Culture

Bill Withers. The explicit statement of community: we carry each other when we can't carry ourselves.

USA for Africa. The most literal possible community anthem - the music industry deciding it was one community for one moment.

James Taylor. Community as the person who shows up when you call. Simple and irreplaceable.

Bob Marley. Community as a spiritual reality - the human family choosing to recognize itself as one.

Barbra Streisand. People who need people are the luckiest people in the world. Community as the admission that you are not complete alone - and the fullness that opens when you stop pretending otherwise.

Woody Guthrie. Community as the radical claim that the land belongs to everyone walking it, not only those who own it. Every verse a different person, all of them equally here, equally home.

Earth, Wind & Fire. Pure vitality - twenty-one notes that make it physiologically difficult to stay still.

ABBA. The peak of the Friday night feeling - fully alive in the moment, young and sweet, only seventeen forever.

Pharrell Williams. Vitality as a contagious, generous, ridiculous gift. The song that it is almost physically impossible to hear without smiling.

Queen. Freddie Mercury at escape velocity - vitality at its most incandescent and unstoppable.

Lizzo. Vitality as self-determination - the song that makes you stand up straighter just by listening. The declaration that aliveness is not conditional on anyone else's approval.

Bob Dylan writing for posterity - the anthem of a generation he was handing a torch to.

Michael Jackson on building a legacy of change that begins with you, right now.

Elvis Presley, weeks after MLK's assassination, singing about the legacy of the dream. The baton passed through music.

Eminem feat. Sia. The loneliness of feeling different - and the legacy of art made from that isolation.

The Who. Legacy as refusal - hope I die before I get old. A generation's statement that it would not inherit the world as it was. Legacy defined by what you reject, not only what you build.