If You Want to Be on the Right Side of History, Follow the Music

History is loud when you’re living inside it. Everyone is certain. Everyone has a microphone. Every moment feels urgent and absolute, as if the future is being decided in real time by whoever speaks with the most confidence.

But history is quiet when it looks back.

What survives is rarely the speeches that demanded obedience. It’s the songs that told the truth gently enough to outlive the moment that produced them.

I have a theory I keep returning to, especially when the world feels heavy.

If you want to be on the right side of history, follow the music.

Not the music that spikes with adrenaline or flatters power in the heat of the moment. The music that lasts. The songs people keep playing decades later when the context has faded but the feeling still makes sense.

Because music has a way of sorting truth from certainty.

There were plenty of songs written in every era that defended the wrong side of history. We just don’t remember most of them. They were built for the moment, not for memory. They justified. They rallied. They reassured. And then they disappeared when time exposed what they were propping up.

What remains tends to do something different.

The songs that survive don’t just oppose something. They imagine something else.

That’s an important distinction.

A lot of protest art knows how to complain. It knows how to name what’s broken. That matters. Naming matters. But complaint alone has a short shelf life. It exhausts the listener and traps the artist in reaction mode.

The music that endures almost always moves beyond “don’t do this” and toward “we can be more than this.”

Think about how often this pattern repeats.

In my lifetime, there were almost no songs celebrating war itself, with one very specific post-9/11 exception. Those songs captured grief and anger honestly. But they stayed locked in that moment. They didn’t widen. They didn’t deepen. They didn’t age into reflection.

At the same time, artists who questioned power, who expressed discomfort, who resisted certainty, were punished in real time. And then slowly, quietly, history caught up to them. Not because they were perfect. But because they were honest.

That happens again and again.

The music that lasts is rarely the music that feels safest when it’s released. It’s the music that risks saying something incomplete. Something vulnerable. Something human.

Songs like “A Change Is Gonna Come” didn’t tell people what to think. They testified. They crossed a line from private feeling into public risk. They didn’t offer solutions. They offered witness.

Songs like “What’s Going On” didn’t accuse. They asked. They diagnosed a sickness softly enough that people stayed in the room. They trusted listeners to recognize themselves in the question.

Songs like “People Get Ready” didn’t just resist injustice. They pointed toward movement. Toward preparation. Toward shared responsibility.

Notice what those songs have in common.

They are not built on outrage alone.
They are not obsessed with being right.
They are not satisfied with identifying villains.

They are interested in dignity. In community. In what comes next.

That’s why they last.

This is where I struggle sometimes with modern protest music. Not because it’s wrong. Often it’s right. Sometimes painfully so. But being right in the moment is not the same thing as being remembered.

Some songs function like newspaper headlines. Necessary. Sharp. Time-stamped. They document the day. Others function like memory. They tell future listeners what it felt like to live through something uncertain and frightening and unresolved.

Both matter. But only one tends to survive time.

Satire can expose cruelty. Anger can name injustice. But music that endures usually does something harder. It reveals a human pattern beneath the policy. Fear seeking control. Power recruiting insecurity. People standing together anyway.

When history looks back, it doesn’t just ask who won. It asks who understood what was happening.

That’s why I keep returning to music when things feel disorienting.

Not to escape. To orient.

Music reminds me that we’ve been here before. That fear has always tried to pass itself off as order. That control has always claimed to be protection. And that communities have always been stronger than the narratives trying to divide them.

The songs that last don’t pretend everything will be fine. They don’t deny pain. They don’t rush to resolution.

They say something quieter and braver.

We can be better than this.
We have been before.
And we are not alone.

History doesn’t reward certainty. It rewards humility. It rewards imagination. It rewards the people who told the truth without knowing how it would end.

So when I wonder how this moment will be remembered, I don’t just watch the headlines. I listen for the songs that will still make sense when the noise has passed.

The ones that help people breathe.
The ones that widen the horizon.
The ones that don’t just resist the past but make room for a future worth living in.

If you want to be on the right side of history, follow the music.

Not because musicians are prophets.

But because the music that lasts almost always knows which way the heart was leaning when everything else was shouting.

And the heart, over time, has a better track record than power ever has.