our hearts beat to, and we cannot help but respond to it.
So when we feel like all hope is lost, remember we are not yet beaten.
We just need a bigger boom box.
Image Credit:
Photo by Stephen Michael Barnett
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons