Their disdain for American gun culture was touched on in the album’s track “Skin the Rabbit.” Their latest album, America, Location 12 (2017), was no exception. In the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida massacre this still holds true.ĭispatch, most known for their 1997 hit, “The General,” has never refrained from letting their social values and political beliefs seep into the music. And here we are in 2018, changing again.Ĭhange in America seems to require a few key ingredients: a rightfully pissed-off new generation, stagnant politicians to rally against, and songs to capture the momentum of the times. “Come, senators, congressmen/Please heed the call/Don't stand in the doorway/Don't block up the hall/For he that gets hurt/Will be he who has stalled.”Īnd as history proved, the times were a-changin’. While America was a powder keg of tension and energy in the face of Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement, Dylan gave his prophecy and plea: In his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan equated songs with guides into “a liberated republic.” Visions of this liberation prevailed throughout The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) and The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964). Dylan embodied the times and shaped the society that followed, a feat achieved only by icons. Woody Guthrie (“This Land is Your Land”) and Pete Seeger (“Where Have All the Flowers Gone”) laid the folk-foundation of Dylan’s pulpit. While these songs respond to an individual, tragic time in history, they are part of a greater, long-standing American tradition of singing out in the face of injustice- a tradition made famous by Bob Dylan. Today, artists such as Dispatch and Pearl Jam are taking to their guitars to demand gun reform in the wake of numerous tragedies. Such songs owe their existence to the strife of the present but their hope is derived from the fact that the voices singing along may know a better world. However, there is another form of musical time travel, a bit harder to come by: a song that not only propels us forward but actually has a hand in shaping the future.

Everyone has their own cherished time portal. Any song that has ever played in the background while a memory is being formed is thereby instilled with the power to bring listeners back to a certain time.

Protest songs by pearl jam