Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Music has always been more than sound arranged in time; it is memory, protest, prayer, and possibility all carried on the same invisible current. A melody can slip past defenses that speeches cannot penetrate, and a chorus can unite strangers faster than any political platform. When people feel powerless, they sing. When history tightens, music loosens it again. That is why the protest songs of the Vietnam era still feel startlingly alive today—not as nostalgia, but as unfinished conversation.

Artists like John Lennon understood that simplicity could be revolutionary. His calls for peace were not complicated manifestos; they were invitations. The power was in repetition, in the insistence that ordinary voices together could become impossible to ignore. In an age still marked by war, division, and competing truths shouted across digital barricades, that insistence feels less like a relic and more like instruction.

The harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young carried grief and outrage in equal measure. Their music did not pretend the world was gentle; it demanded that listeners look directly at violence carried out in their name. Today, images travel faster and tragedies multiply in real time, yet the emotional question remains unchanged: what responsibility does a witness carry? Their songs continue to ask it, and we are still trying to answer.

With Buffalo Springfield, protest sounded like tension itself—the uneasy recognition that something is happening here, even if no one agrees on what it is. That ambiguity mirrors the present moment, where truth is debated, authority questioned, and the ground beneath public life feels perpetually unstable. The music does not resolve the conflict; it forces us to stand inside it.

And then there is Jimi Hendrix, whose guitar could bend anguish, patriotism, and defiance into the same vibrating note. He showed that protest did not always need words. Sound alone could expose contradiction: beauty tangled with destruction, hope threaded through noise. In a world still wrestling with what nations promise and what they deliver, that wordless honesty may be more relevant than ever.

The tradition did not end in the 1960s. Contemporary voices continue to carry that same restless moral energy forward, none more enduring than Bruce Springsteen. His newer anthems echo the timeless concerns of dignity, labor, community, and the cost of power, proving that protest music is not bound to a single war or generation. Like the songs of Vietnam’s era, his work speaks in plain language about complicated truths, the kind that linger long after headlines fade. It is easy to imagine these songs being sung decades from now, not as artifacts of a moment but as companions to whatever struggles come next.

What makes these songs endure is not merely their historical setting but their emotional accuracy. They speak to cycles—war returning, injustice resurfacing, generations rediscovering the same questions under new names. Technology changes, borders shift, leaders rise and fall, yet the human longing for peace, dignity, and truth remains stubbornly constant. Music becomes the bridge across those repeating years, carrying feeling where facts alone cannot travel.

To say these songs are relevant today is almost too small a claim. They are reminders that change has always begun with voices willing to be heard together. Music does not pass laws or sign treaties, but it moves the people who do. And when enough hearts move in the same direction, the world—slowly, imperfectly, but undeniably—moves with them.