Evans Liberal Politics, April 18, 2012, by Paul Evans:

The inspiration for this article comes directly from Martin Luther King, Jr., as interpreted in two consecutive songs by Linkin Park. These songs and Dr. King’s speech in the first of these songs were so moving and inspiring for me that I wanted to be sure more people were exposed to them.

The songs can be found on Linkin Park’s album “A Thousand Suns” from 2010, where the first song grades into the second. First is a spooky version of a snippet of a Martin Luther King, Jr., speech, from inside a church, as he often made his speeches or sermons. Sometimes his sermons are speeches or his speeches are sermons, it’s hard to tell.

Perhaps that goes along with his vision for society of a “Blessed Community” of Christians who truly and actually love their neighbors as themselves. I guess in the society we live in, Dr. King’s vision for us had too much of a fully revolutionary implication for the order of things which exists now, and so like JFK, and later Bobby Kennedy, he died. The real message of Martin Luther King, Jr., for many people is not that of the races of man living together and simply interacting together, but involves the vision of all of us truly living and enacting lives that are loving.

As to his death, draw your own conclusions. Personally I am not a conspiracy theorist, but think that often events occur because of an overall social, mental mood of sorts, and what that accomplishes or enacts in our society and lives. Too often, this works in a rather harmful way, and will continue to until we learn to actually love one another, or else in the final analysis God may well intervene.

In Dr. King’s speech, as recorded in the first of these two songs, he said:

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight, because my conscience leaves me no other choice. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and failed war. This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm … of filling our nation’s homes with offerings and widows …of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the brains of people … cannot be reconciled with wisdom justice and love.

After the third ellipsis, above, the recording by Linkin Park becomes deliberately strongly distorted, leading into the final statement. This last section is spoken a la Darth Vader only in a still more deadly, deathly and almost robotic way. After a short, partial section which is so distorted that I am fairly certain that most of us could not interpret it, the “song” or speech ends with the repeated phrase, “cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.” The song title comes from this directly, simply, “Wisdom, Justice and Love.” This song then leads without pause into the second song, “Iridescent,” where the words are the band’s own:

You were standing in the wake of devastation. You were waiting on the edge of the unknown. With the cataclysm raining down, insides crying save me now, you were there impossibly unknown.

Do you feel cold, and lost in desperation? You build up hope, but failure’s all you’ve known. Remember all the sadness and frustration …and let it go. Let it go.

And then the ghost arrived but blinded every angel, as if the sky had blown the heavens into stars. You felt the gravity return the grace, falling into empty space, no one there to catch you in their arms.

Do you feel cold, and lost in desperation? You build up hope, but failure’s all you’ve known. Remember all the sadness and frustration …and let it go. Let it go.

The refrain is then repeated in a choral version, with a series of a few notes at the end where the tune rises upwards. The phrase “let it go” is sung repeatedly, and the song closes with the solo voice singing the refrain once more.

This song combination is almost impossibly beautiful and very inspiring to me. First of all, I feel an incredible identification with Martin Luther King’s speech. The full effect with distortion can be fully experienced in the video, above.

The second song really hit me hard, perhaps with more grace than any other effect. I felt that perhaps I truly needed to take all the images of war I had seen, all the bombs falling, all the dying people I have known as I grow old, my own mental illness, my mother and sister’s death and my father’s growing rather feeble, and now my poverty, then feel deeply the words of “Iridescent,” and then just let my own sadness and desperation go. Just let it go.

In the final analysis, I really can’t forget what I have seen and what I have been exposed to, but the song really did help me. In a fashion, it did “wash me clean.” I felt energized and inspired, with my ability to face the world strengthened.

The exact way that these two songs are connected, other than the fact that the first song actually grades into the second, is not immediately clear, but to me there is an obvious intuitive connection. It has something to do with the terrible things we are exposed to in the society we live in, and our need for renewal and a clean start. Perhaps any reader who “gets it” might well be helped as I was by Linkin Park’s two songs.

What do these two songs mean to you?

You can view a video of the second, uplifting song, “Iridescent,” here. ~ Paul