247. Song No. 3,692: “The Future,” Michael Franti & Spearhead
All Rebel Rockers, 2008

Like just about everyone else, Michael Franti has mellowed with age: Scroll through the guy’s social media and it’s videos of him and his wife bringing out the best in each other or addressing his followers like friends or expressing some awed wonder at how beautiful the world is or adding some beauty of his own to it with the music he makes. Love and fatherhood and faithfully being the guy who hugs as many people at his concerts as he possibly can have all, it seems, given him plenty of evidence that leading with a Power to the Peaceful mindset is the best way to encourage others to both follow and advocate for that mentality, and he seems to be the happiest version of himself for it.

But, man, do I selfishly miss the music his younger self made and its mix of both pissed-off political awareness and endless optimism in the face of some pretty dire realities. Like a modern-day, music-slinging Vonnegut, it was steeped in the sense that this is a man who takes kindness so seriously and gets so worked up over its imperative that he swears about it, which is truly one of my favorite qualities in a person.

Right on the cusp of the beleaguered Bush II era and the tentatively hopeful ray of light Obama’s first term inspired came this album, and it embodies that in-equal-parts anger about the abortion of justice that the future felt like and cautious positivity of a better tomorrow always being within reach if we can band together longer enough to give it fertile ground to take root in, a seemingly dueling perspective that so many people felt, even (mayhaps especially) those of us who just kept radicalizing leftward in the ensuing years.

It’s an important distinction to make, that feeling pretty dubious about society’s potential to reconcile its ugly, divisive differences but simultaneously, earnestly believing that humanity can still realize its potential to be better before it’s too late is a far cry from the suffocating clutches of fatalism. We can mourn the future we were promised and use that to make someone else’s future brighter by fixing our shit now: Grief isn’t defeat and frustration isn’t resignation, and treating today’s tragedies as an immutable, inevitable sentence is some selfish bullshit. Because, as bleak as things might seem, there’s always some hope to hold onto if you can find a reason to stay—and fight—for tomorrow.