I’ve thought about this a lot in the past few months-all the debates convened in the name of “culture,” the political fractures subsumed within questions of taste or preference. He did nothing less than remap the borders of the American imagination. And if the election of Donald Trump demonstrated anything, it’s that we should never underestimate the unpredictable rhythms of culture, the possibility that a random utterance or an empty boast might coalesce into a movement. There are moments when a song captures our present with prophetic clarity and others when it shines just out of reach, or takes us lower than we thought possible. But American music is a chronicle of joy and pain, a version of the past that floats alongside official history. What’s the point of listening to music during a moment that seems so fraught? In the shadow of all the material changes that might soon come, talking about culture can feel like a waste of time, a momentary distraction on the way to a total despondency. Or maybe that was just the melodrama shading all of our actions right now, whether your candidate won or lost, as we try to resume normal life in the hyper-aware state that someday someone will ask what it was like to live through this week. People sharing admiration for something in common: I sat in my car and wondered if this wasn’t where all political feelings begin. The Giant Claw remix of Guerilla Toss’s “Grass Shack,” he told me. I sent the student a quick message asking him what it was. Her voice sounded like the guide to somewhere I wanted to go.

It was messy and bewitching, brutal and brittle at once. She wasn’t quite singing in the conventional sense it was more like she was throwing her voice against a shifting backdrop of ecstatic, wailing synths. “I do not know tomorrow, only today,” a woman teased and taunted. A couple of days ago, I was driving to the train station near the college where I work when I heard one of my students playing songs on the campus radio station. At the very least, these young people remind you of the necessities: the majesty of hope, the value of proper hydration, the need for good art.

One of the best things about teaching is that it involves surrounding yourself with people who are young and talented, and you go to sleep each night hopeful that one of them, whose path you perhaps had the privilege of steadying somewhere along the way, will later see something that you and others who have come before were blind to.

The brave one song